MarketPlace

Crafting eye-catching ads for female clients

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A controversial condom billboard in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Women in Africa spend more time online reading romantic novels compared to men, according to research. Thus, marketers that include romantic messaging in their advertising can stand to increase purchase intentions from female consumers.

Romance is a powerful driver among female consumers and they tend to pay more attention to products that contain imagery or wordings of a romantic nature.

A report titled Reading in the Mobile Era released this month by Worldreader, a global nonprofit whose mission is to help the world read, shows that women readers spend 11.5 minutes reading while male readers spend 6.5 minutes per session making the former more frequent readers.

“Although the study did not specifically track genre preferences by gender, the overall usage monitoring data most likely reflects the reading preferences of females because they are far more active readers than males,” reported Worldreader.

“The strong fondness for romantic fiction supports this theory. Market research conducted in the USA indicates that 91 per cent of romance book buyers are female, and it is reasonable to assume this ratio holds true in other countries as well.”

The most read books were; Broken Promises, Forever my Love, The Girl with the Magic Hands, Le Roman de la Momie and First Love Thinking of Him.

The findings of the research can be applied in marketing by brands seeking to increase their sales in a competitive market or simply to make their advertisement stand out from the rest.

According to 2010 research conducted on what makes an effective advertising for a man or a woman by Alexander Ngozi Ifezue of the University of Botswana, advertisements that contain romances are most noticeable to female consumers compared to male.

In regards to genders, it was found that it differed when they were exposed to advertisements that featured a male model with a low level of sex appeal. Men were found to have little interest in advertisements that contained male models with a low level of sex appeal and suggestive romance. However, women were found to be attracted to advertisements that contained male models with a low level of sex appeal and suggestive romance.

“The finding suggests that international advertisers must not only take into account whether their advertisements are intended to attract male or female targets, they should also be concerned with the target country’s outlook to the use of sex appeal approach in advertising,” reported Ifezue.

An example of a brand that successfully used romanticised marketing is maize meal flour, Soko Ugali. In 2011, it released an advertisement that featured a man who, after seeing the plate of Ugali on the table, stands up and serenades the meal to a rendition of the famous Kiswahili love song Nakupenda Malaika. His family is in awe to his love of the maize flour brand and clap cheerfully.

The advertisement was played across different television channels usually between 7pm and 8pm when most families are eating supper while watching television, making it popular among consumers.

A research released the following year by Kenyan research company, Consumer Insights, showed that it had overtaken Jogoo to become the leading maize flour brand with 24 per cent market share to its competitor’s 21 per cent.

This was attributed to its marketing campaign on traditional media. While the report did not mention the gender of consumers that bought the maize flour, it did highlight that in Kenya the highest number of shoppers then were female consumers aged between 25 and 29 at 35 per cent, followed by women aged 30-40 at 29 per cent.

On the other hand, men aged between 20 and 24 represented 19 per cent of the shoppers, those 40 years and above were 12 per cent and 15-19 years old male shoppers were five per cent.

- African Laughter