Be Careful When You Roll Your Eyes

Stereotypical Marketing

Are dads finally getting fed up with advertising that portrays them as morons? Well, even if they all aren’t, at least one person is; Gael Fashingbauer Cooper wants more “nuance” in marketing.

I’m a reflexive eye roller, especially when I consider the topic is political correctness. Cooper’s piece made my eyes roll. I mean, why get uptight? They are just ads.

Yet, the truth is that stereotypes, as inaccurate as they can be, create their own unintended reality. The University of Chicago found that the stereotype that boys are better at math actually causes girls to underperform in math. The more anxious the girls were about the stereotype, the more impaired their short-term memory, the type of memory needed to handle complex mathematical information. And that is just one of hundreds of other studies that have shown the dangers of stereotyping.

Cognitively speaking, we stereotype because it makes things easy to categorize. Kenneth Bordens and Irwin Horowitz in their book Social Psychology explain that sterotyping comes from taking mental shortcuts. One of the mind’s most intricate tasks is to govern social behavior, which requires making sense of the complex social world. A way we do that is to group data, or people, like “girls not being good at math.”

There is no escape from grouping or stereotyping. It is hard-wired, as psychologist Wim De Neys of Leuven University, Belgium discovered. The brain’s stereotype detector is activated regardless of whether somebody is generalizing or not. Ignoring the stereotype is the work of the brain’s inhibition center…should you decide to use it. So, not acting on stereotypes literally requires using more of your brain.

Now, I realize that my reflexive eye rolling was my brain’s stereotype detector at work. For me, Cooper’s article on dumb dad ads = political correctness = whining. I automatically looked away, initially not interested in seeing more.  But thankfully, I activated my inhibition center. I researched stereotyping, cognition, and marketing. I decided Cooper was right.

Can nuance be introduced even into “dumb dad” ads? Yes. The blog AdFreak provides dumb dad ad examples, all stereotypical except the Minute Maid one, which is the best in great part because it offers a refreshing twist.

In addition to the moral issues, I don’t like stereotyping for the simple reason that it is the antithesis of good marketing— it is not creative. It doesn’t use enough of the brain. The best marketing doesn’t give in to stereotypes or pretend they don’t exist. It recognizes them for the mental shortcuts that they are. Then it ignores them, or gives that unique tweak.

But I may be missing the boat. There seems to be good money in stereotyping. I simply have to use less of my brain, and as a blonde dad, I certainly know a lot about that.