Appealing to Women: An Analysis of Print Advertisements in Three Women's Interest Magazines

V. Conclusion

Literature review clearly shows that women respond more positively to emotional advertising and remember emotional advertisements more frequently. Women respond to advertisements that are externally focused and involve groups of people.

This study found that the most advertised product categories in women's interest magazines are food and drink, personal care, laundry and household products, medicine,nd clothing and accessories. There was no strong difference between this study and the study performed using the same categories in 1983 in terms of frequency of products advertised. The only large difference was more advertisementsor personal care products in 2013 than 30 years ago. There were some variations among the three magazines in 2013. All these differences resulted from the characteristics of theublications' audience and their core editorial content. When the product categories from the Resnik-Stern Content Classification System were broken down into Taylor's Six-Segment Strategy Wheel, the products in the category of segment 4, the routine segment, made up a whopping 68% of all of the advertisements analyzed.

Overall, the information cues used most frequentlyere performance, availability, components/contents, special offers, and new ideas. There was no strong difference in the frequency of cues used between the two studies. The large increase occurred in the cues of availability, new ideas, nutrition, or taste. The most frequently used product categories for personal care were performance, components/contents, and company research. Analysis of food and drink showed that nutrition, components/contents, and taste were the cues used most frequently in that product category. Lastly, it was found that performance, availability, and components/contents were the cues used most frequently in advertisements for laundry and household products.

Future research may address the limitations of this study. This study used only every other issue of magazines over a 7-month period. Given more time, all issues could have been coded. Additionally, a future study could expand the number of magazines used. Originally, Ladies' Home Journal was to be used in this study but the amount of advertisements was too large for one coder to handle. Additionally, multiple coders could increase the validity of the data collected. Future research could take into consideration advertisements in iPad and Kindle versions of the publications chosen.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to extend a great thank you to Professor Byung Lee at Elon University for his guidance, advice and patience, without which the article could not be published. The author also appreciates numerous Elon University faculty members who have helped guide and revise this article. Lastly, the author thanks Elon University for its continued commitment to undergraduate research and engaged learning, which made this research possible.

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