Advertising to the "other" culture

National Forum, Spring 1997 by Barbara Stern

It is at least arguable that women may read authoritativeness in a male character as preferable because women may not yet be conditioned to accept their own self-sufficiency. Recent research in social psychology using reader response theory suggests that when readers are faced with a narrator, they have been culturally conditioned to expect the narrator to be male. This expectation is based on previous reading experience (more stories are told by men than women) and on general cultural beliefs.

The issue of cultural conditioning leads to the need for more careful examination of whether (or how) advertising perpetuates/changes sexrole stereotypes. Despite objectively similar roles that can be taken by men or women nowadays, stereotypes about sex-linked appropriate behaviors - including language persist and are embodied in advertisements. Even though women have entered the work force and educational institutions in record numbers in the past decades, old habits built into the traditional cultural heritage die hard. The construct of appropriate role behaviors may be changing more slowly than the actual sociocultural changes in role performance.

Habitual usage of language the vehicle for transmitting the beliefs and values that make up a culture - is one of the most significant definers of sexual identity. Advertisers can benefit from greater sensitivity to the way women use language and are used by it to create messages that talk to the contemporary consumer in a language she understands. However, because advertising seems less an agent for social change than a reflection of the cultural context, its language concretizes societal norms. Nevertheless, both norms and language change over the course of time, and advertisers keep pace with the ongoing cultural flow to create effective appeals. As Erving Goffman says:

By and large, advertisers do not create the ritualized expressions they employ; they seem to draw upon the same corpus of displays, the same ritual idiom, that is the resource of all of us who participate in social situations, and to the same end: the rendering of glimpsed action readable. If anything, advertisers conventionalize our conventions, stylize what is already a stylization.

Barbara Stern is a professor of marketing in the Faculty of Management at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. With a Ph.D. in English and an MBA in Marketing, her research incorporates literary theory into the study of marketing, consumer behavior, and advertising. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Marketing among others. A version of this article first appeared in The Dartnell Marketing Manager's Handbook, Third Edition.