MARKETING TO WOMEN

Op Advertising Age las ik een interessant artikel van Mary Lou Quinlan (auteur van; Just Ask a Women) genaamd “Women’s Hidden Holiday-Shopping Secrets Revealed”
Retailers hopen op een meevaller in sales tijdens inkopen voor de feestdagen. Deze hoop is gevestigd op vrouwen: “they remain at the mercy of those whose wallets matter most; women, the power shoppers who always make or break the holiday.” Om achter de beweegredenen van vrouwen te komen om te shoppen voor de feestdagen voerde Quinlan onderzoek uit onder 2000 respondenten. Ze hanteerde hierbij begrippen als ‘hele waarheid’ en ‘halve waarheid’.

Uit het onderzoek bleek dat:
1.1 Halve waarheid: Retailers sporen het koopgedraag aan, waardoor sommige vrouwen op het laatst toch nog veel aankopen doen voor de feestdagen.
1.2 Hele waarheid:49 procent van de vrouwen gaf aan dat ze door de recessie minder extra aankopen zullen doen naast de aankopen die ze al gedaan hebben.

2.1Halve waarheid: Volgens 61 procent van de vrouwen zou de recessie geen invloed moeten hebben op het geven van cadeautjes tijdens de feestdagen.
2.2 Hele waarheid: 80 procent van de vrouwen is van plan dit jaar minder uit te geven aan cadeautjes tijdens de feestdagen. 80 procent zal dit jaar minder uitgeven aan cadeautjes tijdens de feestdagen. Hoewel de vrouwen de traditie graag in ere houden, en de kinderen nog steeds wel cadeautjes zullen krijgen, wordt er dit jaar bezuinigd op cadeautjes voor volwassenen (partner en familieleden).

3.1 Halve waarheid: De vrouwen geven allemaal graag cadeautjes die tonen dat ze om de ander geven.
3.2 Hele waarheid: Ondanks bovenstaand punt willen de vrouwen niet veel geld uitgeven aan deze cadeaus. 29 procent van de vrouwen met een inkomen tussen de 50.000 en 100.000 dollar geeft aan niet de volle prijs te willen betalen voor een product. 43 procent van de groep geeft aan alleen aankopen te doen met contant geld om extra uitgaven te beperken.

4.1 Halve waarheid: 81 procent zegt dat ze graag attente (passende) cadeaus geeft.
4.2 Hele waarheid: Zeker 1 op de 4 vrouwen geven graag cadeaubonnen vanwege het gemak (hoeft niet geruild te worden en kost weinig moeite om mee te nemen).

5.1 Halve waarheid: De vrouwen zeiden het zat te zijn om te bezuinigen en te sparen en dit jaar tijdens de feestdagen veel geld uit te gaan geven.
5.2 Hele waarheid: Hoewel 91 procent van de vrouwen het met bovenstaande stelling niet eens was, verwacht Quinlan samen met Marshal Cohen dat de vrouwen zichzelf toch zullen verwennen met cadeautjes tijdens de feestdagen: “After a year of denial and an avalanche of friends-and-family offers, women will find a way to treat themselves along the way, even if it’s under de guise of choosing their own presents so their families won’t screw up.”

Ik ben erg benieuwd naar het shopgedrag van Nederlandse vrouwen voor de aankomende feestdagen….Zullen zij door de recessie de hand op de knip houden, of vinden ze dat hun gezin, familie en zijzelf wel een extraatje verdiend hebben met Sinterklaas en/of kerst?

Afgelopen weekend was ik in een filiaal van Blokker waar mijn oog op een schap vol roze blikjes viel. Het bleken energiedrankjes te zijn. Meestal richten fabrikanten van energiedrankjes zich op mannen (zie ook de eerder gepubliceerde blog nav de introductie van Burn Energy drinks), wat vreemd is aangezien steeds meer vrouwen energiedrankjes kopen. Deze blikjes zijn heel duidelijk op vrouwen gericht: de naam ‘SHE’ zegt eigenlijk al genoeg. Verder is het blikje roze van kleur en steun je met de koop van het drankje Pink Ribbon. Een erg leuke actie van Pink Ribbon en marketing technisch ook nog eens heel slim; dit is de eerste energiedrank op de Nederlandse markt die specifiek op vrouwen gericht is en door een aantal slimme keuzes (een herkenbaar design, steunen van een ‘vrouwelijk’ doel, extra toegevoegde vitamines en mineralen en geen toegevoegde suiker) zou dit best weleens aan kunnen slaan bij vrouwen.
Het enige minpunt is wellicht de keuze voor de kleur roze; uit diverse boeken over marketing to women blijkt dat volwassen vrouwen zich niet aangesproken voelen door een product speciaal voor vrouwen dat ‘roze geverfd is’. Vrouwen willen zich serieus genomen voelen en willen niet behandeld worden alsof ze tien jaar oud zijn (zie onder andere het boek: Don’t Think Pink uit 2006 van Lisa Johnson). Uit onderzoek van Annemieke Raven -die in 2007 cum laude afstudeerde aan de Universiteit Twente op industrieel ontwerp, design en Styling- blijkt ook dat vrouwen niet vallen voor een stereotype kleur roze. Wel hebben vrouwen andere designwensen dan mannen, maar dit houdt dus niet in dat een product voor vrouwen standaard roze moet zijn.

Lees meer over de energiedrank SHE op de website van Pink Ribbon en de website van SHE Energy.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.

I stumbled upon this interesting list of facts about women. The article was published in 2006, so it could be a little bit outdated, but the facts are speak so much for themselves, that the situation has completely changed over the last 2 years

Women are coming and this is no news anymore, according to NRCNext in an article of Monday, June 7. Apparently, the fact that ever more women study and make a career is so  commonplace now that the newspaper asks itself the question: and where are the men?

It turns out that men have massively changed to services careers, such as banking, real estate agent or programmer. In Holland, 70.000 men who formerly worked in production shifted to jobs in commercial services over the last 10 years.  In the US the picture is more extreme - due to the current recession, men are having a difficult time. Business Week reports that 700.000 men have lost their jobs in the last six months, whereas 300.000 women have found one. According to Business Week this is due to the fact that women choose jobs in sectors that stay, like education and health care, whereas typical male employment such as construction work and production work is suffering badly from the recession.

The NRC Next article also mentions numbers of male- and female students at Dutch Universities. It seems that ever more women enter the university, while the number of men doesn’t decrease. So on the whole, more students leave the university. Due to the economic growth, they can all find jobs. Men choose mainly business administration studies nowadays, whereas women prefer social sciences, languages and health care. 

At the start of their career, men are lagging behind women nowadays. They study less and thus need more time for their studies. Therefore, they don’t get management positions straightaway. However, they catch up easily at a later stage, when women have children and stop working full time.

I’ll certainly be among the first in line to get the brand new 3G Apple iphone. It’s been hard enough for me not to buy one before the introduction of the new 3G version. It turns out I’m not the only woman hooked on smartphones. The New York Times mentions a big shift for the phone industry as smartphone sales to women rise at a faster pace than among men. According to Nielsen, last October, one out of four iPhone owners was a women, and by March this had already changed to one out of three. Smart phones are now smaller, look better and are cheaper, making them more appealing to women. Manufacturers once believed women wanted their gadgets only in pink and holding a mirror, but it turns out that women like toys-for-the-boys, but more logically designed and cheaper.

The Telegraph also published an article on the ‘gadget revolution’ caused by tech-savy women. According to Sony Ericsson, women spend more money on gadgets than shoes (!) - on average, $764 a year.

The New York Times article also mentions that phone makers increasingly see women as the path to the entire household and start marketing to women. Ads for Blackberry have started to turn up in women’s magazines such as Elle, Martha Stewart Living and Oprah Winfrey’s O. The Blackberry Pearl is one of their best selling phones (and rightly so!).

Women use their smartphones to organize their business and family life. According to Nielsen, two-thirds of women with smartphones say they use them primarily for pleasure rather than business Comparing this to 42 percent among men probably shows that either men just spend more time working or women communicate a lot more about the household. Or both?

Tons of facts and figures related to female marketing were presented the Marketing to women conference in Chicago.

Here’s a small selection:

• Women make more than 80% of all consumer related decisions
• Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from cars to health care
• Women represent the majority of the online market
• In the US, women control $7 trillion in consumer and business spending (from The power of the purse
• 30,7% of women outearn their husbands (Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US census)
• women owned businesses now employ more people in the US than the Fortune 500 companies combined
• women purchase 90% of beauty products, 94% of apparel, 89% of home products, 81% of gifts and 51% of consumer electronics
• in the US, women earn more bachelors degrees than men
• in the US women spend an average of 13 hours per week online against 3 hours on magazines and 3 hours on newspapers
• the amount of time women spend on portals has gone down from 42% to 29% as women have grown accustomed to the internet
• women are the number one driver of worldwide economic growth; in China alone, 1.5 billion women are expected to account for $516 billon in spending power by 2014

More facts at www.m2w.biz/fastfacts.html

It’s a shame that most data are American. As far as I know European data are hardly available so it’s about time to start researching these topics in Europe as well!

One of the first questions that always pops up is why there is a specific need for female marketing. Some women feel offended and do not wish to be addressed in a different way than men while most men don’t understand anything about the whole fuss at all.

To me, the differences between men and women are so obvious that I used to skip this part of the discussion. Well, that was a mistake as lots of people disagreed with me. It seems very difficult to discuss differences between the sexes without being accused of using outdated gender stereotypes and bolster sexist thinking.

And so I’ll start of this blog with a decent amount of gender research into the differences between the sexes. The book ‘The female brain’ from Louann Brizendine provides lots of useful information on this subject. She is a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California and she argues that differences in the female brain structure and the resulting differences in hormones explain a lot about different behavior between men and women.


Brizendine starts off with an explanation of genetic differences between men and women. Although more than 90% of genetic materials are identical, the 1% differences between male and female accounts for lots of differences.
A male brain is up to 9% bigger than a female one, even when measured against body size. Yes, there’s a nice topic for jokes… and indeed this used to lead scientists to the assumption that women were actually small versions of men in all aspects, expect for reproduction obviously.
Brizendine goes on to argue that hormones are responsible for typcial male or female behavior. ie the influence of Oestrogen makes women more interested in emotions and communication with other people. She described the lifetime hormone cycle for women with typical phases such as puberty, pregnancy and lactation where hormones play a big role in women’s lives.
I personally really liked the part where she explains the differences between baby girls and baby boys. I have a daughter and a son myself and I instantly recognized everything that Brizendine mentions about this, ie the observation that their neurological structure lets girls establish lots of eye contact with their parents, whereas boys tend to look away. My son Teun was happily watching everything that moved, except for my face, which was quite different with my daughter Jip.
Furthermore, Brizendine states that girls can detect more tones and frequencies in voices than boys and are therefore more inclined to listen to their parents or to let the parents soothe them.
Another thing a recognized all to well: girls seem to use about 3 times as many words than boys and learn to speak much earlier than boys.
Puberty raises hormone levels and sharpens the differences between the sexes. Brizendine states that women react differently to stress and aggression and are more inclined to avoid conflicts and get depressed twice as much as boys of their age. Interesting: Acne indicates a high level of one of the aggression hormones Androgen, also responsible for sexual desire. Taking the pill apparently suppresses the levels of this hormone and thus makes teen girls less aggressive and less eager to have sex.

Some other interesting results from research: women across all cultures seem to attach less importance to looks and find material well being and status more important. Yup, that’s were the cliche couple in Saint Tropez comes from: rich old man dating young model… Well, apparantly this even plays a role when women are financially self sufficient. Besides that, women look for men of at least 10 cm taller and 3,5 years older than they are. Brizendine relates this to age old instincts.