252 The Marketing Book
offensive grounds, as have some more recent
demeaning images of men. Increases in the
divorce rate and the ‘singles’ market have
added to the more general changes in sex roles,
with women becoming more individualistic
through their own careers rather than being
housewivesper se. Marketing to women, how-
ever, may still be in need of updating. There are
new female roles such as the independent
assertive woman, independent passive woman
and independent sexual woman. Some of these
clearly relate to what in popular culture has
been termed ‘girl power’. As female roles
change, so inevitably do those of men. We have
seen a variety of male stereotypes such as the
‘caring sharing new man’, the ‘family’ man, the
‘yob lad’, ‘modelling’ man, ‘househusband’
man, as well as gay images.
Another implication of gender differences
is information processing style between men
and women. In a major research project it was
found that men and women react differently to
certain features of written communication.
Women respond well to bright colours, photo-
graphs and images, and men respond well to
bold headlines, bullet points and graphs (Evans
et al., 2000). So, again, an apparently straightfor-
ward demographic characteristic hides a multi-
tude of implications for the marketer.
Earlier, the gay market was briefly men-
tioned. Indeed, it is worth commenting that
marketing is increasingly interested in this
segment. Gay men, for example, spend twice as
much on clothing and four times as much on
grooming as straights. They are often relatively
more affluent, with few dependants. In terms of
satisfying the accessible criterion, these seg-
ments are easier to reach nowadays because
there are more gay magazines and TV pro-
grammes, and they are able to be reached via
the Internet and sponsorship of gay events (for
example, by Smirnoff, Levi’s and Virgin). Many
in the gay market have also been found to be
more responsive to new products and might be
a good target in the early stages in the life of
new products and services. This is explored
further in a later section.
Social grade
The drinks company also identified occupa-
tional grouping. The AB groups would be
composed of senior and middle management
and professional people, and C1s would be
more likely to be clerks, secretaries, junior
administrators or full-time students. The tradi-
tional justification for the continued use of
social grade is basically twofold. It is simple to
research. All that is required is for data to be
analysed according to the occupation of the
‘chief income earner in the household’, and
from this everyone can be positioned within the
A, B, C1, C2, D, E categories. Second, social
grade appears to have been a reasonably good
discriminator of buying behaviour. However,
during the 1980s in particular, a number of
significant criticisms of social grade were made.
It was also shown that, of 400 respondents to
earlier surveys who were reinterviewed to
confirm their social grade, 41 per cent had been
allocated to the wrong group and this is an
indication of instability of the system (O’Brien
and Ford, 1988).
Another problem concerning social grade
is that although there might be some correla-
tions between social grade and purchase, how
can this be used? Certainly, it is relevant for
selecting appropriate advertising media based
on the matching of segment social grade with
the social grade profiles for different media. But
there could be dangers in inferring values and
attitudes of those in each social grade in order
to create marketing communications messages.
These more affective dimensions might not be
caused by one’s occupation.Family
The drinks company also identified the family
life cycle concept. The younger segment was in
its ‘dependent/first household’ stage and the
older segment was the ‘empty nesters’. This
approach shows how the family unit’s interests
and buying behaviour change over time. A
simple model is the progression from the single