Advertising Guide Consumers Thinking, Actions And Behaviour

Advertisements guide consumers thinking, actions and behaviour as people come to accept the ideas shown through visuals. The most central of these is what it means to be a man or a woman. Ideas abot how to feel, dress, look and behave, and how to connect with other men and women is the culture we live in. A variety of advertisements such as TV adverts, billboards and print ads, outline the way men and women should be according to society. Advertisers give us gender specific advertisements to explain how it is to be a man or a woman. Society has grasped the concepts of what traditional roles in gender should be and applies them to advance their products and reach consumers. In it’s usual and verbal representation of the sexes, advertising†¦show more content†¦Female characters devote their primary energies to improving their appearences and taking care of homes and people.† (Wood, 1994: 235) Representations of men in advertising tend to target power, strength, independence and physique. Male characters are usually represented as isolated and as not needing to rely on others known as the lone hero. Men are seldom present in adverts for women. But when they are, they are commonly a more gentle, kinder, more friendly and understanding, less macho kind of man unlike the men portrayed in adverts for the male audience. Traditionally, advertisements have shown women as mothers and wives, suggesting a feminine ideal of domesticity. Representations of women highlight beauty, sexuality, physique and emotional dealings. Women are regularly represented as being part of a context such as family, friends and working as part of a team. Our gender identities are also reproduced in individual adverts which reflect the fact that, in the popular consensus man and woman are completely seperate genders: if you are not a ‘proper’ man, it follows with inexorable logic that you are ‘effeminate’; conversely, if you are not behaving ‘like a woman’, you will be stigmatised as ‘mannish’. In Erving Goffman’s book ‘Gender Advertisements’ (1979), he believes that when we look at advertisements carefully, they are infact very strange creations,