Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
And guns.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays