I have to admit, I’m one of those tough sells Mark Tungate writes about in Branded Male - Marketing to Men. I hate shopping and see it only as an evil necessity. I don’t buy trendy, and I hate the whole corporate look because I’ll never look like the models that parade around in that attire.
Women have a rougher go of it than men do because our society pushes them into constant upgrades. Men tend to roll along, stuck at whatever pinnacle they reached shortly after graduating high school. Generally, men buy clothes when they gain weight (of course, the clothes are shrinking in the dryer), ruin a favorite shirt, or run out of necessities like tee shirts, socks, and underwear due to attrition. Most men have shirts that have birthdays and anniversaries.
Tungate addresses all these issues in a much more elegant manner than I have here, but I think I’ve summed up his approach. While shopping for clothing or toiletries is a social experience for most women, giving them the chance to catch up on life stories as well as get a supporting vote for a new and daring purchase, most men don't gather like that. I’ve seen men gather to buy shotguns, and generally they go for a two for one to buy a his and his, bass boats, or golf equipment. Even that doesn’t require accompaniment, though. Guys just get together after the initial purchase and ogle each others’ goods.
I approached Tungate’s Branded Male - Marketing to Men with more curiosity than interest. I like to speculate on what markets are going to open up and how advertisers are going to address them, but being a self-employed novelist, I pay a lot of attention to emerging technology, consumer paradigm shifts, and marketing.
Tungate’s tour de force covers clothing, cosmetics, grooming, cars, periodicals, and books (which offered me some insights I hadn’t considered before and found very interesting), and sex. I thought most of it seemed Euro-centric to a degree, or maybe East Coast here in the United States, but it was intensely readable.
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