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