Collecting ideas and starting out.

We seem to have a couple of ideas going at present:

1. A scorecard for online shops, rating them according to the gender emphasis in their advertising.
2. The development of a petition to K-mart marketing (initially) appealing for a change in focus for their children's toys catalogues, probably for Christmas 2014 as catalogues for 2013 are already out and about.
3. Extending the scorecard for online shops to physical shops.  Perhaps this could be a bit like the Let Toys be Toys Good Practice Award for physical and online stores???

I've suggested on the Facebook page that group members/supporters add to the list giving their states and any particular skills they might have in promoting the campaign eg

• IT skills, 
• the ability to ferret out information,
• media/marketing,
• layout/design
• writing
• photography

It would be valuable too, if people with links to various networks were prepared to use their contacts to get the word out that we are tired of the gender based approach to marketing children's toys and that we want to do something about it.

Join our Facebook group

Starting the campaign.

We launched this campaign yesterday by starting a Facebook group in response to a blog on SusanSays called Gender issues.  We hope this will be a national campaign as some of the "offenders" are national companies, or national subsidiaries of multinational.

At the moment as a group we are very much feeling our way.

I suggested an online petition as a way of bringing the issue to the attention of:

• toy stores

• marketing managers

• those responsible for toy store catalogues

I often receive petions from change.org and think this would be a good place to start, but it is important, I think initially to choose one target and focus on that then move on to another.  One of the advantages of online petitions is that they can be spread quickly, especially if we can get a wide enough initial base with people in all the states and territories.

Judging from the comments so far in the group, the K-Mart on line and print catalogues may be a good place to start.

If so we need to find out the following information:

• National marketing manager for K-mart
• State marketing managers
• examples of gender bias in the advertising

We also need to determine:

• the changes we want
• why we want change

Then we need to word the petition!

This is not a one person show... Who is  prepared to commit to doing these tasks?

Answer by comment below or on through the Facebook group.  I have enabled comments so you don't need to log in to post.

We could do with a logo or cover picture to use too...anyone got any ideas???