Challenging the Venus and Mars theory
“Do males and females react differently to emotional advertising?” begin the authors of an article in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. While it is commonly accepted that women are more emotional, no solid evidence exists to support this assertion. In fact, the results of the study conducted by Robert Fisher (University of Western Ontario) and Laurette Dub� (McGill University) indicate that when it comes to feeling emotion, men might be just as sensitive as females.
“Stereotypically, females are thought to be more ‘emotional’ than males, and so conventional wisdom would suggest that females have more extreme responses to advertising with emotional content,” write Fisher and Dub�. “Previous research has not studied how the social desirability of emotions affects responses when ads are viewed in the presence of others.”
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“Challenging the Venus and Mars theory”
It seems to me that this isn’t much of a challenge to the “theory”–or, perhaps, that somebody who’s interested in advertising psychology did a study and someone else titled a story based on their desire to challenge the theory.
It’s been a while since the last time I read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, but as I recall, it didn’t suggest that men aren’t as “emotional,” but rather that men and women communicate differently (plenty of research backs that up) and deal with their emotions differently.
And, let’s face it, advertising is an industry that spends huge sums of money and puts in vast hours of research in order to figure out how to subvert our reactions–to prevent us from dealing with our emotions, or logic–to trigger a base, emotional “Buy” response. That men and women are similarly susceptible to manipulation is not news; nor is it proof against “Mars and Venus.”
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 29 Mar 2005
