Basic Trope: Coloring a product pink on the assumption that women are more likely to buy pink stuff.
- Straight: Trope Co. sells pink toolkits in an attempt to appeal to women.
- Exaggerated: Trope Co. has pink variations of everything it sells.
- Downplayed:
- Trope Co.'s "feminine" tools are a light shade of pink instead of the usual white. In addition, the pink colour serves to distinguish small tools from the rest.
- The toolkit comes in a large variety of colors. One of the women in the ad uses a pink tool.
- Justified: Pink Means Feminine.
- Inverted:
- Trope Co. sells black kitchen equipment in an attempt to appeal to men.
- Trope Co.'s pink toolkits are intended to appeal to men because Real Men Wear Pink.
- Trope Co. specifically avoids making their girls' toys pink.
- Subverted: The pink toolkits are intended to raise breast cancer awareness — not to appeal to women.
- Double Subverted: The pink toolkits become a hit, so Trope Co. goes on to make more pink stuff just to make women buy it.
- Parodied:
- Trope Co. tries to sell pink nuclear weapons to a female Actual Pacifist president, and can't understand why she won't buy them.
- Trope Co. sells The Merch of a Rated M for Manly series. They try to make girls' toys out of it by ... dressing the main character (who is clearly not happy about it) up in a pink T-shirt, and leaving everything else unchanged.
- Trope Co. spends millions of dollars on genetically modifying organisms just to make a bunch of pink food types (pink bananas, pink carrots, pink leeks, pink bread ...). No one buys the stuff because they think it looks too much like Palette-Swapped Alien Food.
- Trope Co. paints all its stores pink as a publicity stunt around some day meant to commemorate women. Cue despondent exclamations of "Oh, no, we've Gone Horribly Right!" from the executives when feminists ask hard questions about their actual record of treatment of women.
- A toolkit clearly made for adults has a garish princess-themed design that looks like something meant for little girls.
- Zig-Zagged: The women's version is pink, but so is one men's version. Then a blue "women's version" comes out.
- Averted: Trope Co. only sells white toolkits.
- Enforced: The meddling executives believe that they could sell more tools by appealing to women, and believe "let's make them pink" is an adequate effort for trying to appeal to women.
- Lampshaded: Girly Girl Carol sees a pink tool and says that she doesn't want it because she doesn't want to be a mechanic, not because she doesn't like the color of regular tools.
- Invoked: Carol wears a pink dress to a store where Trope Co. products are sold. She leaves without buying anything, which the manager figures is because nothing was carried in her preferred color.
- Exploited: Wrench Wench Alice's male colleagues keep stealing her tools. She decides to buy the pink toolkit because the men wouldn't be seen dead with a pink tool.
- Defied: Women find the pink tools condescending and refuse to buy them. As there's no market for them, Trope Co. stops making them.
- Discussed: A group of friends are discussing the marketing tactics of Trope Co. and how they believe the company is using the color pink to target women as potential customers. They talk about whether or not it is an effective strategy and share their own opinions on the matter.
- Conversed: "Why do women in movies always use pink things?"
- Deconstructed: It turns out there's no target market for the pink toolkits: The Ladettes don't want them because they're pink, and Girly Girls don't want toolkits at all.
- Reconstructed: ...or maybe there is a market for such after all: women who want to do mechanical things while being seen as 'reasonably' feminine.
- Implied: We see two toolkits, almost identical except one is pink.
- Played for Laughs:
- Trope Co. tries repeatedly to introduce pink toolkits, only to lose massive amounts of money each time and totally misunderstanding the market.
- Trope Co. tries to introduce a pink toolkit to appeal to women. Somehow, almost all the buyers are men.
- Played for Drama: Trope Co.'s marketing campaign with pink toolkits becomes a controversial topic in the media, sparking debates about gender stereotypes and consumerism.
- Played for Horror: Trope Co. launches a marketing campaign promoting their pink tools as essential for women's safety. They create a fear-based narrative, suggesting that women who don't own these tools are more vulnerable to attacks. The horror lies in the manipulation of fear for profit and the perpetuation of gender stereotypes.
Back to Pink Product Ploy.
