Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus....

It is fairly obvious from this diagram, that the male and female brain definitly work in different ways! For a marketer or advertisor, it is therefore vital to look into the most effective way of getting target audiences to respond, whether it be a male or a female.

When taking a test to discover my brain's "Sex I.D", found that my brain worked largely in a female orientated way, but showing some male orientated thinking patterns. When carryng out a certain part of the test, I found out that the right side of my brain is my dominant side. The right sde of the brain is said to be more adept at language, logic and linear thinkng, whereas the left side of the brain is responsible for controlling visual, spatial and intuitve processes. Another part of the brain test showed that I scored 15 out of 20 when calculating how empathetic I am (showing how I respond to other's emotions). When calculating my systemising score, I only gained 3 out of 20 points, this would suggest that I do not enjoy exploring the intricacies of systems e.g. putting together flat pack furniture!!

Research has shown that females tend to respond more to emotions, details and the use of language. Males on the other hand are more responsive to humour, statistcs and facts.



This Stella Artois advert directed at the male audience uses humour to portray it's message; it implies a James Bond type scenario, making men associate the brand with an iconic (?) character.



This advert shown from the NSPCC has been reported to have gained most of it's donations from a female audience. This relates back to the theory that women respond to emapthy. Another audience that these types of adverts may have a greater impact on may be mothers; an audience that would deeply empathise wth an advert such as this one.

Schiebe and Condry (1984) examined advertisments according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in the advertisments. They found that advertisments aimed at women focused on stressing beauty and youth, whereas the adverts aimed at males emphasised on ambition and physical strength.

When looking at a case study regarding how direct mail is used, it was interesting to see how different writing styles resulted in very different results. Charities tend to use an emotoional female orientated writing style. When researchers re-wrote a certain charity mail shot to make it more masculine and factual, there was an 85% increase in responses from men. When sending this more factual mail shot out to women, there was a 15% decrease in response when comapared with the original emotional version.

Feedback from males and females show that women prefer a more collaberative and conversational style of writing whereas males are annoyed by a chatty style and preferred hard data and facts, as well as concise language. It was also found that women prefer strong colours and evocative images, whereas images were unimportant to males and the use of colours did not generate much interest.