General Electric's Strategic Marketing
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2025-03-28T12:28:37-04:00
Exploring Initiatives Targeting Women
By unboxing the artefacts print manual, it is evident that General Electrics heavily marketed the appliance towards women expressed through features such as illustrations depicting slender fingers with nail polish. These finer details would begin to influence the company's advertising campaigns from 1959 to 1960.
Video Advertisements Promoting the Mixer
General Electrics initially advertised the mixer through generic commercials and later began to implement unique concepts including jingles and theme songs (electricitytheory, 2016). Within a majority of the media content women were directly or subtly incorporated. This is exemplified in the 1959 GE Mixer Ad that promoted a new drink attachment that heavily correlated homemaking with femininity with the men present merely observing the woman as she demonstrates how to use the add-on appliance (electricitytheory, 2016). Moreover, the mixer was not only promoted as a daily efficient tool to speed up a woman’s workload but included a collective shift towards visually appreciating and displaying the appliance for its aesthetic value (electricitytheory, 2016).
Referencing a 1960s Blender Ad, though not specifically related to the mixer, is an important example of a unique marketing strategy (RetroShtuff, 2022). Through the creation of a specialized theme song, General Electrics produced a one-minute advertisement promoting their blender, all while indirectly targeting the content towards women (RetroShtuff, 2022). During the concluding shots the camera pans to a woman's arm as she interacts with the product while incorporating dialogue narrated by a female (RetroShtuff, 2022).
Magazine Advertisements Promoting the Mixer
In observing these ads, a noticeable pattern in marketing the mixer is that General Electrics placed a significant emphasis on the functionality of the appliance and its ability to streamline tasks all while allowing women to take ownership of their time. Additionally, varying elements and add-ons that improved the performance of the mixer were often highlighted including its weight, the detachable cord and its various mixing speeds (electricitytheory, 2016). However, its greatest selling point resulted from its physical design with an ad from a 1962 Ladies’ Home Journal stating “Have you ever seen a prettier looking Portable Mixer? Kitchen-proud homemakers like that!” (Green, 2019).
