Why She Buys (2 page)

This means that most of the things we take for granted as conventional wisdom in marketing, sales, and product design are actually based on a male point of view. And while many companies understand that women are their primary consumers, their executive teams still go about creating products and marketing campaigns for women as if they view the world the same way men do.

Take the case of the ugly Snugli, one of the incidents that became a catalyst for this book.

The year was 2003. The place was Dayton, Ohio. I was with my former colleagues from the Zeno public relations agency at the headquarters of Evenflo Company, a baby products manufacturer that was one of our biggest clients. One of Evenflo’s star products, the Snugli baby carrier, had experienced a slowdown in sales, and our team was brought in to help turn the situation around. The Snugli has a proud history as the original soft baby carrier. Worn over the shoulders, it looks like a backpack in reverse. On the day of this meeting, stiff competition from European brands, including BabyBjörn, was challenging the Snugli’s position in the market. The upstarts were charging double or triple the price of a Snugli and still grabbing market share. It was time to strategize.

The Evenflo team put the Snugli in the middle of the conference table. We stared at the lump of cloth like scientists examining a new life-form. One of the Evenflo people
said, “We’ve got to find ways to get more PR for this, or we’re going to lose shelf space at our retailers.”

As I looked down at the lump of cloth on the table, it was clear to me: no amount of PR would help. It was mud brown, with a pattern on the inside that looked like an old man’s plaid shirt.

“It’s an ugly Snugli,” I told the group. “That’s why it’s not selling.”

First I heard awkward giggles (mainly my own), and then silence. We all stared at the bulky, quilted material in front of us. Finally one of the product managers spoke.

“The important thing is that this is the safest possible baby carrier. It surpasses all Underwriters Laboratories requirements and can hold up to twenty-six pounds. It has greater tensile strength than our competitors’,” said the manager. Everyone listened and nodded. The functionality of the Snugli was never in question. Not only was it strong and safe, it was practical—it had pockets, a place for keys, and sliding back straps that could be adjusted for the wearer’s height.

I looked around the big table. As I’d seen so many times, every person on the agency side of the table was female, and the overwhelming majority of people on the client side were male. I had that old familiar feeling that there was a cultural misunderstanding happening in the room—a misunderstanding of gender cultures. Except this wasn’t just a gender gap; it was a gender
canyon
.

So I clarified. “This is something a woman actually wears on her body, like a piece of clothing. If she’s going to wear it, the Snugli should look fashionable, like any other thing she would choose to wear. It’s a reflection of her taste. It needs a different style.” The fabric on the Snugli wasn’t just homely, it was bulky, and as any woman knows, the last
thing a new mother wants to wear after childbirth is something that makes her feel even bigger.

Silence again. Then smiles. Then nods. I could almost see the lightbulbs going off above the heads of everyone in the room. What a concept—to think that because this product is worn on the body, it should be fashionable and flattering
as well as
functional. Of course! What an insight into the female mind. We all laughed at the revelation: the male-dominated Evenflo team was thinking like engineers, and we were thinking like women—their customers! The clients agreed that embarking on a new fabric design for the Snugli was the best course of action. Our team offered to draw up a list of designers that Evenflo could work with for a new style, and we soon boarded the plane home.

After that fateful meeting, we helped Evenflo partner with fashion designer Nicole Miller to create a limited edition of the Snugli as a test of the fashion-forward concept. Miller designed a sleek, unisex version of the baby carrier in black with white piping. We sent the stylish new Snugli off to celebrity moms, and before we knew it, pictures of the product being worn by celebrities, including Courteney Cox and Cate Blanchett, started appearing in glossy magazines. The company even got a thank-you note from little Apple Martin, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the most stylish actresses anywhere.

The redesigned Snugli was selected by Oprah Winfrey as a giveaway during her “World’s Largest Baby Shower” episode, and subsequently sold out online. Soon after the Nicole Miller project, Evenflo brought in a new CEO, Rob Matteucci. As a twenty-seven-year Procter & Gamble veteran and former head of Clairol, this was a man who knew from women. Matteucci embarked on a makeover for the brand, which is now fully under way.

What’s different today? The company now employs women brand managers and engineers who interact directly with mothers to get feedback on Snugli designs. It has fashion directors who go to Paris and Milan for inspiration on fabrics and color trends. The lumpy cloth is a thing of the past. The brand team follows mommy blogs and website communities to stay in tune with their customers’ needs and opinions. In essence, understanding women has become every employee’s job.

Matteucci acknowledges it’s been a long road from the bad old days of the brand, when designing from a woman’s point of view was an afterthought. “The process of translating what we learn from mothers has become part of our culture, but it’s something we have to work at every day,” says Matteucci, who’s installed a library of information about women at the company’s headquarters. “We are still a work in progress. We’ve made strides, and we expect great things to come. Understanding women is a commitment at every level of the company, and without a doubt, it’s the only way forward for our business.”

If You Don’t Know the Price of Milk, Read On

A
FTER
that Snugli meeting in Ohio, I sat on the plane thinking that if only all of our clients could see their products and campaigns through women’s eyes, how much easier it would be for them to succeed. The majority of male executives I worked with had long ago abdicated shopping to their wives. I knew that when pressed, few of my clients could tell me the price of a gallon of milk. They weren’t the shoppers for their households, but they spent their workdays trying to reach the people who were.

And I observed that the more senior an executive was, the more he or she made decisions about customers based on second- and thirdhand information, whether it was quantitative research reports, agency briefings, or written reports from focus groups. (Let’s face it: the higher up the food chain someone is, the less likely they are to be munching M&Ms in the back of a focus group facility.) Most significant of all, the vast majority of executives were male, so they were also separated from their customers by the wide gulf of gender. Things got lost in translation. The trouble was, these smart and well-intentioned executives would assume that as long as they used women in consumer research or placed women in a few key management positions, gender differences would be taken into account somewhere along the way. Mostly they weren’t.

There are many reasons for this, which we’ll explore throughout the book. But one is that it isn’t just men who misunderstand their female audiences. Women executives have been schooled in the same conventional wisdom of business that men have. And many find themselves going against their better instincts at work or refraining from putting forth their ideas because they don’t want to cast themselves in the soft pink light of femininity, in case it’s used against them.

There is no doubt: the companies who invest in understanding their primary consumer are winning. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn how these companies are changing the rules, dominating their markets, and reinventing their categories. From upstarts such as method and lululemon athletica to titans like Procter & Gamble and MasterCard Worldwide, these mavericks are mastering gender differences and leaving their competitors behind. Their best practices will provide a blueprint for how you can do the same for your business.

It’s not a gap, it’s a canyon

Gender is the most powerful determinant of how a person views the world and everything in it. It’s more powerful than age, income, race, or geography.

Most of us ignore biological differences when we examine our customer base, mainly because we’ve never been taught about them. The brain is still a poorly understood organ, but we do know one thing—there’s no such thing as a unisex brain. New medical research has shown that brains in human beings have sexually dimorphic regions, or areas that are distinctly different between the sexes. The balance of hormones that drive our decision-making processes are complex and distinct to each sex. Biology dictates behavior in every species, whether it’s muskrats, antelopes, or human beings. This book will examine the real-life implications of brain differences and their impact on women’s purchasing decisions and emotional responses to product design, advertising, retail environments, and sales pitches.

Consumer research has a forest-and-trees problem

Without arguing the merits of various research methods or the fact that research is often outsourced too many levels down from corporate decision makers for them to get a handle on important nuances, one thing is true: we often overlook the obvious. Most of us have worked for companies that spend serious money conducting studies to learn about the target consumers. We’ll do things like:

• Analyze their propensity to buy

• Segment them by income bracket

• Target them by age group

• Deconstruct their search patterns

• Dissect their warranty card information

• Study their media habits

We’ll slice and dice data until our eyes are crossed, yet in many cases we’ll overlook the one piece of information that trumps them all:
the sex of the buyer
. Considering there are only two genders in the human race and one of them does most of the shopping, it’s stunning how many companies overlook the psychology of gender, when we all know that men and women look at the world very differently. It’s as if the most fundamental aspect of human nature has been overlooked:
What if we are selling product X to a woman instead of a man? How does this change the equation?
The answer is that it changes the equation entirely, and far more deeply than the thin research that’s so often generated.
Chapter 4
will show you how Procter & Gamble developed female-centric research programs to create wildly successful products such as Swiffer that have increased the company’s stock price and reenergized its standing as one of the most innovative companies in the world.

Normal depends on which bathroom you use

It’s human nature to think that our own behavior is normal and that it’s all those other people who are strange. Men and women inadvertently use their own gender “filters”—or personal biases—to make decisions about what they believe the other sex wants in a product, brand message, or sales environment. In a corporate world dominated by male senior executives and female consumers, the implications for misunderstandings are large and costly.

Most human drama is driven by the fact that men and
women are interested in and desire different things. What’s true at home is true in business. Women respond to different tones and styles and stimuli than men do, and they assign different values to various facets of their own experience. The fact that many, if not most, major marketing campaigns go through a male “filter” before hitting the airwaves has real consequences for businesses that are trying to reach women. The lessons from companies that have successfully tapped into the female human experience, such as MasterCard, are profiled in
Chapter 5
.

There is a distinct female culture that decision makers need to better understand

Even though men and women live together their entire lives—as siblings, offspring, parents, spouses, friends, and colleagues—women live in a distinct female culture, with its own standards of behavior, language, priorities, and value systems, that can be as difficult for men to detect as a dog whistle.
⁵

From the moment they’re born, girls are socialized differently than boys, and the codes of behavior and messages they receive from adults and society are wildly different. In the pages ahead, we’ll examine the fundamentals of female culture and learn why women such as Oprah Winfrey and the late Princess Diana can be considered case studies of female values. On the flip side, we’ll look at how the military is a nearly perfect microcosm of male culture in action. You’ll learn how to view your campaigns and communications through a new filter, to determine whether your efforts are “gender tone-deaf” when it comes to connecting with a female audience.

Five major trends drive the female demographic
,
and these are key to predicting consumer needs

As women increase their purchasing power almost everywhere, they’re unleashing major changes in society as well as in consumption patterns. These changes create needs for new products and services that are only beginning to be tapped to their fullest potential. From more women in the labor force to delayed marriages, higher divorce rates, more time spent as “singletons,” and an aging population, the opportunities are enormous for companies that understand the business implications of these demographic changes.

This book will chart the five major trends driving female populations around the world. You’ll be able to use the information as a blueprint for long-term planning. Each macro global trend is engendering a number of specific micro trends, which are changing women’s behavior and, therefore, their needs and wants.