| You know you wanna ( @ 2005-11-11 12:20:00 |
Has strongly gendered marketing ever made you feel uncomfortable with buying or using a product?
In most cases I don't really care, 'tho for some reason I'm more put off by strongly female targeted marketing than strongly male. On the other hand it could be that female targeted marketing tends to use the color pink heavily and I really dislike pink, with a passion (as in my gf tries to get me to buy pink button up shirts obviously designed for men for me to wear at work and while I can acknowledge it does look halfway decent on me, I won't buy one because I know I'll never wear it.) I often prefer if people simply don't gender me at all, as in, I tend to be as put off by grouping me in with the men as with the women, but I tend to present in a pretty masculine way. More to the point, a good friend of mine is a walking media blitz for a product called The DivaCup and introduced me to it many moons ago, I think the product seems great, and would work out great for me personally (being female bodied and not on hormones of any kind, and likely not starting anything of that sort for some time to come) in a number of ways. I can't however get past the initial squick feeling of seeing "woman" "ladies" etc and all that pink all over the marketing. I'll admit, the concept is a bit 'ick' inducing for me in general and I'm sure that adds to the uncomfortableness of the whole thing but I'm a bit frustrated with myself that this is proving to be more of a hassle than it ought to be. I can remember a few incidences where the clear appeal to the "manly-man machismo factor" of a product has put me off as well, but I can't think of anything this specific, or in the case of this, something that clearly had advantages as this does that I want to use.
I'm guessing eventually I'll simply suck it up and buy one but has anyone else, experienced something similar? How to deal with it, internally and externally? As an example, would it be useful to let the company itself know that they might actually loose customers, or that they might want to attempt to effectively market to the less feminine portion of the female bodied population?
x-posted to:
genderqueer & </span>
boisroom
In most cases I don't really care, 'tho for some reason I'm more put off by strongly female targeted marketing than strongly male. On the other hand it could be that female targeted marketing tends to use the color pink heavily and I really dislike pink, with a passion (as in my gf tries to get me to buy pink button up shirts obviously designed for men for me to wear at work and while I can acknowledge it does look halfway decent on me, I won't buy one because I know I'll never wear it.) I often prefer if people simply don't gender me at all, as in, I tend to be as put off by grouping me in with the men as with the women, but I tend to present in a pretty masculine way. More to the point, a good friend of mine is a walking media blitz for a product called The DivaCup and introduced me to it many moons ago, I think the product seems great, and would work out great for me personally (being female bodied and not on hormones of any kind, and likely not starting anything of that sort for some time to come) in a number of ways. I can't however get past the initial squick feeling of seeing "woman" "ladies" etc and all that pink all over the marketing. I'll admit, the concept is a bit 'ick' inducing for me in general and I'm sure that adds to the uncomfortableness of the whole thing but I'm a bit frustrated with myself that this is proving to be more of a hassle than it ought to be. I can remember a few incidences where the clear appeal to the "manly-man machismo factor" of a product has put me off as well, but I can't think of anything this specific, or in the case of this, something that clearly had advantages as this does that I want to use.
I'm guessing eventually I'll simply suck it up and buy one but has anyone else, experienced something similar? How to deal with it, internally and externally? As an example, would it be useful to let the company itself know that they might actually loose customers, or that they might want to attempt to effectively market to the less feminine portion of the female bodied population?
x-posted to: