Gender, Design and Marketing

Citation

Paswan, A. (2012), "Gender, Design and Marketing", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 456-457. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761211259278

Gender, Design and Marketing is an interesting book grounded in existing research. It focuses on a topic that most researchers and professionals do not want to deal with, i.e. the differences between men and women. Even though deep down most know that men and women differ on several dimensions, including our sense of aesthetics, and right and wrong of design and marketing, most of us do not acknowledge it because it is politically incorrect to do so, or we do not know what to do about it. If we do acknowledge it, then we use our own stereotype to create products, designs, and marketing plans for the opposite gender, i.e. men using their own perception of what women want in design for women and vice versa. Moss deals with this topic in a refreshingly honest manner using evidences gleaned from existing research, without any melodrama or over‐reliance on personal anecdotes.

The book begins by examining the existing literature on purchasing and decision making. The evidence suggests that women play a significantly stronger role in purchase decisions in virtually every field. Marketers overlook the “women's voice or experience.” In Chapter 2, Moss draws upon the work of Barletta (2006) and presents key differences between men and women in Table 2.1 (p. 39). The author also observes that despite this reality, most firms do not take these differences into account in their advertising and marketing campaigns and design of products. Using the homogeneity principle, Moss argues that this mismatch between the market reality, i.e. gender differences, and what marketers do is a key reason for market and product failures.

The next three chapters (3, 4, and 5) present an extensive review of the relevant literature and could be a great resource for researchers interested in gender differences. Chapter 3 focuses on the differences in how men and women approach drawings and paintings, in terms of themes, words, shapes and forms chosen by designers. Table 3.15 (p. 69) presents a summary of the existing research, which is very revealing. Chapter 4 builds on this and presents evidence of gender differences in preferences towards various design elements such as shape, color, words, etc. In chapter 5, Moss suggests that men and women differ in the way they view everyday things around them, such as notions of time and space, serviceability, and attitudes towards cultural anchors. Men and women even differ in the way they use language (p. 96). Together, Moss presents a strong theoretical rationale and builds a very credible argument in support of gender difference towards various elements that make up any design or work of art, including color, shape, language, form, time, space, and movement.

Building on this extensive literature review, Moss next (chapters 6, 7, and 8) presents the practical aspects of design and gender incongruence. In chapter 6, Moss presents the results of an extensive study where she interviewed 40 design professionals, followed by a quantitative study to validate her findings from the qualitative study. Due to space limitations, the findings in detail will not be presented here. However, the results unequivocally show clear differences between male and female graphic and product design preferences on various dimensions such as shapes, colors, use of details, typography, gender of the person shown in the visual, originality or novelty, and the way men and women are depicted (p. 137). Chapter 7 looks at some of these differences in the context of web design. Given the gender bias of the information technology world, the author raises some very pertinent questions which may have interesting implications for the online transaction platform.

Chapter 8 tries to grapple with a very sensitive topic – what accounts for these differences? Moss brings together some very interesting research which suggests that men and women do differ in:

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  mental rotation and spatial perception;

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  targeting accuracy;

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  color blindness, color recognition, and preference;

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  day and night vision;

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  attention and location memory;

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  field independence; and

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  other differences such as aggression and need for affiliation.

However, Moss acknowledges that there is no consensus and scholars differ on what causes these differences – i.e. socio‐culture, evolution, or simply genetic coding or biology.

Finally, Moss ends with a detailed discussion (Chapter 9 and Part IV) of the implications of these differences for graphics, product, web design, and marketing in general. Given the fact that customers are the very reason for firms to exist and form the very core of all activities they undertake, and the fact that the marketplace is about evenly divided into male and female subgroups, the discussions in this book have far‐reaching implications for firms. Coming back to the matching or the congruence principle, Moss argues that unless firms understand the differences and match the designers with the target market, there will always be a mismatch between what the firms want to achieve and what the market eventually gets in terms of value.

In conclusion, the book deals with an interesting idea – the existence of gender differences and how firms have not paid enough attention to matching the designers or the design elements with the preferences of the target segment – men or women. The issues discussed and normative guidelines suggested in this book are intuitively appealing. The book is also based on existing research and not just anecdotes and intuition. I think this book should spawn a whole stream of research investigating the differences among men and women. There is no doubt that the topic is critical and would provide food for thought for marketing and design managers and researchers.