Smooth It with Females, Angle for Males

If the announcer advertising a retail service is a man, the women listening to the ad are more likely to purchase the service when that announcer uses a creaky voice rather than a smooth voice.
     Wait a second here. Hasn’t a long stream of consumer behavior research verified how women prefer smooth to angular in retail settings? Women shoppers tend to like shopping environments with curves and alcoves. That’s not so true of men. The gender difference goes back to childhood. Boys are more likely than girls to prefer rough chunky peanut butter to the smooth variety. As girls draw pictures, they use an abundance of rounded lines, in contrast to boys’ use of many vertical lines.
     People listening to recordings of unfamiliar music with decisive rhythms and dynamics judged it as sounding better when told the conductor was male than when told the conductor was female. The ratings were about 14% higher. With music having delicate rather than decisive qualities, the participants in these University of Southern California and Ohio State University studies gave higher ratings if told the conductor was female. The difference was about 15%.
     But the Duke University creaky-voice study results don’t really conflict with prior research. They augment it. You see, when the announcer in the advertisement was a woman, female listeners were more likely to make a buy if they heard a smooth voice instead of a creaky voice. Female consumers go for smooth in women and angular in their men. The sex drive refers to much more than raw passion. In consumer psychology, it means the mutual attraction of masculinity and femininity toward each other. It's the Yin and the Yang. The complete package of passion is in the interaction.
     What’s important to you in all this is that products and packages with a strong gender identification sell better than those with a weak gender identification. So it’s the strong ones you’ll want to select for your shelves and racks.
     However, “a weak gender identification” doesn’t mean the same as “a single gender identification.” In a literature review at University of Miami and University of St. Gallen, the highest sales potential of all, across a range of target consumer populations, was for those items which had both clear male and clear female characteristics in the same product, package, or presentation. Rainbows outsell narrow color palettes.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
Smooth Purchasing for Shoppers
Precede Gender Attributions with Competence
Impassion Your Shoppers
Feel for the Female In Us
Go Over the Rainbow for LGBT Retailing
Overcome Gender Stereotypes