Why She Buys (21 page)

Women Are the Gold Standard for Design

I
N
classically “male” categories, women are a surprisingly great litmus test for product design.

“Women are the canaries down the coal mine when it comes to new technologies,” says Genevieve Bell, PhD, a cultural anthropologist and human behavior expert for Intel, the world’s leading maker of semiconductor chips. Intel’s products are found in the vast majority of personal computers, and Bell has studied women and technology for more than ten years.

As we’ve seen with Swiffer, women want a product to work the moment it comes out of the box. They want it to be intuitive. They want it to be helpful. Bell sums it up this way: “The fact that women don’t have time to configure or troubleshoot technology to me suggests that they are the gold standard for design. At some level, if you could design things that women want, everyone would want them.”

Women get a bad rap when it comes to new technologies. They are often painted as the industry’s laggards, while men are viewed as the early adopters. History suggests this is not true.

“Women have always been the custodians of technology in the home,” says Bell. “We figured out how to make electricity work, how to use early refrigeration, early stoves, and we were in charge of the first wireless radios, telephones, sewing machines, and televisions. Women were the conduit through which new technology came into the home. But that never gets told as part of our story, because what gets celebrated is what happens in the public domain. All along, women have been the gatekeepers and fire marshals of new technology.”

There are several interesting reasons women want clean, easy-to-use design, she explains. One is that women and men have different orientations toward time and different ideas about how it is best spent. In Western masculine culture, men claim bragging rights about how long it took them to do something. For instance, a man may brag, “It took me sixteen hours to digitize my CD collection this weekend.” In male culture it’s considered enjoyable, acceptable, and even admirable to work on complex projects for hours, and men often find these kinds of projects challenging. Before the advent of high-tech engines, one of the most common sights in America was a man bent over the engine of his car on a weekend afternoon, tinkering away.

Women can be quite the opposite in this regard. They’ll say, “Oh, this outfit is something I just threw on,” or “No, I don’t spend much time on my hair and makeup.” With so many women working two shifts—a day job and another job managing home and family—it becomes a point of pride to multitask and get things done quickly. Most women don’t consider it fun or exciting to wrestle with a challenging technical issue in their free time. “There are simply too many pressures on women’s time to value something that takes a lot of it,” says Bell.

Women want to get to the action. If they’ve got a new cell phone, they want to be able to call a friend on it right away, while men may spend hours programming the phone, downloading applications, and enjoying every minute of it. This may be one of the few areas in life where men are more interested in foreplay than women.

So is feminine design just another way of saying
good
design?

Often the answer is yes. But sometimes there’s an
opportunity to tap the women’s market with something more.

The Lesson of Philips:
Know what you don’t know

Myth:
Entrenched “masculine” brands can’t attract women in a credible way.

Reality:
Yes, they can, especially when they team with brands that already do.

With the exception of Apple, the consumer electronics industry is going through an awkward kind of puberty in its attempts to appeal to women. Marrying style and technology is not easy, and adding to the complexity is the fact that there’s a large contingent of women who like their electronics served up with some serious, shiny bling—crystals and other objects that look like jewelry. Young women in Asia are driving the trend, and they represent an enormous market. In places such as China and Japan, cell phones are decorated with all the drama and color of a Las Vegas showgirl. The phenomenon has created a burgeoning industry in “feminized” electronics accessories.

Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch manufacturing giant, watched the trend grow and saw an opportunity to expand its market. The company had one obstacle to overcome. It wasn’t a technology issue—Philips is a highly respected company with many inventions to its credit, including the compact disc, the audiotape cassette, the rotary electric shaver, and the first home VCR system. The issue was that historically, the company was built on an engineering heritage as masculine as a three-piece suit.

It can be tricky for any company to navigate the murky waters of feminine taste, especially one immersed in designing everything from lightbulbs and semiconductors to MRI machines. But the people at Philips were smart: they knew what they didn’t know. And what they didn’t know was what women wanted, so they partnered with someone who did.

“We are not a female brand,” explains Nils Leseberg, the Netherlands-based director in charge of launching Philips’ female-focused accessories project. “We needed to understand what it would take to create a feminine product in this area that is technologically advanced, yet very appealing to women. It became clear that we could not pull this off alone. We knew we needed to partner with someone who would bring that aspect into the whole equation.”

Philips approached Swarovski, the luxury brand of crystal glass jewelry, to create a new line of electronics accessories for women. Swarovski is an established name in the global fashion world and a favorite with female celebrities.

Swarovski saw an opportunity to expand into the growing electronic accessories market, but technology was not its heritage. With so much to gain on both sides, Philips and Swarovski joined forces to “feminize” a piece of the consumer electronics industry. But which piece? Initially, they weren’t sure.

M
ARRYING
S
TYLE AND
F
UNCTION

The two corporate teams met in Paris for the first time to brainstorm. “It was like a first date,” says Raymond Wong, Philips’ Hong Kong–based design director for the project. “The whole time we asked ourselves, ‘What do women want?’ ”

The combined Philips/Swarovski team decided to tackle two product categories so mundane they could be considered style vacuums: headphones for MP3 players and USB (flash) drives. From a style standpoint, these categories had nowhere to go but up, and from a functional standpoint, they were actually
wearable
.

Women dominated the project’s design team, by a nose—it was a 60/40 split. The team conducted nearly thirty focus groups across the globe to get female feedback on their design ideas. The big question was how to make an elegant design that wasn’t tacky. “If we were to take an everyday product like a USB drive and simply add crystals to it, that would be patronizing, and we would not be able to deliver the quality, uniqueness, and creativity that women expect,” says Wong. Consequently, all the crystals that were used in this project were specially cut and developed for the new products.

P
RETTY AND
P
RACTICAL
, T
OO

The design team wanted to incorporate style that made sense—style that told a story. The end result of the team’s maiden efforts for the USB drive was two feminine designs: the crystal shape of a heart, symbolizing love, and the crystal-studded shape of a lock, symbolizing security. The MP3 headphones, meanwhile, looked like diamond earrings in a teardrop shape. “We discovered in our focus groups that women view these headphones as practical, day-to-day objects,” says Wong. “They wanted to have a sparkle from a distance, but attention to detail and richness when they looked at the product close up.”

Style and performance were just two parts of a larger
context that the design team took into consideration. The companies studied the broader environment in which women would handle and store these objects. In particular, they studied the role of the purse. It’s a fact of life that women store just about everything in their purses, and they’re always losing or destroying things at the bottom of them. “This is one of the reasons the USB lock was specially designed to hang on the outside of a purse,” said Wong. “It’s a beautiful accent to the bag, and it’s practical. Whereas if you were to design a USB stick for a man, you’d make it flat and compact, so he could put it in his pocket.”

B
USINESS
U
NUSUAL FOR
P
HILIPS

The product line was launched with glamorous events, including a fashion show in Beijing and a sneak preview at the famous Colette boutique in Paris. From the beginning, both Philips and Swarovski positioned Active Crystals as a luxury product line, sold primarily at Swarovski boutiques, as well as online. Where you
won’t
find them is in most so-called big-box electronic retailers. This has been a deliberate strategy, according to Philips, which didn’t want Active Crystals to get lost in an environment in which a woman wouldn’t be in the right frame of mind to buy a fashion item. After all, if a woman stopped by a traditional electronics retailer to to buy toner for a printer and ran across Active Crystals on the shelf next to it, she might not be open to viewing them as the luxury products they are. It would be a case of wrong place, wrong time.

Philips says this is just the beginning of its female-focused endeavors. “We believe there are other categories in consumer electronics that are very appealing to women that
haven’t been tapped yet with a real fusion of design and technology,” says Leseberg. “The women’s opportunity needs a long-term vision and a long-term view in order to grow to the size that it can be.”

There are several instructive takeaways from the Active Crystals story:

1. If your company doesn’t have brand credentials with women, consider partnering with one that does, at least for your maiden efforts
.

2. Include women on your product development teams
.

At the risk of stating the obvious, their insights are invaluable and can help ensure that important details aren’t missed, such as understanding how women use their purses for storage.

3. Determine whether your existing distribution channels are appropriate for a feminized new product line
.

You may have an opportunity to expand into new channels, as Philips did with Swarovski boutiques.

More than five years after the inception of the Active Crystals project, there is no longer an active partnership between Philips and Swarovski, but it is not for lack of success. Both companies were able to glean insights for new, women-focused products in their own industries, and they remain in contact should the opportunity for a similar project arise.

Philips and Venus both represent
overt
approaches to the women’s market. But far more common is the
covert
approach, in which a company creates its products to appeal to women in a way that is so subtle, neither men nor women are conscious that women are the target.

The Lesson of Ryland Homes:
If the woman doesn’t want it, the man doesn’t get it

Myth:
Men drive all the big decisions in married households.

Reality:
Women are the deal breakers.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry more male-dominated than home building. The average home-building company is staffed like a World War II aircraft carrier, at least in its management ranks. But times are slowly changing. While most senior executives are still white and male, these companies are waking to the fact that their real customers are women, and that they’ve been leaving money on the table by creating and selling homes from a male perspective, from underdesigning closets to using sell sheets that focus purely on technical data and architectural blueprints.

The Ryland Group is a $2 billion, publicly traded home-building company—one of the top in its industry—that has changed the way it designs houses, based on a new understanding of who rules America’s roosts. In one of the world’s biggest housing downturns, the company is leveraging its knowledge of the alpha consumer every way it can.

If you’ve never thought of a home as a product before, think again—a new home is the ultimate consumer lifestyle product. For most people, there is no bigger purchase, literally or figuratively. As is the case with all major consumer-product categories, women dominate.

“Women influence 91 percent of new home purchases,”
says Eric Elder, the senior executive who has championed most of Ryland’s female-focused efforts. For several years now, single women have been the fastest-growing segment of the home-buying market, buying twice as many homes as single men. I worked with Ryland on a two-year research project to understand what women want in a new home. As a result, the company implemented a variety of covert, female-friendly efforts across the company. The goal was to make these changes imperceptible to home buyers, so that women would feel drawn to Ryland’s homes but men would not feel excluded.

D
ESIGNING
W
OMEN

As discussed in
Chapter 3
, when a woman goes off to the workforce, she changes her personal traffic patterns, along with those of everyone in her family. As such, working mothers were the biggest catalyst for modifying Ryland’s floor plans. The company redesigned the common areas of many of its models so that multitasking moms could keep one eye on the kids and one eye on the stove. Windows were built over kitchen sinks to provide a direct line of sight to the backyard. Open kitchen/family room layouts were designed with nooks for desks, so that kids could do their homework on the computer or watch TV while Mom looked on from nearby. These designs were an acknowledgment of the “time compression” that occurs within families when both parents work. Instead of parents spending an hour or two helping kids with homework and then making dinner, both activities are now likely to happen at the same time.