LGBTQ imagery in advertising: How viewers’ political ideology shapes their emotional response to gender and sexuality in advertisements

Gender is many things to many people. It is at once uniting and divisive.
Northey et al

MANAGEMENT SLANT

  • Depictions of gender in advertisements influence viewer emotions.
  • Male homosexuality creates more powerful, negative emotions than female homosexuality.
  • Such responses are more prevalent in viewers who subscribe to a conservative political ideology.
  • Managers could look to geopolitical segmentation and targeting as a valuable technique to avoid alienating specific segments, whereby managers can utilize election data as a proxy for consumers’ political ideologies.

INTRODUCTION

Mainstream media focus on aggregating large, heterogeneous audiences, so they typically are designed to appeal to as many people as possible, alienate as few...

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