advertising

If you need one more shred of evidence of the gender differences in interpersonal relationships, you’ll find it in a short piece by Alex Mindlin buried in the Business Section of this morning’s New York Times. When it comes to customer loyalty, women aren’t necessarily more loyal than men; it’s just that their loyalties take a different form.

In a series of studies reported in the July 2009 Journal of Marketing, researchers from the Netherlands found that female consumer loyalties are more intimate and personal. For example, women are fiercely loyal to a particular hair stylist rather than to a salon, or to a particular doctor rather than to a clinic or hospital. If you are one of the women, like many, who feel like your hairdresser understands you (and your hair), this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“Women tend to view themselves as being connected with and dependent on a few specific individual others. In contrast, men tend to view themselves as being connected with and dependent on larger groups of people and organizations,” write the marketing professors.

Their targeted advice for the ad world: “Because individual relationships are more important to women, they are more likely to develop loyal customer relationships with individual service providers. Conversely, men find group relationships important and are more likely to develop loyal customer relationships with firms and organizations.” Thus, advertising strategies focused on personal relationships are more likely to be effective with women.

If we extrapolate these results to our friendships, it reinforces what we already know. In general, female relationships tend to be characterized by greater intimacy (and a different kind of loyalty) than those of men.

Ending friendships can be touchy, even virtual ones. That’s why Facebook users are reluctant to defriend and feel humiliated if they’re defriended.

But you've gotta admit it. Everyone has at least a few frenemies they’re just dying to purge from their friends list: People who post too often or who only post to brag; ex-friends or competitors who lurk without posting at all; and people whose names they don’t recognize, let alone consider friends.

Burger King has just provided Facebook users with the ready excuse for which they were waiting. It’s a marketing campaign called the WHOPPER Sacrifice, created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky: Delete ten of your Facebook friends and you’re rewarded with a coupon for a free Whopper.

"The [friend] removal is another kind of socializing," says Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, as reported in Adweek. Benjamin had 736 friends on Facebook at the time the campaign was launched although he may have deleted some by now if he likes Whoppers. "At first you think it's antisocial, but it's a social device," he says. "Now we finally have something to talk about."

Source: Adweek 

If you’ve never heard the term before, Ann Mack, director of trend spotting for JWT (the largest advertising agency in the U.S.), uses the term “digitivity denizens” to describe those of us who straddle two worlds, the real world and the digital one.

 

According to a report by Reuters, the agency surveyed more than 1000 Americans to find out how technology was changing their lives and behavior. We’ve come a long way, baby. Only a fifth of the respondents said they felt comfortable remaining offline for a week...