Effects of gender marketing on consumer behaviour

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: B+, BI - Norwegian School of Management (Norwegian School of Management), course: Understanding the Consumer, 12 entries in the bibliography, 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.