> Karma be damned but women as a whole are swayed more by marketing then men are

To make a claim like this, I'd normally expect data, not a bunch of anecdotes. Men I know are highly swayed by marketing as well. They want expensive cars, tools, games, alcohol, and other toys. It is hard to reason about the degree to which each is influenced solely from the products that are marketed to them.

It is quite a stretch for me to believe that women are fundamentally more susceptible to marketing of frivolous luxuries than men. My guess is that you just don't think the things you want a frivolous.

Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference.

It's not a name brand or a lifestyle, almost everything marketed to men has some sort of pragmatic function to it. Be it the big F-150 that can tow a ton, to the comfortable (yet fuel efficient!) 4-door sedan. Sport cars might be an exception for most men (although not for me). As much as you don't need it, a $2000 60" HDTV is still more functional than a purse that costs the same amount of money.

And now to the marketing for women. Victoria's Secret: you want to look as good as this. Coach: you want a purse that looks like you can afford it. Disney: every girl is a princess. DeBeers: it shows you he loves you. I can go on, but there's no practicality in any of it. It's even worse when the target of the ads are women but the stuff they are selling are for men, since women do a lot of purchasing in relationships. You see this a lot in 'high-end' stuff like watches and sunglasses.

It's not sexism if it's honest - just accept that men and women are wired differently otherwise you do a disservice to women.

"Sexism" has become a dirty word. There's nothing wrong with thinking women and men are wired differently.

There have been studies on chimpanzees showing that female chimps choose girly toys (dolls etc), and male chimps choose male toys (weapons, trucks etc) without any outside influence. Yet people act like the human species is different. They believe people only become who they are because of indoctrination into their respective gender roles.

Then when you call BS on that... you're called a sexist. Then when you say "YES I AM A SEXIST" you're called a misogynist. I don't see how treating women differently (better in many cases) leads to "hating women."

As for marketing - I think women do choose products differently than men. It's because they're wired differently. They are more likely to choose products based on sentimental or perceived social value. If you look at the majority of Meyers-Briggs personality types among women, there aren't as many INTP,INTJ or other engineering types. Even if you don't agree with Meyers-Briggs... that there exists such a strong difference between the male and female population that an INTP (my type) is 4 times as likely to be a male, it should prove there are major differences.

The end result of these differences is that you should buy the woman you want to marry a diamond. As an INTP I know it's illogical - but I can accept it since I believe women and men are wired differently. I feel sorry for the men on HN who believe otherwise and are going to argue against diamonds with their future wife. (good luck with that - unless she's an INTP)

> There's nothing wrong with thinking women and men are wired differently.

And nobody is disagreeing with you. It is sexist to say "women are more influenced by marketing" when they are not. If men and women are influenced the same, then making a statement about the difference between them is being sexist.

So, if someone can actually provide some data that shows whether or not women are more influenced than men, instead of everyone continuing to provide anecdotes (as you have), then we can either stop saying false things, or we can accept that different genders work differently.

I didn't make it clear in my comment - but yeah I don't think women are more susceptible to marketing than men. It's just that women value different things. The original poster values functional items such as cars, computers and cool gadgets. So he thinks that it must be marketing that tricks women into buying non-functional items.

The thing is... if you value how you are perceived by others, then fashion is an extremely important investment. It does serve a purpose to women (and some socially-conscious men).

There is some interesting data that shows women are buying more... just Google "percentage of purchasing decisions made by women." It's over 70% - so it wouldn't be surprising if most marketing is targeted towards women.

The end result is you should talk to your partner and find out what they want and discus it.

If I had bought my wife a diamond ring it would have showed her I really didn't know her.

Pull out whatever study you want that says men are wired X and women are wired Y - that study is based on samples and statistics. You'll find plenty of girls that like trucks and boys that like dolls. Treat the people around you like individuals who can have both male and female traits and their own unique personality.

What you are talking about is tangential to your point.

Purely for the sake of argument let's accept your premise for the moment that men are more concerned with pragmatism than women. It does NOT logically follow that men are less influenced by marketing than women.

You are pretty easily refuted by basically every beer commercial ever. Likewise the trucks you point to - show me a truck advertisement where an engineer comes out and explains exhaustively why this truck is better designed. That basically never happens, instead you get shots of the truck driving over mountains while "fk yea" rock music plays in the background and the truck is shown hauling giant weights around.

There certainly are differences in the way men and women think about things (in a general overall sense)...and I have no doubt that the WAYS in which things are marketed differ between men and women (in a general overall sense)...that doesn't mean women are somehow "more susceptible" though. The fact that advertising to men is just as common as advertising to women suggests they are about equally effective. If you want to suggest otherwise you need to provide actual evidence.

Again: would you like to provide anything other than anecdotes? These are worthless to me (and demonstrate your biases fairly obviously, see next paragraph).

I'm amused at your implied claim that men aren't advertised to in fashion, since I can barely turn on the TV or radio without hearing an ad for Men's Wearhouse. Disney absolutely sells the prince metaphor to little boys too, and the fact that they grow into men who wants princesses is a big part of why that whole thing has stuck around so long. And if you think diamond advertisements aren't at least partially to men who don't know their wives and are at a loss for what will please them besides jewelry, then you simply aren't paying attention to the imagery in these ads or the types of shows they get placed on (e.g. the god damn Superbowl).

You are stretching on all of you examples.

The Men's Warehouse commercials are as I described before, they talk about looking good for a function - work but life also. This is the pragmatic men's marketing. It's not the 'expensive so it must be good' branding that is on a lot of female products.

When was the last Disney 'prince' movie? Aladdin? Lion King? Meanwhile, Disney has now deemed Mulan and Tinker Bell as a princesses, there is now an African-American princess (Princess and the Frog), they added another pretty, white princess (Rapunzel from Tangled), a Scottish princess (Brave) and Disney is adding a hispanic princess[1] (although light on the hispanic). Girls have been sold the knight in shining armor. Boy could care less about princesses they just want be an action hero.

Diamond advertisements that talk about 'investment' are for men, but there aren't many of those. It's all about 'forever', 'love', etc, which are emotional pleas to women.

And the Superbowl has A TON of women watching[2]. It's sexist to think otherwise. The NFL is openly courting women as a way to increase viewership[3].

[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/disney-s-princess-sofia-the-...

[2] http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/marketing-to-wom...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-...

> Think of how men are marketed to and you'll see the difference.

Keywords being "marketed to." Marketing is a perverse beast and should not really be taken as proof of anything. I mean, the DeBeers story which eventually lead to the article here is specifically about how you can create, from whole cloth, a societal tradition simply with quality marketing.

I think you assume masculine things are functional while feminine things are not but that's not entirely true. You're completely overlooking, say, cleaning product and vacuum cleaner ads directed straight at women, and that masculine marketing is just as vapid in as many ways (e.g. Monster Cables, energy drinks). While diamonds don't really "do things" in the way that a car or a TV does, there are incredibly rational social reasons for buying the former and incredibly irrational, marketing-driven reasons for purchasing the latter.

I also think it's incredibly silly to assume we can learn anything about how men and women are wired by looking at marketing. A century or so ago pink was a color for boys and blue was for girls, and at that time you could have made some assumptions about what each sex innately prefers and you would have been just as wrong.

your claim implies that if a certain product (or products related in a theme such as 'pragmatism') A is marketed towards a consumer group B, then B must naturally be inclined to desire product group A.

This leads to the assumption that innate behavioral differences between genders is directly responsible for the discrepancy seen in cultural representations of gender in marketing, media, or even language.

this assumption is not only intuitively wrong, but it is directly contradicted by decades of sociological research.

Almost all of our perceived gender differences are constructed through our use of language and perpetuation of harmful, inaccurate stereotypes[0]. This means that a gender concept such as heterogeneous masculinity is self fulfilling. It simultaneously provides a standard of behavior (men should build stuff, men should be powerful, men should make lots of money, men should 'have' a woman) and is constructed by men's behavior (I made stuff, I am powerful, I make lots of money, I 'have' a woman, therefore I 'am a man').[1]

In regards to it being intuitively wrong:

You mentioned that many items that are marketed to men have a 'pragmatic' function. I'd argue that they're not always pragmatic (you mentioned sports cars), and instead, the overarching theme of most products marketed towards men(and, often by extension, most advertisements) is power.

An immediate example that comes to my mind is toy advertisements that are targeted at children. Most toys that are marketed towards boys feature an element of construction, violence, or critical thinking, while most ads targeted towards girls feature homemaking or visual arts. I don't feel the need to provide a footnote here as the google search 'gender differences in childrens' advertisements' provides a wealth of information.

These differences in advertisements are not because children who have a feminine gender identity are bad at or naturally averse to thinking critically. The disconnect between advertisements targeted at children is a clear example of marketing agencies accomplishing gender on a large scale. This is a particularly potent example because not only does it show that there _are_ differences in the way that gender is constructed, it shows that there is actually a power differential created between the two genders!

This is not to say that the marketing agencies are evil in any way - they are simply playing into a market separation that already exists because of our current construction of gender roles. However, by 'doing gender' and continuing to perpetuate our harmful stereotypes, they are in fact doing society a great disservice.

[0] West & Zimmerman, 1987, 'Doing gender'

[1] Mumby, 1998, 'Organizing Men: Power, Discourse, and the Social Construction of Masculinity(s) in the Workplace'

> As much as you don't need it, a $2000 60" HDTV is still more functional than a purse that costs the same amount of money.

Are you serious? Is this a joke?

A purse actually serves a useful function. It doesn't serve $2000 of function, but it's useful in that it lets you carry around important items.

A TV serves no useful purpose whatsoever. None. Zero. There is nothing useful in your life that the TV lets you do.

I think your bias might be showing here just a little bit.

The purchase of the TV itself is not what's being discussed here, and frankly a bit of a strawman. As useless as it may be, a lot of households consider TV an essential item, so the question of TV marketing affecting men more has to do with _which_ television you buy, as opposed to buying a TV per se. Per Nielsen, women watch significantly more TV than men anyway[1], so talking about marketing to men in the context of _whether_ to buy a TV is pointless.

As far as the _quality_ of the TV being purchased, it seems the point that GP was making (whether I agree with his larger point or not) is that the 60" TV fills its function a lot better than the 19" one which costs a tenth of the price. By contrast, as far as I know there is no correlation to "how well a purse carries items" and its price (beyond the very very low end, of course, but far from the $2000 level). GP's point was that the price difference between a 200 and 2000 dollar purse is being spent almost entirely on brand (even the appearance is the same, when you consider off-brand purses), and the difference between a 200 and 2000 dollar TV is being spent on a VERY large difference in quality as far as functionality. This distinction between "paying for brand" and "paying for functionality" is exactly the point that GP is making about marketing.

As a thought experiment, consider what would happen if Sony started selling its current flagship $2000 TV for 20 dollars, and it was widely known and permanent. Now consider what would happen if the same happened for Louis Vuitton's flagship $2000 handbag. The perceived value of the handbag would vanish almost instantly. No one wants a status symbol that's cheap. You can't destroy _real_ consumer value (vs brand/marketing value) that easily just by dropping the price.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/05/nielsen-gaming-tv-console/

You are saying that a TV that probably costs to make at least a portion of that $2000 is worth less than a purse that can be knocked off to look EXACTLY THE SAME but cost 2 orders of magnitude less are the same?

I won't bother arguing the value of a TV. I think there are many that can argue the value of a designer purse.

What does the cost of manufacturing have to do with an item's utility? You can get a cheap knockoff TV that looks the same as the expensive brand too... It will look the same from a distance, anyway. Just like a cheap knockoff purse.

We're not talking about worth. The exact words were, "more functional". A purse is obviously more functional than a TV.

It could be argued that killing time is a function.

Of course, in exactly the same way that it could be argued that "showing off your wealth with designer accessories" is a function.

Totally agree. I see so many comments on HN along the lines of "ads don't work on me". Guess what? They do. You just don't know it. That's how good they've gotten.

> women as a whole are swayed more by marketing then men are

Citation needed. Plenty of men are swayed by marketing -- for instance, you'll note that the marketing ploy in TFA is directed at men.

It's also worth noting that the commentary here is lopsided. There are comments from men saying they don't care about diamonds but their fiancee did, but you don't see a whole lot of the inverse (women saying "I don't care about diamonds") . One could easily assume that's because "women...are swayed more by marketing then men are". In reality, it's more likely due to HN's readership being predominantly male.

> women as a whole are swayed more by marketing then men are

Either you provide a scientific cite for that claim or that is a straight up sexist statement. In case you haven't heard there's a lot of stupid irrational purchasing behavior by guys too.

I thought it was an interesting statement so I looked into it a little. I personally was less curious if there was a difference in the way men and women react to a constant advertisement, but I wanted to know the % of marketing dollars spent marketing towards women vs men. I did not find those exact numbers, but stumbled onto :http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women

There are a ton of crazy figures to digest on that page, again none addresses which sex is "swayed" more by a given advertisement. For example, "Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care"; "Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth"; and "Wealthy boomer women...make 95 percent of the purchase decisions for their households".

Assuming it is true, women making 85% of consumer purchases is kind of mind blowing. This does not necessarily mean women are swayed more by marketing, but I think it is safe to say women as a whole are targeted by marketing campaigns more than men - at least after reading these numbers that is how I would market a consumer product.

You would think so, but that's not the case. Advertising to men is more expensive than advertising to women, because more marketers are competing for those slots. I can't find any broad stats on this right now, but to use a random example, Cosmo and Maxim are both major magazines catering to otherwise similar demographics (age/income). Maxim claims 9mil readers while Cosmo claims 18mil. The cost for a four-color, full-page spread is ~230k for Maxim and ~289k for Cosmo. That's 62 readers for a dollar for Cosmo, or just 39 readers for a dollar for Maxim. [maximmediakit.com, cosmomediakit.com]

If you reread the page you posted, you can see the hints of that. People talking about how older women make up a demo that "no advertiser can afford to ignore" -- that's not something an advertiser would say unprompted about 18-35 year old males, for example, because the idea of advertisers ignoring 18-35 year old males would be absurd.

85% dollar-wise, or 85% of items purchased? Because I would argue that men tend to make fewer, but more expensive purchases, eg big tv, high end stereo, etc. I would still believe that things are skewed a bit since married women tend to make more of the purchasing decisions than their husbands (from what i understand), but 85% seems awfully high to me.

Check the link, it is extremely fascinating, but this is the relevant section:

>Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care: 91% of New Homes 66% PCs 92% Vacations 80% Healthcare 65% New Cars 89% Bank Accounts 93% Food 93 % OTC Pharmaceuticals American women spend about $5 trillion annually… Over half the U.S. GDP

The list must be referencing "items purchased" rather than "dollar-wise". It is by no means definitive of the answer who makes more expensive purchases, but if women are buying 9 out of every 10 new houses, 65% of new cars, and 80% of healthcare plans what big ticket items are left for men to buy to outspend women?

Now the part at the end about $5 trillion being 1/2 the US GDP, might not be an error but be more telling of when these statistics are from (US GDP currently closer to $15T). Nevertheless like in my OP, the numbers are mind blowing, consider the following:

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

Or

1/2 GDP = women spending = (private consumption - women spending) + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

Yeah I think this would be a hard conclusion to jump to. There have been numerous papers on the benefits of market segmentation by gender to improve marketing effectiveness due to differences between genders.. But I don't know if any studies that can show with any confidence that one gender is more susceptible overall. It is always broken down by marketing approach (approach x effectiveness by gender). So, it is fair to call the spade a spade.

I'm not even sure how you would show this. Would you look at total spending by a gender? But that could reflect income-earning differences. Would you look at percentage spent on advertising by a industry targeting a particular gender? But advertising is an arms race which one must engage in as long as the marginal return is >0, and there are all sorts of things affecting this unrelated to gullibility. Would you look at marginal return on advertising dollar split by gender? But this ought to be ~0 for both genders regardless of effectiveness, per previous.

Yeah, they should spend money on something sensible, like a Porsche.

Porsche makes WAY more sense than a diamond ring. So do hookers and blow!

Either one is a status symbol, but at least you can take your kids to school in one of them.

A Porsche for 25K, hook me up!

Pretty easy for an older one (993, even, or a low end 996 with issues)