And a question.  How many women work at Lego as Lego engineers?  I wonder, my guess is less than a few.

Children do not get to make independent choices, they look up to their parents and trust the caretakers judgment and lessons. And that is why we should take great care with what we show and teach them. For is not the goal of little boys and little girls to grow up to be all they can be? With the variety that comes with it.

Instead of shaping them fo fit a mold to make identical little girls, that they have to fight so hard to break away from.

I showed my daughter the girl focused Lego article an she found it interesting and saw the reason behind it but did not really care about it too much.   She just likes to build stuff and play with the HP stuff.  She also is big in to American Girl, or as much as my wallet will allow.  At her age we really just need to let them do what they find interesting.  She is a self proclaimed nerd and I really need to start teaching her how to use tools as most people really should know how to use.

One of the problems I have with Lego now is he focus on the sets and not the free play, that is why we bought the 1600 piece set.  Though my kids do do a fair amount of free play with both there sets and random bricks.

One other comment, having been to Lego Land a few times in Carlsbad CA the one thing I noticed is most the the boys made guns and the girls made all sorts of random things.

The thing with lego was to solve a puzzle whose solution was stuck inside the head, making other people see and feel my own imagination.It was sculpture without limits created by joining pieces of standardized formats.

A female bodied person with a male gender identity is a transgender man. Learn the difference.

Besides that, we’re talking about pre-pubescent children who have not yet developed secondary sex traits. Their bodies are not yet producing adult levels of sex hormones and are closer to androgynous than masculine or feminine.

Take smoking for example. The existence and marketing of cigarettes reflects the fact that many people find smoking tobacco enjoyable (the same way smoking other substances can be enjoyable too). On the other hand, publishing studies about the lack of negative health effects of cigarettes and lobbying against the inclusion of health warnings on cigarette packs isn’t there to make us more interested in smoking cigarettes or to make us less interested in good health, but to make it easier to continue selling cigarettes. In other words, it is not about companies trying to shape your interests, it is about them trying to keep you from undermining theirs.

The distinction, I think, is an important one – what they make versus how they make it.

Have you ever worked in a big corporation? No one there really cares about anything but making sure the numbers are satisfied. Your McDonald’s example is actually a perfect illustration – what they have ‘works’, and none of the competitors are succeeding more with anything different. So why even think about why it works, and whether it can work differently? They’ll experiment on occasion, when growth starts falling below targets, and if customers like the new idea, it will succeed in the market. If customers like the idea of a competitor more, the competitor will succeed instead. The only reason for corporations to change is when the money stops flowing – society shapes them.

It’s not about being the best for all of society or for each member of society, it’s about being good enough for enough of it. In this way, companies are not there to mirror “people” (in some abstract sense) or specifically you or me, they are there to mirror the people who they hope to get money from.

The hair colour story is another great example. Marketers noticed that enough people are more insecure about their physical appearance than they are proud or snobbish, and reflected that. Where people are more snobbish than expert, it is again reflected – look luxury wine and restaurant marketing, for instance. People who are fine with grey hair do not dye their hair, and people who want a deeply satisfying meal don’t go to 3-star restaurants, of course…

Obviously, any given product cannot appeal to everyone – human beings are far too diverse for that. But when a product (or ad) does appeal to someone, it appeals to them because it reflects their interests, not because it has brainwashed them into changing their interests. I suppose there must be some small group of people who do get brainwashed by everything they see (as you’d have to be for your interests to fundamentally altered by advertising), but that’s really nobody’s fault but theirs, and how would you determine their “true” interests anyway?

To go back to Lego, the reason they switched from the (IMHO quite awesome) ad above to the more dull and dollified version they have recently launched is because there aren’t enough parents today whose views the former reflects/who have raised their daughters in a way that they’d be attracted by it. The most we can blame businesses for is not challenging such parents, but do we really want to give businesses that responsibility?

Sorry, but yes. A profit motive doesn’t absolve them of their sins or remove my ability to criticize and critique them. They may be 100% mercenary, but they are not omniscient. They can only push what they believe will sell, and they frequently make those choices based on their own preconceived notions. Marketing strives for empiricism, but rarely makes it. Ideology is a strong, strong current and it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of other ads if your ideology won’t even let you try them.

You think that everyone at BP and their ad agencies thinks that oil is the best thing in the world? You think McDonald’s executives eat nothing but Happy Meals?

This is what I think: “Products (and advertising) reflect what advertisers think about society, which helps to shape it.”

How do you extrapolate your two questions from this single sentence? Regardless, McDonald’s, at least, is a good example of ideology tainting their marketing strategy. Last year, a very highly placed McD executive told me that they keep their ‘girl toy/boy toy’ lines, not because it’s better from a marketing perspective, but because it would be ‘too hard to change’. This was after my daughter complained at being repeatedly given ‘girl’ toys after we specifically requested ‘boy’ toys.

Let’s not try to outsource our responsibility to where it does not lie, even if doing so makes us feel better. The most successful company will be the one that best reflects (and least
challenges) the preferences of those groups that it chooses to target.

Let’s not try to make excuses for marketers, even if it makes them feel better. The most successful company will be the one that does the best job selling their products, despite what their marketing department may screw up that year. By your logic, marketing never makes any mistakes, because they perfectly understand their markets.

Businesses certainly do not encourage society to change for the better, but they are a mirror, not a motive force. If we don’t like what we see, we should change ourselves.

Businesses are not mirrors. They are made of people, and you can’t ‘mirror’ yourself. Remember that people who work in marketing are exactly that: People. They are not gods, they are not omniscient, and they are no more motiveless than any other human being. They have just as many preconceived notions as you and I do, and they bring those to the table just as you and I do. Fact: Marketers are not immune to marketing.

Businesses are not mirrors. They do not benignly reflect what we already are. If you cared to do a bit of research, you could find so many well-documented examples of marketers setting out to change public opinion, and quite handily succeeding. Hair color, for instance, used to be taboo, something for ‘low’ women. Advertisers didn’t just work with the status quo, they worked to change it and now sell tons of hair dye. This is just one example out of the millions that are available. Again, businesses are not mirrors.

Set and match.

You think that everyone at BP and their ad agencies thinks that oil is the best thing in the world? You think McDonald’s executives eat nothing but Happy Meals?

Let’s not try to outsource our responsibility to where it does not lie, even if doing so makes us feel better. The most successful company will be the one that best reflects (and least challenges) the preferences of those groups that it chooses to target.

Businesses certainly do not encourage society to change for the better, but they are a mirror, not a motive force. If we don’t like what we see, we should change ourselves.

Products (and advertising) reflect what advertisers think about society, which helps to shape it.

FTFY

This was the 80′s, not the 60′s. By then, girls were no longer expected to wear pretty skirts and sit around playing tea party all the time, which was rather convenient since there weren’t as many moms dedicated to laundry, cleaning and combing hair as a full time job.

My own guess is that this ad was targeting practical, middle to working class people, who didn’t typically dress their kids in fancy, light-coloured clothing just to kick around.

That’s the worst thing about it. Why not add more girly minifigs to the standard lego instead of making another, separate line?

Oddly enough, that’s the one that’s more creative, more flexible, and has a wider range.

Most of the Lego toy sets are not really “neutral”, they are aimed to appeal to boys.

;->