MARKETING TO WOMEN

I was surprised to hear that the first real women’s brand was Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand. The brand was launched in 1968 and marketed to young professional women. With the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby”, the campaign connected well with women’s emancipation and feminism in the seventies. Especially because the campaign resonated so strongly with the values of young women, critics considered it to be responsible for a rapid increase in smoking among teenage girls. A report by the Surgeon General of the United States describes this marketing strategy as attempting to link smoking “to women’s freedom, emancipation, and empowerment.”

In later years, it was exactly the strength of the ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ campaigns connection to the feminist movement that led to an identity crisis for the brand.  In the early 1990’s, young women did not want to be associated with feminism anymore. For them, the slogan was the reason not to buy Virginia Slims anymore. The brand was reinvented and adopted the tagline: ‘It’s a woman thing’. However, it never equalled it’s success during the seventies.

Apparently, women have always been an important part of the cigarette market since Lucky Strike’s ‘‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’’ campaign in the 1920’s. Virginia Slims was the first cigarette exclusively for women that was successful. Women are an important target group for the tobacco industry;  the cost of marketing to women in the USA alone is more than $5 billion per year.

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.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.

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.

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!

Interesting press release from the European Parliament: EP members condemn the use of stereotypes in marketing and advertising, and adopted a report on ‘how marketing and advertising affect equality between men and women. The report notes the continued widespread existence of male and female stereotypes despite various Community programmes to promote gender equality. The repot was adopted with 504 votes in favour, 110 against and 22 abstentions’. 

That’s a substantial majority. The members of the EP ask member states to start special campaigns against sexist insults or degrading images of both men and women in advertising. Specific attention is paid to the use of extremely thin models because of their influence on people with eating disorders (esp. teenagers). 

I would love to have heard some examples of bad and good ads, but unfortunately these are not included in the press release.

Now I am not so sure about the influence of the European Parliament (limited, I’m afraid), but let’s hope this will lead to better advertising!

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.

Yesterday, Harvard professor of economic studies Claudia Goldin was visiting Holland and gave a lecture at the Department of OCW: Education, Culture and Sciences. She’s an expert in the field of economic change due to the entrance of women in the workforce. According to her, Holland is now on the level of Indiana in terms of female participation in the workforce. Yes indeed, Indiana, the rural, conservative state in the Mid-West… Although the number of women that work is on pair with other European countries, the amount of working hours is substantially lower; Dutch and Norwegian women work 1300 hours a year on average, the least of all OESO countries. That comes down to less than 20 hours per week. Goldin argues that this extreme low amount of hours spent working holds the Dutch back from what she calls the ’silent revolution’, the crucial change for women to an equal position in society. 

There’s an article on Goldin in a ww.nrcnext.nl/links, but you have to register to read it.

Topics related to women seem to be on the agenda everywhere. Today I read about the launch of a new series on Dutch television, covering three women who set up a consultancy, specializing in getting women in top career positions. The series are part of a campaign called ‘CEO becomes SHEO’ to counter negative stereotypes about working women (moms) and create more top positions for women.