Lecture Ten: Gender Responses to Direct Marketing and Charity Campaigns

Now we all know advertising is about reaching as many people within your target audience as possible. To achieve this however you need to understand how they respond to advertisements and better still understand how Men and Women as different groups respond to advertisements. This weeks lesson was about gender differences in response to direct mail and with this was also used to tie in our Integrated Charities Assignment; we could then use the information from this lesson when thinking about what charity would would most appeal to our target audience, students aged 18-24.

To start off Ruth showed us the advertisements below and we all had to say what we felt about the advert.



- As a class we came to the result that although the use of Sean Bean's voice was very clever, as it is a very distinctive and recognisable voice, the actual advert itself lacked impact and many of us got bored quickly.



- This advert became very disturbing for a couple of members within our group as they have lost family members to cancer. However the general feel of the class was too heavy and is too focused on getting people emotionally but for me that it is exactly what is needed... even if it is so impact full it is what is needed to get people's attention.



- The final advert was one for giving blood which has a personal link to me because I have been giving blood ever since I have been able too. The group found that this advert was probably the most influential because it gave you straight facts and the slogan "save a life... Give Blood" is simple and sticks in your mind.
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Moving on from our own views within the class room I want to look at some of the theory that is out there. One of the strongest theories is from Schiebe and Condry (1984) who examined advertisements according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in advertisements. The found that:

- That advertisements aimed at women portrayed beauty and youth.


Where as,


- Advertisements aimed at men showed physical strength and ambition.

I now have 2 different adverts for deodorant, just see if you can see the differences Schiebe and Condry found.





I would then just like to leave you with a link to an article written by 2 university psychology students about Gender Differences in Memory and Self-Esteem for Advertising

Enterprise Week (Week 09)

Well welcome again to my blog and as the title suggests this weeks blog is about Enterprise Week. Enterprise Week is a series of talks and competitions that run from today, the 17th November to 22nd and I have just taken some time to talk about the 3 lectures that were aimed specifically for the Business, Marketing and Advertising students and Bucks. I am aiming to give you a brief of what they were like and then my final added thoughts. Enjoy.

Lecture One: What Next? Experts from the world of advertising and marketing come together to discuss the challenges for the industry in the next decade.
(11:30am - 12:45pm @ the CLT - Chalfont Campus)

This lecture was structured very similarly to Question Time, which you may have seen on the BBC, where you have a panel of speakers from the relevant industry or sector who come together and answer a series, in this case 7, of questions in this particular industry. Now here is the panel for the lecture:
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Ivor Peters - Managing Director of Primal PR under the BWP Group.

Jamie Matthews - Managing Director of Initials Marketing (Up for agency of the year).

Andrew Canter - Founder of Contentworx.

Don Cowley - Panel Chairman

Steve Cox - UK Marketing Director for Titan Outdoor UK.

Allan Rich - Founder of MediaCom and now a Non-Executive Director of the Cello Group.

Jayne Barr - Runs Creative Consulting.

Rob Laurence - Marketing and new Product Development Director at TGI.
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Now the lecture started with 2 of our 3rd year students, Luke Burr and Rob Millett, talking about the topic for their dissertations shortly followed by Don Cowley introducing the panel and kicking off the discussion.

One of the questions which I thought was very relevant to us, as current students, was the very first question asked by Rob Millett. He asked:

How do you think the recession will affect the PR and Advertising industries and how will they counteract it, for their clients and their own businesses?

Now the reason I think this question is relevant because although I am a first year student and if I am lucky I will come out with my Degree at the tail end of the recession. Currently however, where we are very much at the beginning of a recession, the answers given by the panel came off as a sence of reassurance by basically stating that as long as the agencies and business are run properly they will stand strong through the recession. Allan Rich put some points across like the big agencies will now only pay attention to what they do best, the budget wont change but the strategies will and just that they will stick will the big brands.

Lecture Six: Gendre Responses to Advertising

In todays lecture we talked about our upcomming perception experiment assignment. We had an example test produced by Ruth to show us how to evaluate our experiment. The test was in 3 sections which all consisted of a series of pictures on a PowerPoint presentation.

The first section was a selection of 14 different print advertisments and we were shown each one for about 3-5 seconds. After all the pictures had been shown to us Ruth asked which one of the 14 print ads was most prominent in our minds by naming each one n we had a show of hands. The one most recognised generally by the class was the Nissan advert. We decided that this was mainly due to the fact that there was a large section of block colour to draw the eye in and then there were only two lines of writing which was easy to read.

The second section was this time a collection of 10 male focused advertisements, all print ads again. Again, in a group, we were asked which advert was most prominent. This time however we discussed how the advert is focused at the male population. we come to some conclusions that males prefer darker colours in their adverts like blacks, greys, browns and blues etc and that they generally remember adverts that are funny. However out of the 10 ads 90% of the females in the class remembered the Paco-Rebarno advert simply because it was a picture of a toned and semi-clothed man. Most of the males in the class though remembered an advert with a joke in it.

Then the final section was again 10 print advertisements but to contrast the second section they were all female focused. The first ad was of a man frozen outside in the snow holding a beer to keep it cold whereas there are a pair of female legs in the sauna. Now we found out that the men found out that the advert was for beer first because of the logo in the corner but in contrast the woman had noticed that there was a man outside whereas the males in the group missed that.

The aim of this lesson was to prove that men and woman are targeted differently with print and video ads aimed specifically at one sex. I also found this interesting post which is a good read:

Men vs. Women