Effects of gender marketing on consumer behaviour

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: B+, BI - Norwegian School of Management (Norwegian School of Management), course: Understanding the Consumer, language: English, abstract: Introduction Consumers decision-making styles are supposed to represent a durable cognitive orientation towards shopping and purchasing that dominates choices. Therefore they should be important to marketers because they are linked to purchase behaviour and sales inseparably (Mitchell and Walsh 2004). Bristor and Fischer (1993) stated, 'gender is a social concept referring to psychologically, sociologically, or culturally rooted traits, attitudes, beliefs, and behavioural tendencies. Because gender is a pervasive filter through which individuals experience their social world, consumption activities are fundamentally gendered.' When Gender Marketing was developed in the United States 15 years ago, it evolved out of the diversity approach. To realize that men's and women's needs are different and that products are not gender neutral was just a logical consequence out of the practice with differing consumer needs within different ethnical, religious or cultural groups (Flocke 2006). The main goal of gender marketing is to implement differing needs of men and women into the development, distribution, price setting and communication of products and services. Maintainers of this approach consider it as important because of the emerging differences between men and women in their way to articulate consumption desires, making purchase intentions or evaluate products (Flocke 2006). According to Mitchell and Walsh (2004) 'males and females want different products and they are likely to have different ways of thinking about obtaining these' (:331). The aim of this paper is to find out how the commitment to a product is increasing by using gender specific advertisement compared to gender neutral advertisement. Therefore, after a short overview about stated gender differences in the scientific literature, it will discuss three different theoretical models in order to design a testing method: the CVPA (Centrality of Visual Product Aesthetics) as an approach to identify customer concerns about visuals, the selectivity model to discover gender differences in information processing and finally the C-Sconstruct to detect affections to either connected or separated advertisement appeals. After the evolvement of several hypotheses according to the used models the proposal provides a method for testing the stated presumptions and end up with managerial implications and suggestions for further research.