Gender Stereotyping and Children

It's a given that ads use gender stereotyping in both negative and positive fashions. I personally accept whatever effect it may have on adults, though I think that it is the dichotomy of creating, reinforcing and simply reflecting stereotypes that makes ads so powerful and successful. What I think is more interesting, and more ethically challenging is how ads that gender stereotype affect children. As adults, we should be able to think and fend for ourselves, and in our world ads can be representations of us that we merely agree with or don't, or more or less fail to notice. But children, whose minds are still developing along with their sense of identity relative to the rest of the world, are more affected by advertisements.



Toys like Nerf, Hot Wheels, and action figures are specifically targeted at boys. When have you ever seen a Nerf commercial featuring a girl? Or Hot Wheels? This creates a stark division of interests engrained in children at an earlier age. It is blatant conditioning for the roles they are expected to fulfill later in life. We see this especially when we compare ads targeted at boys, like the one above, to ads for dolls and play kitchen appliances targeted at girls. Ads for products like Nerf and Hot Wheels are loud and aggressive, while ads for toys like Barbie or My Little Pony sing a cute, jovial song, and the girls are smile and giggle a lot, while the boys in their ads run around and yell at each other. The color usage is also usually very different. Colors in ads targeted at boys are bright and loud, while those in the ads targeted at girls use more pastels (pinks, purples, light blues), though they now often use bright colors, those colors still never evoke aggressiveness. You also see way more black in ads targeted at boys, and a lot of white in ads made for girls.



Do these stereotyping techniques always make girls adhere to the baby loving, caretaking stereotype bestowed upon them? No. Do boys always grow up wanting to drive fast cars and join the army? Also no. My concern is more with how gender stereotyping in ads affects how children identify with the world around them. What toys a kid plays with can be determined by many factors other than commercials--what is available at school, what their friends have, and mostly what their parents give them to play with. I identify with the girls who are upset when McDonalds gives them the "girl" toy instead of the "boy" toy. I also know the boys who were upset to the converse dilemma. Girls like us identified as "tomboys," and were not always accepted by our baby doll loving companions. Does gender stereotyping in advertisements contribute to kids becoming outcast for several years in school?




Conversely, there are children's toys whose ads are consistently gender neutral, most notably play doh. However, I would also call the product itself more acceptably gender neutral than barbie vs. batman. It seems that toys that serve as creative stimulus are generally targeted to both sexes.



Here, Barbie did something pretty cool. Here is an ad that just barely features the doll itself, but actually features women as pilots, fire fighters, teachers, doctors, athletes. An ad that says "I can be anything," putting the decision in the hands of the viewer, more like an ad toward an adult. However, I could argue that this is also targeted at the adult, the parent, who is a little less traditional than the other moms and generally wouldn't buy a Barbie for her daughter. I mean hey, it got me.

Absolut Semiotics.

Today I would like to take a look at the long-term Absolut ad campaign in terms of semiotics.

Most of us have seen these ads somewhere or another, mostly in magazines and occasionally on television. I think we can agree that these ads take pretty much the same shape consistently: You see a clear (sometimes integrated into its relative surroundings) image of the bottle, with a simple, bold caption, usually at the bottom of the ad reading "ABSOLUT _______." I invite you to look at the link to a gallery of Absolut Ads below to get a sense of the campaign's versatility.

http://www.absolutad.com/absolut_gallery/singles/

But with all these ads, seemingly targeting different nationalities, lifestyles, emotions, etc... What are these ads trying to tell us. A brief intro to the history of the Absolut ads tells us this:

Adman Geoff Hays of the TBWA ad agency in New York was asked to come up with a campaign for Absolut Vodka. The Stockholm team had taken great care to outline a campaign for the new product based on very specific guidelines - all advertising should center around the bottle, the product should not be identified with any particular lifestyle and the approach should have a timeless yet contemporary feel to it. 

Thousands of miles away, Hayes took these ideas one step further. The story goes that the idea for "Absolut Perfection" and the Absolut Vodka campaign came to him nee the bath. At that moment, in a New York bathtub, 400 years of Swedish tradition became a modern phenomenon.

There is the beginning of our answer. The point of these ads is to NOT target a specific lifestyle or culture, but to suggest that Absolut can be apart of anyones life and any country's culture. It can be everyone's vodka. Even the fact the Hayes came up with the ad idea in the bathtub manifests this very purpose.

But lets take a look even further, at the object in focus here: the bottle. The bottle has been a very important player in Absolut's essence and success. The bottle design was inspired from an old Swedish medicine bottle found in an antique shop, and appears as such. Think: a bottle that appears to cure all ailments. Upon further contemplating the bottle design, it was decided that it should have no label (usually it is clear, with the brand name in blue, with black script), so you could see the contents of the bottle. This goes along with the company's original slogan for the vodka, "Absolute pure." For various marketing and legal reasons, they modified it to be "Absolut." But thanks to their bottle, and various advertisements that imply it's purity, we still associate Absolut with pureness.

Overall, the Absolut ads collectively do not give off any particular ambience, appealing to any certain demographic. The ads purposely, though maybe they are less effective individually, attract all audiences from all regions and all walks of life. Absolut has manage to convey its origins as well as create the idea that it is the vodka for anyone, any time and any place.

Election 2012: Battle of the Brands

I was asked to elaborate on a brief point I made in my initial post about the the current US election being a competition between brands. Here goes.

Surely this imagery is familiar to you. These are our candidates' logos--the first giveaway that we are looking at two brands. They also both have a slogan. This time around our incumbent has chosen "Forward," and Romney uses, "Believe in America." Upon reading those, you probably felt something right? Both appeal to your emotions, specifically to your patriotism. More importantly these slogans are the essence of each candidate, and a segue into the core of what defines all brands: their promise.

Keeping consistent with his motivational 2008 slogan "Yes We Can," Obama promotes moving forward this election--moving the country forward, the economy forward, ... essentially he promises progress. Romney, being the newcomer in the race has a somewhat fresh take with "Believe in America." I will say this isn't quite as clever or relative to his trickle down economics or status on social issues, but this slogan does appeal to the Republican audience.

After the brand establishment, we of course have advertisements. And of course both of these branded people have ads. I argue that their internet and TV spots are accompanied by their national tour of speeches, endorsements, annoying emails and of course the party conventions in the advertisement category. All of these contribute to their ploys to win over their "fellow Americans."

And of course their selling of themselves is for our (the consumers') benefits. We obviously want the best, most apt candidate to govern our country. Ultimately, we are choosing between two products--two brands.

What does a brand mean? You will see that I can't say enough, and I can't say it well.

In the last three hundred or so years, the idea and practices of brands and branding have evolved to be much more sophisticated and multi-purposeful. Brands have transformed from being purely functional to being sort of a cultural phenomenon. In the beginning of brand usage, advertising was primarily used as propaganda and to sell product. Of course, those are still the primary functions of ads and branding today, but ads and branding have also become an art-- a form of expression and individuality. The evolution of products to brands has also transferred the importance from the brand and product itself to the consumer and his/her relation to the brand, more so even that the consumer's relation to the product.

In this transition, brands and advertisement also became the essence of competition. In a culture of excess, our grocery stores are filled with not just one kind of every essential or desired product. When we shop for food, we are faced with the choice of which of several brands of bread, chicken, cookies, fruit, and even water we should buy. How do you make your decision? Label? Their association with another popular brand? Price? Cooperate social responsibility? What ever the answer is, it is part of the promise the brand has made to the consumer; part of the impression they have made on you--the consumer.

In short, brands have become things that govern our lives. They help you make decisions. More than that, we now use brands to tell the world who we are. What jeans should I wear that exude my essence of self to the rest of the world? What watch should I purchase--does it say worldly entrepreneur, or trendy student? It's really quite narcissistic, but we unconsciously live by these governances anyway. How else do we give off that vital first impression?

Honestly, I'm not sure that I have made a very coherent point here. And I have only touched on a very small portion of what brands do for us, and to us. What they mean. I will close this entry with reiterating that brands affect people, and the world. I mean, we are going through another election, and choosing between two brands to lead our country. Because brands do contribute to major decision making in the world, it has also become very important for brands to offer up some sort of social responsibility. Again, I'm at kind of a loss for something else to add without going on with unorganized thoughts forever. Hope this is on the right track...