Is that hot sauce manly? Are those cocktails feminine?
If you thought dinnerwas unisex, think again. From alcoholic beverages to dairy products, marketers, manufacturers and restaurateurs are vying to stand out by identifying their food and beverages as male or female.
Take Mansauce, for example, a Greenbank, Ont.-based brand of spicy sauce, launched last November, that claims to be “the manliest condiment … ever.”
Company partner Chris Galvin explains the sauce is made with jalapenos and bananapeppers – “stuff that’s typically associated with men.” While the product has plenty of female fans, its customer base consists largely of men, he says. He doubts his company would have generated the same level of buzz if it had adopted a more feminine or gender-neutral image.
“In general, men like spicy food. They have the palate for it,” Mr. Galvin says. “A lot of men – me especially – they like to associate with a brand. Guys walk around with their Budweiser shirts … like, ‘This is me, this is my beer,’ so I think a lot of guys can associate with Mansauce.”
To some extent, the marketing of certain food and beverages has always been divided along gender lines. Beer advertisements have typically been geared toward men, while ads for yogurt are generally tailored for women. But these days, companies are taking bolder steps to segment the market, unapologetically distinguishing which items are for men and which are for women.
Last month, New York chef Daniel Boulud and mixologist Xavier Herit released a two-volume recipe collection, Cocktails & Amuse-Bouches: For Her & For Him. The separate books, one “for her” and the other “for him,” contain recipes catering to the different genders. The cover of the volume For Her, for instance, features a “White Cosmopolitan,” a sweet, white cranberry juice cocktail served in a dainty martini glass with a pink orchid suspended in ice. The cover of For Him shows a tumbler of “Bitter for Better,” an amber-coloured drink made with rum, bitters and an orange peel garnish.
Earlier this year, Dr Pepper launched a new low-calorie pop, Dr Pepper 10, aimed at men, in test markets in the United States. A commercial for the product emphasized it has “only 10 manly calories,” and that “it’s not for women.” And in New Zealand, dairy company Fonterra unveiled a “manly” yogurt last year under the brand name Mammoth Supply Co. The brand’s slogan, “Real man food, man!” leaves little room for gender ambiguity.
When Colio Estate Wines, headquartered in Mississauga, Ont., launched its Girls’ Night Out label in 2008, it was considered an unprecedented move to tailor an alcoholic beverage specifically for women, says Doug Beatty, the winery’s vice-president of marketing. Competitors tended to be nervous about alienating half the adult population. But there are now several alcoholic beverage brands, like Skinnygirl Margarita in the U.S., that focus exclusively on female consumers.
Whether they’re marketed as such or not, we all tend to think of everyday items, including food and beverages, as one gender or the other, says James Wilkie, a doctoral candidate in marketing at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Humans instinctively categorize other individuals as male or female, Mr. Wilkie says. This kind of thinking is so ingrained in our society and is applied so frequently on a daily basis, he says, “we tend to almost reflexively apply it to things that perhaps it’s not relevant to apply it to.”
In a study published last year, he examined how such perceptions affect people’s food choices. Men, more than women, he found, tend to be more concerned about choosing foods that conform to gender norms. For instance, they often choose rib-eye steaks, gravy and dishes described as “hearty” over supposedly feminine foods like salads.
