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By Cristina Cuevas
Source
By Cristina Cuevas
Frito-Lay claims to have uncovered women’s snacking desires and intends to buy their way into shopping bags with their new good-for-you, gender-biased snacks.
Whether in-your-face or through minimal effort, sexism in advertising is nothing new.
Men have always been the universal target of beer advertisements, and women are naturally prey to health food campaigns so often that it might as well be presumed that they are the only ones who ever diet.
According to Frito-Lay research, women are apparently snacking twice as much as men, but are more likely to choose fruits, vegetables, and sweets over salty laden treats, such as Lay’s, Fritos, Ruffles, Doritos, Cheetos, and Tostitos.
Frito-Lay’s advertisers looked into neurological research to assess and help rebuild their marketing strategies and found “what appealed to women most,” according to the New York Times, “was that the decision-making area of the brain is larger in women and is somehow related to feelings of guilt.”
They also found that the hippocampus, the brain’s memory and emotional center, is also relatively larger in women.
Frito-Lay is now on a crusade to convince women that these new products are a healthy snacking choice.
This leads Ms. Nykoliation of Frito-Lay’s partnered agency Juniper Park, to gather that they “would look for characters they could empathize with,” and that is the key to this campaign.
“Only in a Woman’s World,” is the newly sculpted advertisement or inane ploy rather, drawn up to seduce female consumers.
This concept portrays four cartoon women who are “fab, funny, and fearlessly female.”
Frito-Lay launched a Web Site WomansWorld.com, where consumers can go behind the scenes to meet the campaign stars and see that they each have a “personal imperfection, challenge, secret shame, or something to forget,” just as all real women do.
Viewers can also watch their webisodes where they chat about men and diets while either eating cookies, and later feeling guilt, or carelessly snacking on Frito-Lay’s new snacks.
This is where they mistakenly introduce guilt as a constant concern of women and then try to replace those feelings by exchanging “guilty foods” with Frito Lay’s new “female-friendly” snacks.
They also failed when one of the fashionistas, Maya, rants that she is compelled to go “tanning, waxing, buffing, lifting, plucking, and polishing,” to feel sexy.
The naked truth is, most women are sick of guilt, dieting, and endless hours of beauty regimens. They don’t need reminders like phony fashionistas to imply that eating Frito-Lay is eating healthy.
The whole concept is degrading.
The attempt to distract women with neurotic cartoon characters does not remove their ability to choose their usual fruits and vegetables over a low-calorie popcorn or a ration sized 100 calorie pack of SunChips.
Perhaps women can forgive Frito-Lay for the natural-ingredients pictured on their new feminine-friendly packaging or the “Sex and the City” knockoffs, because, after all, their classic products are among favorites of guilty junk food pleasures.
