Gender neutral marketing and the challenges for marketers

Gender neutral marketing is the new buzzword. Dollies and pink frills for girls and dinosaurs and super heroes for boys are out and gender neutral parenting is in – and all the products and accessories that go with this. This certainly creates a new set of opportunities for marketers but also creates a pitfall of which they must be wary.

The needs of the customer are at the heart of any marketing campaign and marketers must be receptive to demographic shifts. Marketers cannot assume that the customer group of yesterday will still exist tomorrow and they must also ensure they have a solid information source to ascertain what their customers are actually demanding.

The emergence of youth culture in the 20th century was a seismic demographic shift and one marketers were able to capitalise on by creating a unique set of products and aspirations. Another more recent development is the emergence of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the UK. At the end of March Emerald Life, a full-service UK insurance broker offering products tailored for the LGBT community, launched.

The focus remains on the consumer, as it always has, but now a sales market is made up of a number of sub-markets, and is nearly always segmented in detail. By changing to suit the consumer, businesses can reap real rewards, as Target (US retail giant) did last year when it took a number of its department’s gender neutral.