Gender Stereotyping in Marketing - A Curious Double Standard

We hear a lot about Gender Stereotyping in Marketing. The 'princessification of children's toys', for example, where toys that used to be relatively gender neutral, are 'princessifying' themselves for little girls, or making themselves hyper-masculine for little boys. Social Anthropoligsts such as Erving Goffman have made the argument that in gender stereotyping, we are socially constructing the concept of two distinct, mutually exclusive genders - ascribing roles and codes of behaviour to impressionable, developing children.

Similarly, in the Beer industry, a growing interest in women drinkers led many brewers to target women drinkers with overtly feminine new beers designed to look like an accessory or some form of make-up bottle they could easily put in their purse. 

While the intention may have been to make the traditionally male-dominant beer industry more accessible to women, the products themselves seemed largely contrived. Will using a cursive font and plastering the colour pink onto a product really make women buy it? Unsurprisingly, many of these products were not welcomed with open arms as many women found the designs mildly sexist.

In a curious double standard, men seem to be welcoming efforts by the traditionally female-dominant grocery foods industry to reach out to the grocery shopping "Manfluencers" (Wall Street Journal). Yogurt, for example has traditionally been characterised in grocery store aisles by their feminine, light (pastel, white, pink) coloured packaging. Chobani, an American yogurt company, has recently addressed this issue, designing a male- targeted yogurt 'Powerful Yogurt' 

Featuring a bull mascot and red and black packaging, Powerful Yogurt boasts more protein than its 'feminine' alternatives. While it is overtly gender stereotyped to appeal to men, Chobani's Powerful Yogurt seems to be gaining quite the following - lovingly nicknamed "Brogurt".

These varying reactions to the same concept of gender stereotyping lead me to question. Is there a double standard? Is it somehow okay to use the hyper-masculine stereotype to appeal to men and not okay to use overly feminine stereotypes to appeal to women? And if so, does the problem lie with the product decisions or is it some form of commercial realism, presenting what we as our respective genders generally prefer?