MARKETING TO WOMEN

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.

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?

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.

What’s a woman without her purse? Purses are among the top shopping items for women and it’s no surprise anymore to find women crying at a Louis Vuitton shop over a sold out limited-edition must-have bag.
Here’s a movie from someone who made a study of the contents of purses. Of course she found many, many ingredients, with an average of 66,7 (mine comes close to that…)
Virtually every woman carries a purse every day and women have an average of 2.4 purses (I must admit that I have many more…). Women carry around their entire life in their purse, it’s a home away from home. So if you want to be a part of women’s life, develop something that she will carry around in her purse!

I reread Trends from Tom Peters and Martha Barletti this weekend, a nice little book covering all the essentials of marketing to women. One part that I recognized all too well is the observation that people always joke and tell stories about the differences between men and women during off-work hours. In that realm, it is accepted as a fact of life. In a business context however, ‘we persistently -and foolishly- shun any recognition of the distinction between male and female cultures.’
This fear of alienating men is the number 1 objection against marketing to women initiatives. To this, Peters and Barletti respond ‘we must begin worrying instead about how thoroughly we have alienated women by ignoring their sensibilities’, as companies persist in their idea of men as the dominant group to market to. They add: We (males) snicker about women’s “shopping proclivity” but persist in reflexively acting as if the “consumer” - for furniture, cars, food, and computers alike - is a ‘he’.
They also deliver some easy to use advice on how to market to women and explain that it’s not all that difficult: ‘We tie ourselves in knots as we go about tying little pink ribbons around some special “women’s brand” - when, in fact, the key to reach women is to honour their complexity’.

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!

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!

Fara Warner describes some really interesting cases in her book The power of the purse

Some of the cases are really well known, ie the De Beers right hand ring campaign, but it’s still fascinating to read the story behind it. For those who have missed out on this excellent example of female marketing: De Beers, a leading diamond company reacted to declining marriage rates due to women’s growing economic self-sufficiency. Traditionally, a woman would wait for the white knight to come and give her a diamond engagement ring, but these messages of love were not attainable for every women, and besides that was seen as patronizing by women who are now earning their own money. However, many women still stick to the traditional idea of a diamond engagement ring, so DeBeers came up with the concept of the right hand ring - a ring for women to buy as a present to themselves and a sign of empowerment, with copy that read: “Your right hand is a declaration of independence. Your left hand lives for love. Your right hand lives for the moment. Your left hand wants to be held. Your right hand wants to be held high. Women of the world, raise your right hand.” Right hand rings became a hit.

Warner stresses the fact that De Beers had watched the tension between tradition and empowerment and created a strategy to adapt to the new situation of women. That is also the case with the other examples in her book. Her core argument is that women are not a minority, but in fact the majority of consumers and companies should formulate their own answer to the new position of women in society. Warner: “succeeding with women consumers is no longer a nice-to-have accomplishment that makes management feel as if it is doing a good thing for a minority market. It’s no longer about putting women in advertising or even making products that fit women better. Instead, the constant drive to adapt to women is a must-have for a profitable future”.

But how? Well, there’s no recipe. Women are quickly becoming an ever more important economic force, but they come in many different versions, sometimes further apart from each other than from men. Women can have many roles, making the picture even more complicated. If I look at my own life, I am a marketing professional, a mother, a marathon skater, a shopper and an ‘Amsterdammer’ all in one day. On the internet, I can address all these roles and due to my economic power and financial freedom no role really defines the whole of me.
The most interesting observation of Warner is that these successful cases of female marketing were not about creating a women’s brand, but about ‘finding the relevance (…) to women consumers”.

Is female marketing an American thing? There’s a LOT of information on the topic on American website, but it’s hard to find anything at all on European ones. Is this one of the areas where Europe is lagging behind? In that case, be prepared for the revolution to start overhere…
Sisteract will be present at the annual female marketing conference in Chicago next month and one look at the attendees list shows us that a lot US corporates apparently have a female marketing manager. When will we see the first one in the Netherlands?

This blog is about two subjects. First of all and most important, it’s about female marketing. In the US, many companies have found out that marketing to women requires a new approach; in Europe, companies are just starting to explore this field.
Wondering why marketing to women is important? Just check some of these fast facts:
- women account for 85% of all consumer purchases
- women represent the majority of the online market
- women process information and make purchasing decisions differently than men and often feel misunderstood by marketing campaigns. Check more fast facts here
Secondly, this blog is about the big changes taking place in the field of marketing; fragmentation of audiences, declining impact of traditional advertising, the rise of social networks and the new voice of the consumer.

At Sisteract, we combine these two challenges and try to find a new tone of voice that appeals to women and also taps into new ways of marketing - truly interactive marketing.

From now on, we will share our knowledge on these subjects in this blog and post interesting facts, book reviews, cases and everything related to marketing to women. Please feel free to respond - the subject usually leads to heated debates about gender differences, and we would love to host such discussions on our blog.

For all Dutch readers: sorry that this blog is in English. However, at this time, the entire discussion on female marketing is taking place in the English speaking world, so if we would post in Dutch we would be pretty lonely with our opinions… We have considered a bilingual version but time is limited and there are tons of new books and articles to explore, so writing in two languages is a guarantee for another blog started with good intentions but abandoned after a while.

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