MARKETING TO WOMEN

Ikea found a really nice way to launch it’s first store in NY: it placed gigantic pop up Ikea room settings throughout the city. The cardboard boxes contained complete interiors, obviously furnished with IKEA stuff. Here’s one that was placed on Cadman Plaza.

They also built massive sculptures of local landmarks like the Empire State Buiding or Brooklyn Bridge out of more than 1000 Ikea cardboard boxes.

Even though most comments on the internet on this campaign were very positive, some people are critical. Comments like: I ” Ikea’s great and all, but it’s frustrating to shop in a store where bedspreads are called “Dahlbrugg” and bookshelves “Lenkii” or some such thing, instead of being labelled what they are.” are merely funny, but serious there are also more serious objections such as worries about the weekend traffic jams to the store. This shows once more that advertisers cannot expect discussions to be restricted to the campaign that’s out there. And that means a whole new attitude towards consumers; not just being nice on the marketing side and then forgetting about the client when he or she is asking for service.

Something that Justien Marseille said last week at the VEA conference What women want struck me. She described the world as an ever more feminin place, and according to her one thing that companies would have to change is not to sell a product to a consumer, but to sell a relationship. That’s typically something that women are looking for. I believe Marseille is so right when she says that the old paradigm of hard product selling is so outdated. It feels kind of wrong when a company is really trying to get you in as a customer, and then afterwards treats you as a merely annoying insect. Unfortunately, that is still harsh reality. Most companies are still trying to trick people into a certain purchase only to ignore them afterwards. That doesn’t go down well with women though. 

Nice idea on the Adage 3 min news: people could upload their photo’s and greetings for mothers day to www.kinemo.com for free, and they were then displayed for 5 seconds on a huge interactive billboard on Times Square. And, very clever: you could then create your personal postcard with a picture from your Times Square billboard, although this costs $69, a bit too much for a postcard…

Great idea from 3Iying to ask girls to upload their ‘flip an ad’ on Youtube. Check the flipped print ads on their Flickr photostream. This makes so much sense - doesn’t everyone know that most ads are really stupid and don’t connect to your life at all. Just check the girl’s comments in the slideshow and see how many advertising ideas just don’t land with girls.

Today was the first day of the M2W (marketing to women) conference in Chicago with more or less everyone working in the field present; that is a lot of American agencies and brands and 3 people from Europe, all from Amsterdam (2 from Bosley and me)… This shows again that the topic of female marketing is not on the European agenda yet.

What struck me was the fact that virtually all lectures where about the changes in the media landscape and the importance of digital media for female marketing. An important insight is that women are now digitally empowered. They are no longer overwhelmed by the amount of content on offer. They no longer need the big internet portals to help them lead the way on the internet, instead they visit hundreds of websites, including many niche sites. They are online for about 13 hours a week, which is really a lot compared to the 3 hours they reserve for magazines (according to Glam Media, an online publishing network targeting women with 64 million unique visitors). So women have shifted from the analog to the digital world, hurray! As a result, they can now decide what’s important to them, on her time and on her terms and brands can do no more than align themselves to that.

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!

Really interesting stuff, this study” about women and digital media (mainly Internet) and how the interaction impacts their lives.
Yahoo was one of the commissioners, probably as part of the development of their new and already much criticized women’s platform Shine
Some key findings:
- internet is now the leading medium for women; with 3.3 hours a day it’s more important than television (2,9 hours) and still growing fast
- the content sought online is not found in typical women’s magazines (news, weather, games, finance)
- women go online during the entire day and easily mix work and personal activities

- women are shopping online more then ever before

Looking at the main navigation of Shine:
Fashion + Beauty
Healthy Living
Entertainment
Parenting
Love + Sex
Work + Money
Food
At Home
Astrology
I’m not sure if Yahoo has read it’s own report very closely?

Some remarks from the report: “The sites that were most frequently mentioned by women were not what could be found in typical women’s magazines: news, weather, shopping, games and finance topped the list. It turns out, a higher percentage of women visit sports sites than astrology sites”. Still, Shine opted for astrology instead of sports. Their main navigation reminds me a lot about all the zillions of typical women’s portals.
There’s an interesting discussion about the merits of portals aimed at women commenting to ablogpost from Holly Buchanan.