ABSTRACT
Is the use of traditional gender portrayal justified from an advertising effectiveness point of view? This chapter reviews empirical literature testing the effectiveness of gendered advertising over time and cross-culturally, and identifies conflicting findings. It also reports on my novel application of social perception theories, e.g. Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002; Kervyn, Fiske & Malone, 2012), as a way of reconciling these. I argue that gender is not a uniform category and audiences react differently to various gender subcategories such as ‘businesswoman’ or ‘househusband’. My own research (Zawisza & Cinnirella, 2010; Zawisza, Luyt, Zawadzka & Buczny, 2016, 2018; Zawisza & Pittard, 2015) illustrates that what matters for advertising effectiveness cross-culturally is not whether advertising breaks gender traditions but what the content of the stereotypes used is. Further, I also propose an extension of the social perception model to improve its predictive value in an advertising context.
