tandards.” Another quotation in another of their gendered adverts gives even higher praise: ‘The best little hi-fi in the world? You bet your boots it is.’ However, these accolades are virtually invisible in relation to the picture of the woman. Compare this to the Marantz advert and you will find that the language is more generic and focuses on the qualities of the product. The design is simpler, cleaner, yet more sophisticated with smarter copy. The emphasis is upon professionality and by not using totally inappropriate imagery and by using gender neutral colour and only showing photographs of the equipment they are trying to sell it achieves a gender neutral conclusion. The TEAC adverts are very obviously gendered visually, but I think that if the adverts were gender neutral then the awards and quotations would be far more prominent, as people often take decisions based on reviews, from films, to CDs, to cars, to stereos for example.Looking at the Aiwa homepage I was again greeted by pictures of their hi-fis with women draped over them. I was looking for how they described their stereos and was confronted with woofers, sub-woofers, pro-logic, sub-channels, and I was thinking it was not unlike the blurb that is talked about cars. Then I had a look at their Micro systems. There are twelve different systems and all had the pre-fix - ‘NSX’, which just so happens to also be the name of Honda’s best car that is very fast, sleek and expensive. This use of association further underlines the bias toward male marketing in a totally non-gender specific product.I think that the TEAC campaign could not happen without the explosion in sales of magazines like FHM and Loaded. I also think that it could also be a lack of progression at the same speed as society that stereos continue to be advertised as gendered. The first gramophones would have been the purchase of the man of the household as he was th...
