Blog 7

Written on 2:18 PM by Sarah

Something I’ve always noticed is that in commercials, women are seldom without a ring on their finger. This is especially true in commercials advertising household products (cleaning products, air freshener, dishwashing liquid, etc.). This might not seem so strange, especially for ads that are targeting married women. However, when one considers that the divorce rate in America is currently above 50%, this seemingly innocuous detail becomes a little more peculiar.

This is made even more interesting given that the marriage rate in the US has been on the decline for years as more and more couples take to cohabitation instead of marriage. A 2006 article reported that 49.7% of households were married couples in 2005, down from more than 51% in  2000.

So if the reality is that less Americans are getting married and staying married (and the majority of Americans are unmarried), why is it that women in television commercials are always wearing wedding rings?

Since nothing makes its way into an advertisement by accident, this subtle detail must be a calculated attempt by advertisers to somehow make their advertisements more appealing or persuasive. But what are the underlying reasons? What kind of customer insights findings did they base this decision on?

A cursory search on Google yielded no definitive answers, but I have a few hypotheses of my own.

First, no matter what the actual marriage rate is, most women still aspire to marry.. someday. While common law marriage is becoming more socially acceptable, if you asked a woman to describe her ideal life, chances are, she would be married.

If this is true, and marketers were able to gain this insight about women, then it makes sense that they would make sure all the women in their advertisements had rings. The ring sends a subconscious message to women saying, “That woman who uses that product or service is married, so maybe if I buy that product or use that service, I will get married, too.”

Second, commercials typically represent “a perfect world”. The sky is always just a little bluer, everyone’s teeth are unnaturally white, and everyone has flawless (digitally retouched) skin. It is possible that for whatever reason, in a perfect world, women are married. I’m sure some feminists would have a lot to say about this hypothesis, but personally, I don’t think that the desire to be married is chauvinistic or anti-feminist in any way.

Finally, maybe most of the women targeted by these commercials truly are married, in which case the commercials are simply appealing to their target audience.

These reasons are purely conjecture, and I think it would be very interesting to find out the real reason (if any) behind this phenomenon.

It would also be interesting to see if this also occurs with men in commercials. My instinct is to guess that a much smaller percentage of men wear wedding bands in commercials unless they are depicted as having children, as having children out of wedlock is still somewhat taboo.

If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to our feed