Food for thought...

It’s been a year since I started blogging about Qual Research. The reasons I started writing about Qual Research were a) to grow in my own thinking and b) since I found very little being written about it.

My vision for this blog has been, to develop it into a comprehensive source of information on commercial qualitative research. Over the past few months I have realized that there are many related areas / disciplines that impact a researcher's thinking and contribute to her skill set & knowledge and a blog about qual research is incomplete without discussions on such related disciplines.

I would posting such thoughts here - half baked to begin with - in the hope that I learn something from the discussions they create.

Hope you enjoy these interesting bite sized portions!

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Today's FFT - Does communication differ on planet mars v/s venus ?

Susan writes about the gender genie - a gender-writing analyser that can read your blog content or any piece of writing for that matter and predict - your gender. I put in my blog content there and the genie decided I have a masculine style of writing. Maybe true.

Men and women do tend to write differently and even relate to / interpret communication differently. Susan's post touches up on the 'thinking' v/s 'feeling' preferences in men v/s women.
I wondered after reading her post - when communication is designed to target a specific audience - are these differences kept in mind consciously / intuitively by communication experts ? Would copy / creatives developed by a man appeal to the sensibilities of a woman as well as if those were designed by a woman herself?

For instance - I had a discussion with someone a while ago about the way marketing has been designed for lingerie brands. I had a hunch that there were two distinctive ways in which lingerie was being marketed - 1 seemed like an overtly masculine perspective reflected in the product line (loud colours, fish net stockings) and the store ambiance (raunchy looking models) - the brand that comes to mind is Ann Summers. The other seemed to take a feminine approach - pastel colours, where the mannequins looked elegant rather than overtly sexy - the kind that one would see at M&S.

Do you also see that as a gender difference in the way the two brands have been positioned ?

brand communication, gender differences and brand communication