Today’s ESPN Man Shops Suspiciously Like Yesterday’s Woman
If ESPN is noticing “the new male consumer,” he is surely entering the mainstream. This man, as described in a TV Week article on ESPN’s shifting ad approach, is someone “a different set of advertisers need to reach. Those new males are booking family vacations, picking breakfast cereals and laundry detergent and even using grooming products.” That tried and true male bastion realms are taking note, and taking action, pitching different advertisers and in different ways, reflects a big picture gender evolution.
If you still aren’t sold on marketing to women for fear it will just dilute your message or alienate men, stop and think. Men are much more involved in day-to-day shopping, and they are getting more comfortable with the idea altogether (and thus, may be better equipped to admit it to researchers from now on). Still (and oddly), marketers may lag behind what’s really going on in our culture now by continuing to polarize men and women in their consumer research. Do men and women really live and shop in such divergent ways these days?
Whether this gender role re-alignment is due to more demanding shared parenthood issues, or whether this is really a pointed economic downturn/layoff reverberation, or something else, society is shifting. Advertisers have finally gotten all all gung ho about reaching women (credit is due), but in the meantime, they’ve also been distracted from the broader happenings in consumer behavior. Men aren’t the anti-women in this regard. Instead, the genders are converging (as consumers) to a pretty significant degree.
What does it mean? How can you adjust/regroup to reach these guys with your messages? Whatever you do, don’t see it as a huge new market (i.e. problem) to decipher. Please! Instead, notice the common ground and similarities among the women you serve and the guys who are also starting to buy your products. If you’ve done your homework and are marketing to women t-r-a-n-s-p-a-r-e-n-t-l-y (see Don’t Think Pink for help), you, in fact, have it made. Your approach is so relevant to the lifestyle profile – and not the gender – of your women’s market, that it also works for the men who live that lifestyle. Ta da!
Of course, men and women are not the same, and science has shown their brains tend to operate differently. I’m not questioning that. Yet, the 21st Century demands an even deeper look: as human beings people are different, and gender assumptions about roles overly simplify any of the issues we need to address in work, marketing and life.
Marketers shoot themselves in the proverbial and collective foot by creating just the two segments – men over there and women over here – and calling it good. What happens when a few men wander over to the “women’s area” or vice versa? ESPN can tell you…and that’s where we are now.
