The LA Times is reporting a shocking finding: men are doing the grocery shopping! In other news, they also apparently buy clothes, change diapers, and book swimming lessons. Will wonders never cease. The Times tells us that the grocery retailers are finally waking up to this supposed gender revolution:
The nation’s biggest food and personal products manufacturers are taking notice, trying to market products and adjust store layouts to cater to men. It’s a paradigm shift for the $560-billion retail food industry that has patently referred to the primary customer as “she,” focusing marketing and advertising firepower on women, and mothers in particular — sometimes making fun of dads in the process.
This type of analysis is as superficial as it is insulting. Men eat food. Men love food. Men cook food. Men shop for food. Trying to “adjust store layouts to cater to men” is short-hand for “caving to stereotypes about masculinity.” To really understand men and groceries, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of men.
An amazing sight: a man shopping for food -- LA Times
In our work, we recently did a study about a food category and men. We showed our client that food has implicit gender “maps” to it. You can pattern food to this gender map, but don’t insult your customers. Don’t cave to the easy stereotype of “meat and potatoes = man.” Men, just like women, are diverse in their understanding of food.
To illustrate, we developed this framework.
Foods have implicit gender schme
Just because “steak” is masculine doesn’t mean most men want steak or identify with that type of masculinity. Remember that masculinity (just like femininity) isn’t a “must have” but a “should do” that we all grapple with, and some of us ultimately reject.
The Times goes on to profile P&G and Kraft’s attempts to understand men and their grocery shopping. We approve of their ethnographic approach in general, though we would want our clients to know that there is not one single category called “men.” You can’t be sure to be successful with “men” if you have a single idea of who a “man” is.
If grocery stores want to “cater to” men, they need to first understand that masculinity is a social construct. From there, they can make their in-store experiences more attuned to implicit gender maps that customers hold in their minds when they walk in.
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