Sex Differences in Processing Printed Advertisements

Abstract

The success of using biological sex to divide or segment markets requires a thorough understanding of how men and women process and respond to advertisements and other persuasive communications. Toward this end, this research ( N = 64; 32 men and 32 women) studied how college-age men and women respond to printed advertisements. There were no differences between the sexes in recall and recognition of claims in advertisements, but men and women generated different types of message relevant thoughts—women generated more category thoughts and men generated more attribute thoughts, suggesting that, while women and men might not differ in the depth of processing, they might use different processing styles.