Gender Studies Blog Post #3
My favorite moment of Gender Studies from the past few weeks is without a doubt the time we spent looking at those very “peculiar” ads in class. Aside from the enjoyment I got out of reading “MAN CARD REVOKED” in front of the class, I’d say the most fascinating part of the ads is just how blatant and seemingly uncalculated they are. The fact that ads like these had to go through and be approved at board meetings in these companies and not enough high ranking people thought “Well you know, there are prolly some lassies who’d buy a Dr. Pepper from us if we didn’t blatantly say in our new ad ‘It’s not for women’. Why are we just cutting off a big chunk of our customers like this?” to come up with a different advertisement baffles me. Even if it somehow did improve their sales short term, what the hell were they thinking when it came to PR? Who had enough confidence in this terrible ad to introduce it to their coworkers? Why am I still wasting my time trying to understand a terrible business decision that happened over a decade ago despite having no prior interest in this company?
After performing a very extensive two minutes of research, it seems that out of the twenty one thousand-ish employees working at Dr. Pepper, only three thousand five hundred or so of those workers are female. However, I was very surprised to learn that Dr. Pepper currently has a higher representation of women at a leadership level than employees of all levels when going off of percentage, which just makes the fact that the ad was approved even more confusing. I’m not sure how this compared to their gender divide back in 2011 when the ad was first released, but I’d be very interested to see how their workforce’s demographic has changed throughout the company’s history.
Based on what I know about business, marketing ploys are always made to increase a certain population of consumers, no matter how broad the statement is. Thus when looking at the ads of better known companies I made the assumption that there male consumer rate was down. Therefore by making this claim, men are more likely to buy the product thus making money. Second of all, not all business' care about inclusivity. For example, have you ever seen a make up commercial that used a male model on live television? And yet men sometimes paint their nails and put make up on. Sometimes cutting out a population for a product isn't the end of the world for a company. And lastly, all business' care about is money. these are just the three main things I know about business's. Overall great blog post!
ReplyDeleteYeah, those ads were definitely shocking, and its kind of astounding to think that anyone on those advertising teams thought that was an effective advertising strategy. But I suppose it is, since the examples we looked at were gendered ads with a severe lack of subtlety, but I'm sure there's a ton that sell remarkably well who use the same gender division tactics as these less.... graceful ones. For example, like all hygiene products are sooo gendered, even to sell the exact same product. It's really interesting that you looked up the employee gender ratio, since I'm sure that plays a major role in what products and ads get approved or not. Very interesting post!
ReplyDelete