The "Woman Appeal"
An article by Frances Maule of the J. Walter Thompson New York office, printed in an agency house bulletin dated January 1924, Number 105. Only its first page is in this file.
What it is
An article by Frances Maule of the J. Walter Thompson New York office, printed in an agency house bulletin dated January 1924, Number 105. Only its first page is in this file. The deck cites an estimate of reliable authorities that 85% of all purchases are made by women. Maule opens with an unnamed economist's point that a housewife buys a wider range of goods than any manufacturer or business buyer: milk and shoes, furniture and meat, bedding and disinfectants, rugs and candy. So understanding women buyers is one of the major problems of advertising. Her correction is the old suffrage slogan Women Are People. Copywriters, she says, try so hard to aim at women that they overshoot and over-feminize their appeal, writing to a fancy picture labelled Woman that is close to the angel-idiot stereotype. The page breaks off mid-sentence.
Why read it now
The core point holds and is still broken daily. Writing to a stereotype of a segment, rather than to real people who belong to it, produces ads the segment does not recognise. Modern evidence agrees: Kantar's work with the UN-convened Unstereotype Alliance reports that ads with less stereotyped portrayals of women do better on brand and sales measures. Maule's method is also sound. She proves the subject matters with scale, then names the error with a label a team can repeat in a review, over-feminize, and hands over a slogan too short to argue with. What is weak: the 85% figure is an estimate with no source given, and versions of it still circulate without a clear origin. The page also assumes the buyer is a housewife. Only one page survives here, so the rest of the argument, including the shopper types the collection record mentions, is not in this file. Use: before approving work aimed at any group, women, young people or Saudi families, ask whether a real member of that group would recognise themselves in it, and cut any line written to the group in the abstract.
Passages worth keeping
The importance of the subject can be gauged somewhat from the estimate of reliable authorities that 85% of all purchases are made by women
تبدأ المقالة بالحجم لتقنع القارئ بأهمية الموضوع قبل أي نقد، مع أن الرقم تقدير لا تذكر مصدره.
She has to buy milk and shoes, furniture and meat, magazines and fruit, hats and underwear, bedding and disinfectants, rugs and candy
قائمة المشتريات المتنوعة تجعل ربة البيت أوسع خبرة بالشراء من أي مشترٍ محترف، فلا يصح أن يُستهان بها.
Women Are People.
القاعدة كلها في ثلاث كلمات: اكتب للمرأة كما تكتب لإنسان كامل، لا لصورة خاصة مصنوعة لها.
They are so eager to hit the bull's eye that they overshoot the mark. They may be said to "over-feminize" their appeal.
الحرص الزائد على مخاطبة المرأة يفسد الرسالة، فيكتب المعلن بمبالغة تبعده عن المرأة الحقيقية.
the good old conventional "angel-idiot" conception of women
تسمّي الكاتبة القالب القديم الذي يصور المرأة ملاكًا ساذجًا، وتكشفه قالبًا لا وصفًا محايدًا.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original idn.duke.edu
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