Gender Stereotype in Toy Advertisements on Social Networking Sites

Abstract

Marketing and advertising messages are often designed to persuade and influence the consumers into purchasing the products or services usually designed based on market segmentation and target consumers. This segmentation may vary but the most common type of market segmentation is based on demographic information such as gender. In toy advertisements, children are the target markets. Research shows that most toy advertisements involve gender stereotypes. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the visual elements of gender stereotypes in children's toy advertisements on social media. Using a case study approach, children's toy advertisements on Mattel's official Facebook page were analyzed from January 2019 to December 2019. A total of 87 relevant advertisements were gathered and subjected to content analysis focusing on gender stereotype characteristics and the presence of boy(s) or girl(s) model(s) in the advertisements. The analysis was conducted based on gender stereotype characteristics and the presence of boy or girl models in the advertisement. The findings showed that advertisements for girl toys are more frequently posted on Mattel's official Facebook page than advertisements for boy toys. Further analysis revealed that the advertisements contained more feminine compared to masculine traits and role behaviors. However, a large majority of the advertised toys do not have emotional behaviors. It was envisaged that the findings of this study could advance our knowledge of gender stereotypes in toy advertisements.

An Analysis of Gender Representation In English Language Advertisements In Indonesia: A Corpus-Based Study

“…Advertisements for food tend to use more masculine language, while advertisements for beauty products use more feminine language. This finding is consistent with previous research on gender representation in advertisements (Goffman, 1979), such as those by Azmi (2021) and Siswati (2019).…”

Surveillance of Injury Types, Locations, and Intensities in Male and Female Tennis Players: A Content Analysis of Online Newspaper Reports

“…The inter-coder reliability outcomes revealed a Cohen’s kappa agreement of 1.000 concerning players’ gender as well as 0.961 for injury types and 0.840 for injury intensities. Cohen’s kappa has been considered as a robust method of reliability measurement for content analysis [ 34 , 35 , 36 ].…”

Reclaiming Women‟s power by eatery names in two multicultural cities

“…Marketing and networking need to adopt a feminine name [60]. As a result of her husband's lack of social engagements in the neighbourhood, the wife's name is more well-known and regularly used as an address [61]. Contrary to Javanese culture, a married woman is often referred to as "bu + her husband's name," such as Bu Cokro, where Cokro is her husband's name.…”