ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I argued that consumer markets are not social facts which can be ‘discovered’ and targeted – they are generated or materialised in the very processes of marketing and advertising. I argued that the characteristics of these ‘imagined’ target markets come to be reflexively incorporated into the textual address of advertising campaigns. In this chapter my concern is to compare the forms of textual address found in female-targeted advertisements and in male-targeted advertisements. How is meaning created in a print advertisement? How is this meaning targeted at specific groups? How should we analyse images of gender in advertising?
