ABSTRACT
Marketing Gender as a Need The marketing of goods and services in today's consumerist culture manipulates both identity and desire and ultimately reenforces the pyra mid model of the gender/identity/power system. Because gender is one of the lowest common denominators of identity, and power is just now one of the lowest common denominators of desire, we've got a match made in heaven for marketing people everywhere. All marketers have to do is divide their goods and services into two categories : stuff for men, and stuff for women. All they have to do is figure out how to convince people that their goods will make us better men or better women than anyone else's stuff. I think this analysis works. Even in the marketing of supposedly non-gender-specific goods like insurance, soda pop, computers, or cars, the emphasis is on how buying those services and goods will make you fit in and be respectable within the community you wish to be a member of. In terms of the gender/identity/power pyramid, the ultimate marketing device would convince us that by buying that service or those goods, we will rise up on that pyramid.
