SOC 0851 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Market Segmentation, Hulu, Commodification
• Gender, Advertising, and the Commodification of Gender
o Gender composition of a media organization can have an effect on the gender
content that gets produced
o Gender built into the ways in which some media organizations function
▪ Division of daytime / prime time
▪ Advertising
▪ As technologies such as Hulu, Netflix, and on-demand TV make it more
difficult for advertisers to reach their viewers or to compete for attention
among the barrage of advertisement most people face on a daily basis,
targeting advertising toward a specific group becomes increasingly
important
o Market segmentation – sales approach in which corporations divide a large and
diverse market for a product into smaller segments based on characteristics like
gender, social class, and race, thereby creating many small, homogeneous
markets
▪ Creating advertising that is specifically geared toward one gender or the
other is an example of market segmentation
▪ Advertisers and marketers have traditionally ignored men as potential
buyers of household goods, including products and groceries
▪ As increasing numbers of men have begun to clean and to go to the
supermarket, advertisers and marketers have begun to reconsider their
decisions to aim their commercials and print ads for groceries and
cleaning products exclusively at women
o Advertising is no longer about convincing audiences that one product is better
than another or cheaper than another
▪ Because most of the products and services people in the developed world
purchase are nonessential goods, advertising and marketing create a
sense of need in consumers by convincing them that they can attain
some desirable state of being by buying their product
▪ Advertisers and marketers work at convincing us not just that we should
buy a product because it works better than other products, or that we
really actually need it, but that owning it will make us cooler and happier
▪ Advertisers increasingly began to create connections between social
values and commodities, or the products they were selling
o Commodification – turning any object, idea, or behavior into something that can
be bought and sold
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