MARKETING TO WOMEN

By now no one can have missed out on the importance of Word of Mouth and of course the internet is THE medium to facilitate this.
But the full potential of word of mouth on the internet is uncovered by women. Word of mouth is something that literally comes naturally to women - women use more words than men - an average of 20.000 a day against 7.000 for men, and that’s just the words they speak out loud.

So women are better at word of mouth than men. 84% of women tell others when they’ve had a great brand experience.

That’s something you have to tap into as a brand. Brands that facilitate conversations grow 4 times faster than other brands.
It’s no surprise that in the US, a service has been developed to help brands to organize word of mouth on the internet. Shespeaks has a network of over 50.000 women in the US who can try out products.
At the marketing to women conference I heard a case about nail polish brand OPI (I love them, I have tons of crazy colors from them) who were really successful using product sampling, discussions and coupons online.

They sampled their Nicsticks, a new easy to use nail polish to the members of Shespeak and 96% of the users discussed the item, 73% indicated they intended to purchase the product and there was a 220% increase in sales. Besides that, 80% of the coupons were passed on to other people. I liked the way OPI approached the program. Next month they will test the effectiveness by comparing results of an ad in Glamour to the results of the panel. They also mentioned that results from this way of testing are less distorted than results of focus groups, as you always get 2 or 3 people who dominate such a group, whereas online everyone has the same voice. That was a new insight to me, but it makes a lot of sense!