Misogynistic candy?
Oct. 25th, 2003 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayWhile in Gibraltar two weeks ago, I was looking for examples of British culture... not Milton or Shakespeare, but the sort of ephemeral culture that one can buy in a convenience store. Digestive biscuits. Tabloids. Bovril. And a couple of yellow-foiled candy bars... "Yorkies", some kind of honeycomb bar. Their slogan, blazoned across the bottom: "It's Not For Girls!" accompanied by a red slash through a miniskirted figure with a purse. On the reverse, next to the nutritional information was a smaller no-females icon with the slogan "Don't Feed The Birds!".
The latter is mystifying... unless somehow bird = woman in Yorkshire slang. The candy was made by Nestle, at an address in York. For anyone reading from the UK... have you seen this? Is this kind of perceived anti-female sentiment commonplace in advertising there? Am I reading too much into a simple confectionery?
The latter is mystifying... unless somehow bird = woman in Yorkshire slang. The candy was made by Nestle, at an address in York. For anyone reading from the UK... have you seen this? Is this kind of perceived anti-female sentiment commonplace in advertising there? Am I reading too much into a simple confectionery?
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Date: 2003-10-25 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-26 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-25 09:24 pm (UTC)See here (http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv/misc_tv/yorkie_bar_quot_not_for_girls_quot/) for discussion on the campaign.
No, I wouldn't say that that degree of blatant misogyny is a common feature of UK advertising.
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Date: 2003-10-25 09:29 pm (UTC)bird does = girl in Britspeak, too.
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Date: 2003-10-26 08:07 am (UTC)Heh. Having met them, I can just imagine. Harmless, but it could almost work as negative advertising -- women buying them precisely in reaction to being told they shouldn't, that sort of thing ;-).
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Date: 2003-10-26 09:22 am (UTC)Precisely, indeed! Marketing has all kinds of approaches to getting and keeping products in the check-out lines. Activating "oh, yeah? I'll show you" is just one of 'em. It does have to be used carefully, and in moderation, of course--but getting folks defiant tends to make 'em more likely to act.
I would think that most folks see it as a humorous attempt to grab the contrarian tendencies of the buying sector by putting a self-referential skew to a long-running older theme. This should spruce up interest in an otherwise boringly familiar stand-by--or so the advertisers must hope.
Seems to be working? :-)
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