Why She Buys (20 page)

T
HE
I
CING ON THE
C
AKE
: T
HOUGHTFUL
F
EATURES
T
HAT
M
AKE THE
D
IFFERENCE

Truly great products don’t just solve a problem; they offer an element of delight. That’s what separates the billion-dollar brands from the chaff. “This element of delight is something we very much focus on, because it’s beyond the rational when it comes to purchasing decisions,” says Lynde.

“Delight” is just a euphemism for thoughtful details. As with every other aspect of their lives, women notice the thoughtful details in product design. “From the moment she opens the Swiffer box, she has to say, ‘Ah, I get it. It’s even better than they said,’ ” notes Lynde. “That’s our goal. And that only comes through adding the elements of delight beyond the functional perfection that we try to achieve in our products.”

Some of Swiffer’s details that women notice and appreciate include:

• Textures and features on the mops that prevent them from falling over when they’re leaning against a wall

• Velcro on Wet Jet pads that allows users to throw the pad on the ground and stamp it onto the mop, without having to turn the mop upside down

• A 360-degree turning radius on the heads of the mops, for getting around furniture legs and tough corners more easily

Today, P&G employees spend hours with ordinary women, watching them wash their clothes, clean their houses, feed their kids, and put on makeup. Researchers look for the small but pesky problems that a new product might solve. To P&G, small and pesky has the potential to mean big and lucrative. Tide to Go stain sticks are another classic example of a great product innovation driven by an unarticulated need. Who says stains occur exclusively in the privacy of your own home? If only. The stick is popular with moms in particular, who find themselves on the receiving end of their kids’ spilled juice boxes and other debris. Now they just pop the sticks in their purse, and off they go.

There are several important lessons to be learned from the story of Swiffer that can be used in how you think about creating products for women.

1. Demographic changes open up new opportunities
.

As P&G discovered, the fact that more women work outside the home has increased the level of frustration with household chores, creating an opening for a solution like Swiffer. How can you leverage the biggest societal trends (outlined in
Chapter 3
) to create opportunities for your own business?

2. If something is a common problem that everyone recognizes, its solution would be universally embraced
.

Everybody hates mopping. There are lots of things
everybody hates, such as spilling on themselves in public places (a problem that P&G’s Tide to Go Sticks solve) and getting wedgies (a problem that Hanes No Ride Up Panties solve). Look for ideas hidden in the obvious, the mundane, the negative, and the bothersome.

3. Thoughtful details make the difference between a product women like and a product women love
.

Details are what separate the good from the great. A mop that doesn’t tip over when you lean it against the wall? Ingenious.

4. How you innovate is just as important as what you innovate
.

Watching your customers in their natural habitat may lead you to innovations faster than simulated environments or written research reports. Since modern women’s lives are pulled in so many directions, following them throughout their busy days is one of the most effective ways to determine their unarticulated needs.

5. Simplicity matters
.

If the customer needs a manual the size of a Tom Wolfe novel to understand your product, or if industrial-strength scissors are required just to open the package, then you’re creating a barrier to women embracing your product. More than a quarter of all households in the United States are run by single women, so there are fewer households in which two adults can be counted on to assemble a product together. Whatever it is, make it easy to open and operate.

Which Approach Is Best: Covert or Overt?

O
NE
thing everyone knows but rarely talks about is that it’s socially acceptable for women to buy products that are clearly made for men, but the reverse is not usually true. For example, in one episode of the TV show
The Office
, Steve Carell’s character, the deluded Michael Scott, shows up to work wearing a women’s suit he got on sale. Naturally, he is mocked for wearing it, and Scott feels humiliated about “cross-dressing” by accident. Entertainers have long known that the sight gag of men using women’s products is good for a laugh, as seen in everything from
Some Like It Hot
to
Monty Python
and
Tootsie
.

It doesn’t work the other way around. No one bats an eyelash when a woman throws a man’s messenger bag over her shoulder, uses a man’s razor on her legs, or wears Chuck Taylor high-tops. But heaven forbid a guy turns up at a gym locker room using his wife’s pastel-colored Venus razor—his friends will rib him mercilessly. “We’re even afraid to wear pink shirts to work,” confides one of my male executive friends who works in a Fortune 500 firm. And he’s in marketing, for heaven’s sake.

This legitimate fear of turning off men with overtly feminine offerings is one reason executives shy away from creating products and strategies for the women’s market. It can be hard to determine whether to execute something
overtly
feminine (such as the Venus razor) or
covertly
feminine (the iPod). Especially when there’s no arguing that women love style, color, and fashion in just about everything. So which is the better path for product design, covert or overt?

There is no right answer, but being overtly feminine in a unisex category is riskier, because men are automatically
excluded from your market, and a certain percentage of women may feel patronized. No one, man or woman, wants to feel like they’re getting a dumbed-down version of a product. However, if you’re able to create a product that is genuinely designed for women’s needs and it powerfully resonates with them—such as Gillette’s Venus brand—then it may make no difference whether or not the men show up; the women could carry you all the way to the bank.

The Lesson of Venus:
Men and women use the same products differently

Myth:
Shaving is shaving.

Reality:
Addressing real differences can lead to real revenues.

Gillette’s Venus is the ultimate example of a winning feminine product born out of an industry traditionally focused on men. This multiblade masterpiece, which now offers up to five blades on a single cartridge, has been a hit since its introduction in 2001 and now commands a whopping 55 percent of the women’s razor market.
⁴
Venus is the number one women’s shaving brand in the world, a ranking that has given its competitors a raging case of “Venus Envy,” as
BusinessWeek
has dubbed it.

Venus is a proposition of distinct virtues—namely, that it’s specially designed for the unique angles and curves of a woman’s shaving geography, which is clearly different from men’s. Women shave in all sorts of awkward places that men don’t, from knees to ankles to armpits and the groin area. There are also differences in how women shave—it’s often done standing on one leg in a poorly lit, slippery place,
where they must reach awkwardly to get to the parts of the body they can’t see, such as armpits and the backs of legs. One actually needs quite a bit of core strength to avoid tumbling right into the tub.

With an elongated, soft-grip handle and pivoting razor head, Venus is ergonomic in all the right places. Today the line offers eight colors, though Venus is often associated with pink because of its advertising campaigns, which position the razor as a beauty product. (Back in 2001, the original launch color was blue, to evoke water.
⁵
) Regardless of color, Venus has built its success by offering a product that has been designed specifically for women’s unique anatomy. The success of Venus teaches three important lessons:

1. Addressing anatomical differences can lead to new product lines
.

Venus captured the other half of the population for Gillette by creating a need for a gender-specific product. It communicated its benefits by focusing on the physical differences between men and women. In your own business, it’s worth determining whether anatomical differences impact how women use your product, and if there’s an opportunity to better leverage these differences. The implications for manufacturers in industries ranging from outdoor clothing and gear (such as backpacks and sleeping bags) to consumer electronics and functional foods, among many others, are enormous and still not fully realized.

2. There are products in which pink can be used effectively to target women
.

Not only are pink and the other bright colors in the Venus line cute, they serve a purpose: to keep the men
and boys in a woman’s household from accidentally using her razor. Wherever you can, however, offer more colors than just pink, so your product doesn’t look like a cliché. Venus offers eight colors.

3. Benefits can be both functional and emotional
.

Venus performs as promised, and it’s positioned as a beauty product. Its marketing campaigns tell women Venus will make them more beautiful by unleashing the “goddess” inside them. When a product is created that addresses both functional and emotional benefits, you just may hit the bull’s-eye, as Venus did.

T
HE
E
VOLUTION OF
P
INK

F
or more than twenty years, October has been designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the sheer number of pink products raising money for the cause means that pink is becoming as symbolic of autumn as the colors of fall leaves. In addition to raising millions to fight the disease, the breast cancer movement has legitimized the wearing of pink among adult women in a way that Disney’s princesses never could.

The modern pink movement began back in 1991, the year pink ribbons were distributed to all breast cancer survivors and participants in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in New York City. A year later, cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies, in partnership with
Self
magazine, passed out 1.5 million ribbons at its cosmetic counters. Avon followed suit with its own fund-raising crusade in 1993 and created pink-ribbon pins. The rest, as they say, is history.

Pink wasn’t always so popular. Back in the 1980s, when women were first fighting their way through corporate glass ceilings, many female executives shunned
pink because they felt it undermined their credibility. Pink screamed Barbie dolls and ice cream cones, instead of competent executive who deserves the same pay as her male counterpart. Many big accounting and technology firms didn’t even allow women to wear the color to the office, mandating earth-tones-only policies. Well, we’ve come a long way, baby.

From iPods to cell phones, sneakers, and professionally licensed sports gear (even though there isn’t a team out there with pink on its official uniform), pink is back. Could it be that women are finally secure enough with their place in the world to embrace the traditional color of femininity? Or is it just that the sheer number of breast cancer awareness campaigns has finally given adult women permission to wear—and buy—their favorite guilty-pleasure color?

Whether it’s biology or buy-ology, one thing is for sure: October is the one month of the year when both men and women can embrace the traditional color of femininity without going pink in the cheeks.

Evolution of Pink Timeline