Being a sports fanatic myself, I have been keeping track of the news around women and sports for a while, and that’s a lot. The number of medals for Dutch women at the Beijing Olympics clearly showed that women have to be taken seriously, also in the top of sports.
In some sports disciplines, women are competing on the same level as men, or even winning from them. I recently watched a documentary on Laleh Seddigh, also known as the ‘little Schumacher’, competing with men in the Iranian 1600 GT class. Wearing a headscarf and with the permission of her husband obviously, but anyhow. Her struggle for emancipation, demanding the right for women to race, turned her into a cult icon for Iranian women as well as the world press. However, Iranian race authorities were not amused, and she had to give up her own racing licence. For further reading, here’s an article on Laleh Seddingh.
Another female race hero is Danica Patrick from the US, who won an Indy race last year, something that no other woman achieved before. The enormous popularity of these women makes them an important role model for young women, who have much broader possibilities in the field of sports than their mothers.
Happily, female sports is no longer only aerobics. Today, I read in the Second Sight newsletter: football isno longer a male thing. The Dutch football league KNVB now has almost 10% female members (more than 107.000) and female football is the fastest growing part within the organization.
No surprise that sports brands are now catering to female target audiences. If I only count my own yearly spendings on sports articles, this must be an enormous opportunity…
Marianne van Leeuwen on October 14th 2008 in Insights & ideas
Springwise mentioned the opening of a new Best Buy store, especially designed for women. I had heard about Best Buy’s marketing to women programme before, but so far no results were presented. Now Aurora, Colorado (why there?) has the first Best Buy store expecially designed for and by women, after nine months of development in cooperation with women.
It’s no surprise that the women asked for more information about the use of the electronic products in their own daily life, and the combination of products. In the new store, electronics products are placed in homelike settings.
The interiors are made of wood pannelling, carpets, earth tones and natural lighting instead of the metal shelves and cool blue that Best Buy used to have.
Family restrooms and special race car- shopping carts make it easy to visit the shop with kids.
One more thing the women asked for was more eye-contact with customers.
The cost of the store was higher than usual for Best Buy, but with an estimated 45% of electronics purchases done by women the company expects to win by serving women better.
Marianne van Leeuwen on October 10th 2008 in Uncategorized
This week, Amsterdam television channel AT5 showed a report on Sisteract and marketing to women. Sorry, it’s all in Dutch, but anyway, you can watch the movie here.
Marianne van Leeuwen on October 10th 2008 in News
Dutch newspaper het Parool mentions an interesting survey held by Motivaction: interviews among 700 women show that women over 30 are not sensitive at all to celebrity women advertising products. 95% of them says that A-listers in ads do not have any impact on their choices at all.
Younger women seem to be a little bit more open to celeb-ads, although 85% of the target group also claims not to be influenced by them.
I wonder though, if this is also true in fashion, as I heard of many succesful examples in that category. Anyhow, these results must make marketeers think twice before they spend big budgets on celebrities.
By the way, I’d really want to hear the response among men!
Marianne van Leeuwen on October 6th 2008 in News
