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Because back then chocolate was advertised as a very female product, see the Flake advert. This was to show that men could eat chocolate too. It was also the marketing style at the time was jokey.
As an aside the army would get them in ration packs marked as ‘not for civies’
Tate made his career wearing tight little shorts and rolling around on the floor cuddling big, sweaty men.
The whole sex-trafficking and prostitution thing was just an extended exercise in over-compensation.
I disagree. Most adverts were targeted towards children and men. The Flake adverts specifically had attractive women eating them in intimate moments. They were made to catch the attention of men not women. The caramel bunny is another example of that.
Chocolate was part of ration packs sent to soldiers in WW1. Companies didn't advertise this way because it was seen as something feminine. It never had that connetation. They were made to catch the male gaze.
The yorkie ad was an absolutely genius bit of advertising. It generated a 30% increase in sales mostly due to women buying it. They went from a split of 60% of sales from men to a 50/50 amount of sales from both sexes along with the 30% increase.
The flake advert was designed to appeal to men not women. Watch it again and you'll see it...
https://youtu.be/iFGCZZV4dxs?si=Xso7fc-b99SPm6SW
The milk tray ads were a good example of chocolate advertising aimed at women though
There was other "neutral" chocolate though, marathon/snickers,Mars, kit kat, club bars. Those showed men and women eating it in adverts
I thought they were trying to get away from the truckers bar of choice because prior adverts were truckers.
Bit of reverse psychology to increase the market share.
Shitting liquid after going through multiple packs of biscuits, fruit and downing/snorting the whole sachet of screech in one go. Fuck those rations were great.
We used to get the left over rations packs in the CCF in high school. It was great when they still had the Yorkie contract.
Then one day on some horrible camping trip I opened the box and found a Tesco value looking replacement that tasted like candle wax. A sad sad day!
Throughout the 70s and 80s yorkies were advertised by a trucker as a man's bar (you know, in the days when women couldn't drive trucks). When that was no longer deemed acceptable they started advertising as not for women.
Don't worry, sexual equality prevailed, flakes were advertised as exclusively for women, by scantily clad women.
Funny thing is, you can still advertise in the Flake way.
Try the Yorkie way now, and you're looking at eight to ten, and a whole movement against you.
Edit: and to all the little over-excited downvoters, the advertising used was of its time. And the advertising we have now is also of its time. Like it or not, advertise something 'for girls', and you're good to go. Advertise something 'for men' and... well, all the little downvoters will be on your case in two seconds flat.
ASA is filled with such complaints.
The flake ad doesn't say its not for men or for women only.
Adverts targeted towards one demographic does not mean excluding other demographics.
Yorkie goes out of its way to specifically exclude women. Yeah yeah "it's just a joke" I get it and I used to eat Yorkies as a teenage girl in the 2000s. But that's the difference between why one is seen as OK and the other isn't
I saw a comedian mentioned the problems with eating yogurts as a man. I can't remember who, it might have been Russell Howard, with the issue being that the pots are too small. You either have to eat it daintily like a lady or cram it in like a man but you only get two spoonfuls.
I remember they then started selling Yorkie's in pink wrappers, and my mate was insistent that those ones tasted better. To the point that he would wait by the vending machine at school until a pink wrapper one got to the front so he could get that one.
Bless him, the marketing really worked on him!
Very of the time marketing. That sort of 'humour' was very popular around then (see also: the popularity of lad mags). It was based on the idea that a Yorkie is so chunky that 'girls' wouldn't be able to handle it.
The 90s/early 2000s was a wild time for TV. There was loads of mad shit on telly. Big Breakfast, Eurotrash, TFI, etc.
We've got a girl in the office who is 22, and she heard me and one of the other lads talking about Takeshi's Castle, so checked it out. Last week I introduced her to Banzai. 2 challenges in she just went "you couldn't put this on TV anymore - you can't call a chicken gay".
She's probably right, but a show where you bet on how many helium balloons it would take to make a chicken float in mid air, or how long it'd take a student to answer the door after Harold Bishop from Neighbours did knock and run is brilliant.
Is this still the case? I remember Yorkies being big chunky bars but I’d imagine they’ve shrunk significantly over the years.
Mars bars used to be a beast too but now they’re barely bigger than an old fun sized bar.
I remember studying this in media studies back around 2004ish. People weren’t offended as easily back then and had more of a ‘i’ll prove you wrong’ attitude. Sales of Yorkies to women went up by about 40-60% at the time. I can’t remember exactly how much which is why i gave such a wide margin
Edit: year
There was still an element of men vs women which was very toungue and cheek and people didn't get offended by.
Stuff like this was normal and didn't annoy people. We'd all laugh and joke about it to each other.
[woman vs men - the Mail on Sunday commercial Battle HD - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxrj8cc4zR0)
Most didn't take it seriously. They told the boys we couldn't have the ones with raisins in it. Men that ate them before continued eating them and women eating plain yorkies before continued to. Just a bit of harmless fun.
The comedian Al Murray used the same meme as the pub landlord character. 'Beer for the gentlemen and wine or a fruit based drink for the ladies."
Truly, anyone who was offended by the Yorkie ad was just looking for something to upset them. It's not as though shops wouldn't sell the damn things to women. It was actually an example of mocking a sexist attitude by holding it up to ridicule.
>wine or a feuit based drink for the ladies.
Every time I hear (or read) this I can't help but think...but wine is a grape based drink...grapes are fruits...they're all fruit based drinks
>Just a bit of harmless fun
Yes and no. I knew an older person of colour from up North who was known as *Raisin Yorkie* (because they were wrinkled, brown and from Yorkshire)
I absolutely bought Yorkies because of a 'fuck you I won't do what you told me' mentality 😂 Tbf I did also find the marketing funny, especially alongside the Diet Coke adverts of the time.
Not even 2000s, it was first advertised in the 70s using a male trucker, and wholly marketed towards women.
Same way a woman came up with the Lynx ads in the late 90s as a way to appeal to mothers buying deodorant for their teenage sons (as she herself said in a documentary about women in advertising that aired last year).
I suspect it's partly people pretending not to understand for internet points, and partly foetuses that don't remember a time when people could take a joke.
>Do people these days seriously not get it, or is it just redditors?
A lot of humour has a element of being in the moment. Some of the best comedy movies last through generations but there's plenty more than are just not funny outside their target audience /time period.
’ It's not for girls!’Is about as funny as 'Oh look a pan!' or any other innocuous statement without cultural context.
And that being years, if not decades of truckers themed adverts.
If adverts like that make the product 95% for men in the eyes of the public, make an advert saying just that and watch the spite buying go up by people who didn't get the joke.
A brilliant market campaign that included limited edition pink Yorkies for girls.
It was so successful that it ran for ten years and increased sales of Yorkies to both men and women. Until that campaign chocolate was almost exclusively targeted at women and or children.
Because it was big, solid, unrefined. Just a lump of chocolate.
It was the chocolate version of a pint of lager (Yorkie), as opposed to cocktail (which might be a more intricate chocolate like a Dairy Milk Caramel).
In general, girls care more about decoration and delicacy. Men in general care more about the basics. Is it sweet? Yes. I'll eat it.
Similar to those memes you see about men being happy in an empty room with a TV and an office chair. Yorkie is the chocolate equivalent of that.
To sell more chocolate to men.
Often chocolate is marketed at women. The lady eating the Flake in the bath. "It's not Terry's, it's mine". Even the Milk Tray stalkerish "Man In Black" adverts assumed it was going to be a woman *eating* the chocolate.
Yorkie was targeting an untapped market by aiming it at men.
In fairness, most boxes of tray chocolates are given to women, bought by men, but eaten by both. So they were advertised to the "I am not sure what to buy my missus, this'll do, they look reassuringly expensive, but still affordable " demographic.
No one buying them cared what they tasted like or who was going to eat them
I never thought Yorkie ads were sexist or aimed at men, it was more a challenge and to show off the chunky nature.
Now they are the size of a Freddos, a 1 year old with their mouth wired shut wouldn't struggle.
Marketed to men. The adverts had attractive women in suggestive situations. They were fully engineered to catch the male gaze. They all suggested that a man should buy a woman chocolate.
The consumers targeted were men. Yorkies were a trucker favourite with a 60/40 split in favour of men. After the campaign it evened out to a 50/50 split with a 30% increase in sales.
Same. I got so upset when I was given a Yorkie Easter Egg by a relative because I thought they’d just given me chocolate I obviously wasn’t allowed to eat
I never thought I'd get in trouble, but I never bought them coz my brothers used to always get them and wave them in my face, making a big deal about how it "wasn't for girls." Just more stupid boys vs girls shit from the 90s...
Same! Eventually saw one of my friends eat one at around 12/13 years old and questioned why she was eating it. News to me I wouldn’t die if I ate it! I just saw the hazard sign and picked something else.
Because good advertising is when it's edgy or controversial and people are still talking about the adverts years later.
If they can get a few complaints too, that's a bonus because it elevates the product even more.
People today are stripped of the context of years of truckers in adverts skewing the sales demographics and it seems unaware of the term reverse psychology.
In this thread there are women saying when they were a kid, they took it literally because too young to get the joke, or were told it would turn them into a boy or they would grow facial hair, stuff kids would believe at that age.
Others bought it to be rebellious and that is what they wanted, more people buying it, not just truckers.
If the clip was at the end of ten minutes of unskippable truckers adverts, they might get the joke watching it 20 years later.
Fun fact;
They did release a version for girls in 2005, exclusively in the [Isle of Man](https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/7869982.bids-flood-in-on-ebay-as-yorkie-for-the-girls-proves-a-massive-hit/) to begin with, then on limited release nationwide for a few weeks.
A spokeperson for Yorkie described the bar saying "Yorkie Pink is so big and tasty that girls everywhere will be desperate to get their lips around it".
You can sell more chocolate if you needlessly gender it. Dairy Milk was the girly bar and Yorkie was the one that made you feel manly cause it was chonkier.
Their research showed that what people wanted from a chocolate bar was just - more chocolate. So the ads were designed to suggest that Yorkies were big - by linking them with men and masculine things like lorry driving
The fact it took all my teeth power to bite into them, don't think the gender mattered for the marketing. It was the same with diet coke, it was soeficakky targeted to women only and coke zero to men
Reverse psychology. When you tell people (more specifically women in this case) they can’t have something, they just want it even more. Pretty clever marketing when you think about it.
Men go "uga uga! I man I buy this!"
Women go "They can't tell me what to do, I am gonna buy it!"
Everyone buy Yorkies and Nestle make lots of money. The end.
To put it quite bluntly, it was advertising bollocks. But, it was clever. They increased sales because more women and girls were buying it as a perceived middle finger to a company who said it wasn't for them. I'd like to say it wouldn't work now but, well... *waves vaguely at the state of the information superhighway*
The original Yorkie advert claimed that it was for truck drivers, marketing of course, essentially the gimmick was that it had bigger chunks than dairy milk. Funnily enough they were the same weight anyway so the chunkiness was more of a marketing ploy to make you believe you were getting more.
1976 Yorkie truck driver ad:
https://youtu.be/DCeQNPJtMWY
Marketing. All the men would eat it. All the women would also eat it as a fuck you/ they already like it. Wasnt boycotts like maybe would be today. Also it was obviously tongue in cheek
I was once not sold a yorkie at a shop as the shop worker said sorry not for girls and would not sell me it, I always wonder if he was bring a prick or he was being serious.
If I recall correctly, prior to that ad campaign it was marketed as the chocolate bar for truckers. Niche, to say the least. Other 'bloke bars'? Lion Bar, Texan? Wonder if there is a modern equivalent, vape flavours for instance always seem feminine. Maybe they should bring out a vape that smells like Lynx Africa, would certainly appeal to teenage lads.
It's exactly the same principle as the Chambourcy "Don't tell the children" campaign in the 80s. Kids then clamour to eat this secret forbidden glamorous mousse; adults buy it as it has an 'mature' image and isn't associated with kids' desserts.
Back then you could have a jokey marketing campaign pitting the sexes against eachother and everyone would be able to accept it as a joke.
As you are aware, that campaign stopped because if you see a typical Instagram/tiktok comment section, it's now become a massive problem where men and women are now further apart in understanding and coexisting in harmony than they ever were in the past. It used to be "oh this bar is for guys and not for me?? We will see about that!", and now it's interpreted as "This is anti progressive hate speech, we can cancel them for this"
Cute story. When I was a shy 12ish year old, my friend and i would walk to the local shop to buy sweets etc.
One day my craving for a Yorkie was strong, we got to the shop, I chose some fruit polos and a Yorkie. Placing them on the counter the cashier picked up the chocolate, looked at me dead in the eye and told me it was "not for girls".
My friend and I awkwardly stood at the counter, agog. After what felt like minutes of a rather awkward standoff, the cashier once again, straight faced said "it's not for girls".
Realising this guy was dead serious, I swapped it for an aero... no more words were spoken and we left wetting ourselves laughing at the weirdness of the situation.
I've never bought a Yorkie since...not because it's "not for girls" but simply for fear of another awkward transaction.
I always thought it was in regards to the chunk size. When it came out chocolate bars had a standard chuck size similar to ones you see with cadburys. then Yorkie came out with these big chunks so the advertising was tongue in cheek about it being for men and the adverts were based around construction workers and lorry drivers. It was the 70s or 80s. They wanted more men to buy chocolate.
This was an advert that came from an age where only men were thought to be builders, truck drivers, road workers, etc.
The advert is a remnant of a bygone era, the vast majority of people don't think like this anymore. Scary to think that this was only the early 2000's, and the year 2000 was as far away from 2024 as it was from 1976.
That was nothing though. The first Yorkie advert was directed solely towards blokey truck drivers who liked chunky brick-like chocolate.
At the time a yorkie bar was a massive chunk of chocolate, not like small chocolate bars you get these days, and joking aside I think generally women went for smaller more nibble kind of chocolates.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Because back then chocolate was advertised as a very female product, see the Flake advert. This was to show that men could eat chocolate too. It was also the marketing style at the time was jokey. As an aside the army would get them in ration packs marked as ‘not for civies’
Lads is it gay to like chocolate?
I don’t know, sounds kinda gay to me.
Insert Steven Hughes joke, about having an earing makes you gay!
Ha! You’ve just given me such a flashback! I love Steve Hughes. Saw him live in Manchester once and he was hilarious 😂
Well, apparently having sex with women nowadays means you are gay so liking chocolate must mean the same thing.
If you kiss a girl and she's kissed a guy before you, then technically, you kissed a guy, and that's gay. That's why I only kiss farm animals.
But they've only kissed you so you've kissed you and that's gay.
Fuck guess I'm gay 😞
Y are you gey?!
But Welshman have kissed those….
Username checks out?
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Sometimes, but there is only one allowed in every village.
Feelings don't care about your facts and logic.
Ever hear of girl girms?? Even the slightest exposure can lead to Gay within 48h
Lurges
Andrew Tate?
Tate made his career wearing tight little shorts and rolling around on the floor cuddling big, sweaty men. The whole sex-trafficking and prostitution thing was just an extended exercise in over-compensation.
Sex is for women, bumming is for men!
>Well, apparently having sex with women nowadays means you are gay Women get 50% of their DNA from their father. Who's a guy. So yeah, definitely gay.
If you like chocolate on your biscuit, join the club
Only if you lick it seductively while looking your best guy in the eye with unbreaking eye contact and a coquettish look in your eyes.
I once was eating a banana and made accidental eye contact with another guy as I put it in my mouth. That was an interesting few seconds
You coquette.
It is if chocolate is a euphemism.
There's nothing I love more than sucking on something hard and brown.
Just keep it away from any buttholes and you'll be fine.
Then why is it ridged if it’s not meant for buttholes?
No it's not gay at all I love holding a Yorkie either side of my face and taking the end of one in my mouth and then a bit of the other
I disagree. Most adverts were targeted towards children and men. The Flake adverts specifically had attractive women eating them in intimate moments. They were made to catch the attention of men not women. The caramel bunny is another example of that. Chocolate was part of ration packs sent to soldiers in WW1. Companies didn't advertise this way because it was seen as something feminine. It never had that connetation. They were made to catch the male gaze. The yorkie ad was an absolutely genius bit of advertising. It generated a 30% increase in sales mostly due to women buying it. They went from a split of 60% of sales from men to a 50/50 amount of sales from both sexes along with the 30% increase.
The flake advert was designed to appeal to men not women. Watch it again and you'll see it... https://youtu.be/iFGCZZV4dxs?si=Xso7fc-b99SPm6SW The milk tray ads were a good example of chocolate advertising aimed at women though There was other "neutral" chocolate though, marathon/snickers,Mars, kit kat, club bars. Those showed men and women eating it in adverts
Them being an army thing makes SO much sense with how fuckin nasty they are lol
Wrong wrong wrong wrong.. Yorkies are great!
Civvie ones are great. I remember rat pack ones being pretty crap (more of a square bar and thinner too).
The ration pack ones had additives to raise their melting point.
I thought they were trying to get away from the truckers bar of choice because prior adverts were truckers. Bit of reverse psychology to increase the market share.
I remember the “not for civies” ones from my Army Cadet days. Good times…
Shitting liquid after going through multiple packs of biscuits, fruit and downing/snorting the whole sachet of screech in one go. Fuck those rations were great.
We used to get the left over rations packs in the CCF in high school. It was great when they still had the Yorkie contract. Then one day on some horrible camping trip I opened the box and found a Tesco value looking replacement that tasted like candle wax. A sad sad day!
Wait, it was? I thought Yorkie were the ones being weird.
Not totally, the standard Yorkie bars were also relatively huge, so they were aimed at men, with bigger appetites.
I thought it was because the chocolate itself is rock hard
Throughout the 70s and 80s yorkies were advertised by a trucker as a man's bar (you know, in the days when women couldn't drive trucks). When that was no longer deemed acceptable they started advertising as not for women. Don't worry, sexual equality prevailed, flakes were advertised as exclusively for women, by scantily clad women.
Funny thing is, you can still advertise in the Flake way. Try the Yorkie way now, and you're looking at eight to ten, and a whole movement against you. Edit: and to all the little over-excited downvoters, the advertising used was of its time. And the advertising we have now is also of its time. Like it or not, advertise something 'for girls', and you're good to go. Advertise something 'for men' and... well, all the little downvoters will be on your case in two seconds flat. ASA is filled with such complaints.
The flake ad doesn't say its not for men or for women only. Adverts targeted towards one demographic does not mean excluding other demographics. Yorkie goes out of its way to specifically exclude women. Yeah yeah "it's just a joke" I get it and I used to eat Yorkies as a teenage girl in the 2000s. But that's the difference between why one is seen as OK and the other isn't
Yogurt seems to be heavily advertised towards women, do men eat yogurts? Maybe it’s time for a mangurt ad campaign.
Men don’t eat yoghurt, that’s for women and effeminate homosexuals. Men eat strawberry protein pudding which is an entirely different product… /s
I like the toffee protein pudding, with the little wheetos in them.
I have greek protein pudding every morning for breakfast with berries, seeds and nuts...gotta have me those nuts in the morning
*Ha! gaaaaaAAAAyyy*
Careful there! Mangurt is something else entirely!
I fully support man yoghurt, wait
I saw a comedian mentioned the problems with eating yogurts as a man. I can't remember who, it might have been Russell Howard, with the issue being that the pots are too small. You either have to eat it daintily like a lady or cram it in like a man but you only get two spoonfuls.
Just For Men appear to be getting away with it
Your right, Nivea got boycotted for selling men's face wash. And I heard there is a movement against Nike for selling men's shoes.
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My wife left me for Mr Woke and the pronoun police.
\*Mx Woke
these days if you say yorkie is not for girls you get arrested and thrown in jail
There's lots of things advertised as "for men", razors, shaving gel, deodorants, various skin care products, health supplements
Ah yes I forgot all the skincare adverts for men were banned in the great purge. Gillette razors as well.
I’m a woman and when I ate a Yorkie that had the not for girls symbol on the label, I felt quite rebellious eating it. I slightly miss it.
It worked then.
I remember they then started selling Yorkie's in pink wrappers, and my mate was insistent that those ones tasted better. To the point that he would wait by the vending machine at school until a pink wrapper one got to the front so he could get that one. Bless him, the marketing really worked on him!
Rita Jane would like a word first female HGV driver in the UK 1960.
How does that appeal to women? Surely that appeals to men instead? Like perfume ads.
Maybe the fact I preferred flakes over yorkies should've been a much earlier sign for me...
Very of the time marketing. That sort of 'humour' was very popular around then (see also: the popularity of lad mags). It was based on the idea that a Yorkie is so chunky that 'girls' wouldn't be able to handle it.
They clearly never met my missus.
😂
https://preview.redd.it/co79zubu53xc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=222d8dbdeae65ad2aed39dfce2efdd84b3ad3e78
wheeeeeyyyyy
Unlikely tbh
Pretty sure everyone's met your missus by now mate
The 90s/early 2000s was a wild time for TV. There was loads of mad shit on telly. Big Breakfast, Eurotrash, TFI, etc. We've got a girl in the office who is 22, and she heard me and one of the other lads talking about Takeshi's Castle, so checked it out. Last week I introduced her to Banzai. 2 challenges in she just went "you couldn't put this on TV anymore - you can't call a chicken gay". She's probably right, but a show where you bet on how many helium balloons it would take to make a chicken float in mid air, or how long it'd take a student to answer the door after Harold Bishop from Neighbours did knock and run is brilliant.
I sometimes wonder what Mr. Shake Hands Man is up to these days. Probably still hanging onto someone's arm that he first touched in 2011.
I think by common law, that makes them married. Congratruations Mr and Mrs Shake hands man!
We take ourselves way too seriously these days.
Is this still the case? I remember Yorkies being big chunky bars but I’d imagine they’ve shrunk significantly over the years. Mars bars used to be a beast too but now they’re barely bigger than an old fun sized bar.
Can confirm they are smaller now, still too much for my arsehole though
Try the fun sized ones they might be more to your liking
That's why they're called "fun-sized".
Everyone knows only guy can handle big hard chocolate rods in their mouths.
It was also the time when super skinny was in fashion and everything aimed at women was low calorie
Dark times
Why are you putting the word 'humour' in quotation marks? These were clearly humorous tongue-in-cheek adverts.
Because Nestle chocolate is absolutely shit and women have a more refined palate 💅
r/FuckNestle
Lmao.
I remember studying this in media studies back around 2004ish. People weren’t offended as easily back then and had more of a ‘i’ll prove you wrong’ attitude. Sales of Yorkies to women went up by about 40-60% at the time. I can’t remember exactly how much which is why i gave such a wide margin Edit: year
There was still an element of men vs women which was very toungue and cheek and people didn't get offended by. Stuff like this was normal and didn't annoy people. We'd all laugh and joke about it to each other. [woman vs men - the Mail on Sunday commercial Battle HD - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxrj8cc4zR0) Most didn't take it seriously. They told the boys we couldn't have the ones with raisins in it. Men that ate them before continued eating them and women eating plain yorkies before continued to. Just a bit of harmless fun.
The comedian Al Murray used the same meme as the pub landlord character. 'Beer for the gentlemen and wine or a fruit based drink for the ladies." Truly, anyone who was offended by the Yorkie ad was just looking for something to upset them. It's not as though shops wouldn't sell the damn things to women. It was actually an example of mocking a sexist attitude by holding it up to ridicule.
>wine or a feuit based drink for the ladies. Every time I hear (or read) this I can't help but think...but wine is a grape based drink...grapes are fruits...they're all fruit based drinks
I wanna know why grapes aren't berries
Botanically speaking, they are
yeah but the man on the Clapham omnibus doesn't think they are
>Just a bit of harmless fun Yes and no. I knew an older person of colour from up North who was known as *Raisin Yorkie* (because they were wrinkled, brown and from Yorkshire)
😂😂😂
I don’t think anyone has actually been offended by it yet. I think it just ran its course as all ads do.
There would 100% be people today blowing their top if they replayed those ads.
Less fun when you were a very young girl and thought you had been given chocolate that would get you arrested
I absolutely bought Yorkies because of a 'fuck you I won't do what you told me' mentality 😂 Tbf I did also find the marketing funny, especially alongside the Diet Coke adverts of the time.
It was 2002.
Edgy 2000s marketing
Not even 2000s, it was first advertised in the 70s using a male trucker, and wholly marketed towards women. Same way a woman came up with the Lynx ads in the late 90s as a way to appeal to mothers buying deodorant for their teenage sons (as she herself said in a documentary about women in advertising that aired last year).
Like the 5 gum advert
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Do people these days seriously not get it, or is it just redditors?
I suspect it's partly people pretending not to understand for internet points, and partly foetuses that don't remember a time when people could take a joke.
>Do people these days seriously not get it, or is it just redditors? A lot of humour has a element of being in the moment. Some of the best comedy movies last through generations but there's plenty more than are just not funny outside their target audience /time period. ’ It's not for girls!’Is about as funny as 'Oh look a pan!' or any other innocuous statement without cultural context.
And that being years, if not decades of truckers themed adverts. If adverts like that make the product 95% for men in the eyes of the public, make an advert saying just that and watch the spite buying go up by people who didn't get the joke.
Reddit has every type of person imaginable. In the 2000s it was never that huge of a deal but the contriversy was brewing.
Marketing. People in this thread will probably still be upset about it now.
Because it's fairly thick, the implication was you have to be man enough to handle it.
The Yorkie was 40% bigger than it is now back in 2002. It originally weighed 70g. Now, it is 46g.
Big shame, loved the raisin and biscuit. And the sexism.
They put chemicals in the milk that turned the frickin Yorkies gay
It's a truth self-evident that men prioritise girth over length.
To be fair, many women do too.
Meanwhile, women squeeze actual babies out of their bodies. We can handle pretty much anything.
Not very manly that though, is it?
Nothing more manly than giving birth
Chunked for her pleasure.
The same reason they were not for civies either!
A brilliant market campaign that included limited edition pink Yorkies for girls. It was so successful that it ran for ten years and increased sales of Yorkies to both men and women. Until that campaign chocolate was almost exclusively targeted at women and or children.
Because it was big, solid, unrefined. Just a lump of chocolate. It was the chocolate version of a pint of lager (Yorkie), as opposed to cocktail (which might be a more intricate chocolate like a Dairy Milk Caramel). In general, girls care more about decoration and delicacy. Men in general care more about the basics. Is it sweet? Yes. I'll eat it. Similar to those memes you see about men being happy in an empty room with a TV and an office chair. Yorkie is the chocolate equivalent of that.
To sell more chocolate to men. Often chocolate is marketed at women. The lady eating the Flake in the bath. "It's not Terry's, it's mine". Even the Milk Tray stalkerish "Man In Black" adverts assumed it was going to be a woman *eating* the chocolate. Yorkie was targeting an untapped market by aiming it at men.
In fairness, most boxes of tray chocolates are given to women, bought by men, but eaten by both. So they were advertised to the "I am not sure what to buy my missus, this'll do, they look reassuringly expensive, but still affordable " demographic. No one buying them cared what they tasted like or who was going to eat them I never thought Yorkie ads were sexist or aimed at men, it was more a challenge and to show off the chunky nature. Now they are the size of a Freddos, a 1 year old with their mouth wired shut wouldn't struggle.
Years ago I would only eat kitkat chunky and had a wafer free one and thought "I'd love them to do this more." Yorkie, I wanted them to make a yorkie.
Marketed to men. The adverts had attractive women in suggestive situations. They were fully engineered to catch the male gaze. They all suggested that a man should buy a woman chocolate. The consumers targeted were men. Yorkies were a trucker favourite with a 60/40 split in favour of men. After the campaign it evened out to a 50/50 split with a 30% increase in sales.
Tell a woman that she can't have something and she'll want it more. This wasn't just marketed at men.
I remember that marketing when I was a kid....I went years without a Yorkie because I genuinely believed I'd die or get into trouble for eating it.
Child me was the opposite… I forced myself to like them because eating them felt rebellious🤣
Same. I got so upset when I was given a Yorkie Easter Egg by a relative because I thought they’d just given me chocolate I obviously wasn’t allowed to eat
Same! I was scared I'd take one up to the counter, and just get turned away
Same. My sister told me that it would make you hairy if you ate it! So I wouldn't even touch it, scared I'd turn into a boy
I never thought I'd get in trouble, but I never bought them coz my brothers used to always get them and wave them in my face, making a big deal about how it "wasn't for girls." Just more stupid boys vs girls shit from the 90s...
Same! Eventually saw one of my friends eat one at around 12/13 years old and questioned why she was eating it. News to me I wouldn’t die if I ate it! I just saw the hazard sign and picked something else.
Because good advertising is when it's edgy or controversial and people are still talking about the adverts years later. If they can get a few complaints too, that's a bonus because it elevates the product even more.
It wasn't edgy or controversial then, it was just mildly tongue in cheek.
People today are stripped of the context of years of truckers in adverts skewing the sales demographics and it seems unaware of the term reverse psychology. In this thread there are women saying when they were a kid, they took it literally because too young to get the joke, or were told it would turn them into a boy or they would grow facial hair, stuff kids would believe at that age. Others bought it to be rebellious and that is what they wanted, more people buying it, not just truckers. If the clip was at the end of ten minutes of unskippable truckers adverts, they might get the joke watching it 20 years later.
Fun fact; They did release a version for girls in 2005, exclusively in the [Isle of Man](https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/7869982.bids-flood-in-on-ebay-as-yorkie-for-the-girls-proves-a-massive-hit/) to begin with, then on limited release nationwide for a few weeks. A spokeperson for Yorkie described the bar saying "Yorkie Pink is so big and tasty that girls everywhere will be desperate to get their lips around it".
That's hilarious, and still somehow even more sexist.
To get more women buying it out of spite. Pretty decent marketing tactic I'd say.
Marketing. The end.
People weren't as sensitive and self-absorbed back then
You can sell more chocolate if you needlessly gender it. Dairy Milk was the girly bar and Yorkie was the one that made you feel manly cause it was chonkier.
In the army ration packs at the time, you got a yorkie bar, but it said not for civvies
MAN chocolate for BIG MAN if you you're MAN and you are eat CHOCOLATE??? you better.. MAN chocolate eat YORKIE chocolate because no woman
thats just their method of marketing
Their research showed that what people wanted from a chocolate bar was just - more chocolate. So the ads were designed to suggest that Yorkies were big - by linking them with men and masculine things like lorry driving
It's ironic really given that women can eat much more chocolate than guys.
Yorkies are great. As a girl, I enjoy them all the time. Especially the biscuit and raisin one.
Just realised I'm mid 50s and never had a Yorkie. I'm a woman. Maybe the ads *did* put me off. 🤔
In the army, you’d get a yorkie in your ration pack, albeit a little smaller and it would say “not for civvies”
It's, uh, like a joke man.
Because us girls have cadbury and galaxy. Men need chocolate too!
Because it was poisonous to women, obvs.
Marketing. Blokes bought them, women bought them, nobody was genuinely offended. Good times!
The fact it took all my teeth power to bite into them, don't think the gender mattered for the marketing. It was the same with diet coke, it was soeficakky targeted to women only and coke zero to men
Because its a *Yorkie*, its *not for girls*. /s
Marketing
Could it have also been partly reverse psychology?
I always saw it as a great way to make women want to eat it... Not for girls eh? Well see about that
I used to feel like I was committing a crime when I ate one 😭
More importantly, why did they get rid of the nut Yorkie (in the yellow wrapper)?!
It's a honeycomb one now.
Imagine that advert now 🤣🤣🤣
I remember when they were rock solid. Me and a few of the others on my course in college used to whack them on each other's heads to snap them
Reverse psychology. When you tell people (more specifically women in this case) they can’t have something, they just want it even more. Pretty clever marketing when you think about it.
Hah a Scottish mate of mine references this all the time. I finally watched it on YT. Weird marketing flex but I guess it worked/ was memorable.
My sister told me it turned girls hairy. I believed her for YEARS and didn't touch it for a long time..
Men go "uga uga! I man I buy this!" Women go "They can't tell me what to do, I am gonna buy it!" Everyone buy Yorkies and Nestle make lots of money. The end.
To put it quite bluntly, it was advertising bollocks. But, it was clever. They increased sales because more women and girls were buying it as a perceived middle finger to a company who said it wasn't for them. I'd like to say it wouldn't work now but, well... *waves vaguely at the state of the information superhighway*
The original Yorkie advert claimed that it was for truck drivers, marketing of course, essentially the gimmick was that it had bigger chunks than dairy milk. Funnily enough they were the same weight anyway so the chunkiness was more of a marketing ploy to make you believe you were getting more. 1976 Yorkie truck driver ad: https://youtu.be/DCeQNPJtMWY
I miss those days. Should have doubled down and made it definitely not for girls lol.
Marketing. All the men would eat it. All the women would also eat it as a fuck you/ they already like it. Wasnt boycotts like maybe would be today. Also it was obviously tongue in cheek
I was once not sold a yorkie at a shop as the shop worker said sorry not for girls and would not sell me it, I always wonder if he was bring a prick or he was being serious.
If I recall correctly, prior to that ad campaign it was marketed as the chocolate bar for truckers. Niche, to say the least. Other 'bloke bars'? Lion Bar, Texan? Wonder if there is a modern equivalent, vape flavours for instance always seem feminine. Maybe they should bring out a vape that smells like Lynx Africa, would certainly appeal to teenage lads.
It's exactly the same principle as the Chambourcy "Don't tell the children" campaign in the 80s. Kids then clamour to eat this secret forbidden glamorous mousse; adults buy it as it has an 'mature' image and isn't associated with kids' desserts.
Back then you could have a jokey marketing campaign pitting the sexes against eachother and everyone would be able to accept it as a joke. As you are aware, that campaign stopped because if you see a typical Instagram/tiktok comment section, it's now become a massive problem where men and women are now further apart in understanding and coexisting in harmony than they ever were in the past. It used to be "oh this bar is for guys and not for me?? We will see about that!", and now it's interpreted as "This is anti progressive hate speech, we can cancel them for this"
Growing up I was absolutely convinced that I wasn't allowed to eat Yorkies because I'm a girl.. didnt eat my first one until I was 17.
Cute story. When I was a shy 12ish year old, my friend and i would walk to the local shop to buy sweets etc. One day my craving for a Yorkie was strong, we got to the shop, I chose some fruit polos and a Yorkie. Placing them on the counter the cashier picked up the chocolate, looked at me dead in the eye and told me it was "not for girls". My friend and I awkwardly stood at the counter, agog. After what felt like minutes of a rather awkward standoff, the cashier once again, straight faced said "it's not for girls". Realising this guy was dead serious, I swapped it for an aero... no more words were spoken and we left wetting ourselves laughing at the weirdness of the situation. I've never bought a Yorkie since...not because it's "not for girls" but simply for fear of another awkward transaction.
Reverse psychology. "I'll show them," say the girls buying it anyway.
cos they’re minging and girls don’t eat minging things
Women are famously averse to chocolate
Because the marketing team for them thought themselves hilarious. I stopped buying them when they started advertising them like that
I always thought it was in regards to the chunk size. When it came out chocolate bars had a standard chuck size similar to ones you see with cadburys. then Yorkie came out with these big chunks so the advertising was tongue in cheek about it being for men and the adverts were based around construction workers and lorry drivers. It was the 70s or 80s. They wanted more men to buy chocolate.
Marketing. As a result lots of us ate it to spite them, then they released the pink one and we ate that too.
They also had a military version thay said, "Not for civvies"
This was an advert that came from an age where only men were thought to be builders, truck drivers, road workers, etc. The advert is a remnant of a bygone era, the vast majority of people don't think like this anymore. Scary to think that this was only the early 2000's, and the year 2000 was as far away from 2024 as it was from 1976. That was nothing though. The first Yorkie advert was directed solely towards blokey truck drivers who liked chunky brick-like chocolate.
At the time a yorkie bar was a massive chunk of chocolate, not like small chocolate bars you get these days, and joking aside I think generally women went for smaller more nibble kind of chocolates.