Branded Male: Marketing to Men Review

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(More customer reviews)I have to admit, I'm one of those tough sells Mark Tungate writes about in BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN. I hate shopping and see it only as an evil necessity. I don't buy trendy, and I hate the whole corporate look because I'll never look like the models that parade around in that attire.
Women have a rougher go of it than men do because our society pushes them into constant upgrades. Men tend to roll along stuck at whatever pinnacle they reached shortly after graduating high school. Generally men buy clothes when they gain weight (of course, the clothes are SHRINKING in the dryer), ruin a favorite shirt, or run out of necessities like tee shirts, socks, and underwear due to attrition. Most men have shirts that have birthdays and anniversaries.
Tungate addresses all these issues in a much more elegant manner than I have here, but I think I've summed up his approach. While shopping for clothing or toiletries is a social experience for most women, giving them the chance to catch up on life stories as well as get a supporting vote for a new and daring purchase, men don't gather like that. I've seen men gather to buy shotguns, and generally they go for a two for one to buy a his and his, bass boats, or golf equipment. Even that doesn't require accompaniment, though. Guys just get together after the initial purchase and ogle each others' goods.
I approached Tungate's BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN with more curiosity than interest. I like to speculate on what markets are going to open up and how advertisers are going to address them. Being a self-employed novelist, I pay a lot of attention to emerging technology, consumer paradigm shifts, and marketing.
Tungate's tour de force covers clothing, cosmestics, grooming, cars, periodicals and books (which offered me some insights I hadn't considered before and found very interesting), and sex. I thought most of it seemed Euro-centric to a degree, or maybe East Coast here in the United States, but it was intensely readable.
I love history, and Tungate brings a lot of history into the book that I didn't expect. I found the marketing aspect interesting, but I was more taken with the history that he delivers. These manifested as brief snippets laced throughout the text that anchored the points he made and allowed me to better understand what he was saying. I'll bet most readers that pick this book up will experience the same thing.
I actually planned to allow myself time to read a chapter a day, basically covering each of the topics Tungate proposes. Instead, I was sucked in by the writing and compelled to keep turning pages. I hadn't expected to be as captivated by the subject as I was (after all, I am male and we have short attention spans and tend not to over think dress and style).
As a novelist by trade, I found a lot of information in the book that I plan on using in my writing. I know I've read a good book when it finds a place on my shelf (and I've got limited space at this point). BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN is a great, fun read with plenty of information and marketing tips. The text is broken up into a modified block format (each paragraph has a double-space between it that allows plenty of white space) and that layout actually made the book even easier to read.
If you're interested in marketing, or understanding your husband's reluctance to go shopping even when he needs to, Tungate explains some of what's going on. Anyone that's read Alissa Quart's book BRANDED: THE BUYING AND SELLING OF TEENAGERS will enjoy this one as a follow-up. And if you haven't read Quart's book, you're in for two books that are definite eye-openers.


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