further to this, Guy Kewney has written a posting on the subject.
Many surveys have suggested, regularly, that mature business buyers are actually deterred from promotions – exhibition booths, events and advertising – which assumes a 20-year-old male as the stereotype customer. These surveys are all nonsense, in the minds of the CF devcon organiser. Women don’t exist; adult males are all sexually rampant and alcohol-fuelled. Muslims only pretend to be uninterested in getting drunk, and Real Programmers are either adolescent, or wish they were.
more here
I was surveyed on test marketing for a high-end digital video camera a couple of years ago. The intended advertising campaign had, quite deliberately, grotesque scenes of gratuitous violence (think happy slapping) and ludicrous crude sexual innuendo (people filming the boobs of girls in bikinis). I basically wrote ‘you picked me for this survey because I could not be more in your target market, and you’re marketing as if people like me don’t exist. Oddly, middle aged professionals with geeky tastes have a lot more money to spend on toys like this than adolescent boys.’