Why She Buys (22 page)

Time compression and the blurring of boundaries between work and home means that home isn’t quite the sanctuary it once was. With cell phones, mobile devices, laptops, and the Internet, work is “part of the furniture” at home, too. In an effort to replace what’s been lost, Ryland redesigned its master bedrooms as oases for stress relief. New master suites were designed as retreats for the adults in the house—and in particular, women. “A private, relaxing, reenergizing space is especially important to single mothers, who don’t get much time on their own,” says Elder. Many of Ryland’s master bedroom suites now feature a coffee bar, mini fridge, and lounge area.

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Modifications to Ryland’s floor plans were just the beginning. The company also embarked on design changes to its neighborhoods. It learned that women don’t view themselves as buying just a house with four walls; they feel like they’re buying an entire community, a neighborhood, a school district, and a lifestyle. Women believe a new house is going to improve their life, along with the lives of everyone in their family. If it won’t, they might as well stay where they are. Subsequently, Ryland began creating more female-friendly amenities in its neighborhood designs, including cul-de-sacs, better street lighting, pocket parks, electronic garage doors as a standard feature, better lighting around home entryways, and secure gated entries in townhouse communities.

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As part of the female-friendly process, Ryland completely overhauled its design centers, the places where customers pick out their options and upgrades after signing a contract for a new home. These centers had a history of being housed in the bare garages of model homes.

“In our industry, picking out home options and upgrades used to be a back-office function,” says Elder. “We’d have a hodgepodge of display cases given to us by random suppliers, with a few samples of products here and there, bad lighting … the whole experience was an afterthought.” It couldn’t be more different now. “We actually embrace the personalization process, when we used to fight it,” explains Elder. “It’s one of the biggest changes that’s occurred at the company, and it’s wholly driven by women.” A senior female executive at Ryland, Diane Morrison, was the force behind the company’s new design centers. She recognized that for many women, the appointment at the design center is the most exciting part of the home-buying process: it is here that they get to pick out all the things that will make the home distinctly their own.

Ryland also broadened the color palettes on its home exteriors, to help women feel that their new home has a unique, personal identity, and to diminish the dreaded “cookie cutter” effect. Instead of offering three exterior colors in a one-hundred-house community, Ryland now typically offers from nine to fifteen.

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Ryland is a great example of a masculine industry that’s responded to women with subtle design changes that benefit both sexes.

“Every architect that’s designed homes throughout the history of this company has been a man,” says Elder. “Closets used to be leftover spaces that were essentially a door and a hole. Now they are a design element of the home, with functionality built into them. Our sales lobbies, which used to be fairly bare, now have places to sit down, with inspirational reading materials, like home design magazines, and toys for kids. And we’ve changed our merchandising displays so that they are more emotionally charged and filled with pictures of people.”

When the covert approach is done right, men don’t even notice the design elements that have been added for women. It turns out that men like the idea of having a hot cup of coffee in their master bedroom, too. “From a consumer standpoint, men would live in the garage if they had to,” says Elder with a grin. “Women want the home, and men want the women to get what they want. The great thing for us is that the changes we’ve made have been driven by women but are appreciated by men, too.”

When you appeal to women in a covert fashion, the men find themselves on the receiving end of things they never knew they wanted but are happy to get—and maybe even pay more for the next time. The lesson is this: when you make women happy, you make everyone happy. Women are the leading economic indicators of what people want. Key learnings from Ryland include:

1. Never underestimate the influence of women in a “couples” purchase
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Women are the veto vote for buying decisions large and small, from deciding what home to buy to where to eat. The individual who conducts the financial transaction (which can often be the husband) is not always the primary decision maker. If you sell to a lot of couples, figure out the “hot buttons” for both your male and female customers. They may be very different.

2. Study how the divorce rate and the increased spending power of single women may be impacting your industry
.

The phenomenon can open new opportunities in product design, as it did with Ryland and its master bedroom retreats, and also in the services that support your product offerings.

3. A well-crafted, subtle approach attracts women and pleases men, too
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It’s socially unacceptable for men to buy products that are overtly feminine. By being subtle in your appeal to women—through a covert approach—you have the ability to attract both sexes without alienating either one. Married women never want to see their husbands alienated or emasculated. (Not if they’re happily married, anyway.)

Covert Success Stories

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houses to cleaning products to household appliances and a good bottle of wine, a covert approach can broaden markets and build revenue.

Dutch Boy, a major paint brand from Sherwin-Williams, revolutionized the paint industry by creating easy-to-open Twist & Pour containers that allow people to pour paint in essentially the same way they pour liquid laundry detergent—from a plastic container with a handle and screw-top cap. The company realized that no one, particularly women, enjoys dealing with the traditional metal paint can lids that need to be opened and closed with screwdrivers and are notoriously difficult to pour without spilling.

“Eighty-six percent of the time, [paint] color is either selected by the female or she’s the major influencer,” says Adam Chafe, a Dutch Boy senior executive. “If you know who’s making the decisions, that’s where you get your insights.” Creating an entirely new paint container was no small undertaking for Dutch Boy. The company had to retrofit tens of thousands of paint shakers in retail locations, because they were literally trying to fit a square peg (the new design for Twist & Pour is a square) into a round hole. It also had to retool the company’s plants, which were created for metal cans. Sherwin-Williams continues to innovate based on consumer insights, and in 2008 launched Refresh by Dutch Boy, a line of paint that absorbs odors out of the air, created in partnership with Arm & Hammer. “Odor management is completely female-driven,” says Chafe. “Frankly, men care a lot less about how a home smells than women do.”

Women may drive the do-it-yourself industry—especially when it comes to interior design changes—yet the Twist & Pour and Refresh lines are products that men can appreciate, too.

Whirlpool, a client I worked with for years and one of the world’s leading appliance manufacturers, introduced its successful Duet European-style front-loading washing machines to a country of women who hate to bend and squat (America, this means us). The Duet features pedestals in 10- and 15.5-inch heights that raise the washer and dryer for comfortable loading and less bending, and incorporates a sophisticated “bubble” design for its doors that make homeowners of both sexes proud to show off the products, instead of wanting to hide them in the basement or laundry room.

Red Bicyclette, the French wine from the American E. & J. Gallo Winery, has been a major success for the wine-making giant. The label features a whimsical, cute-as-a-
bouton
cartoon of a Frenchman in a beret riding a red bike, with a dog running behind him holding a baguette in its mouth. Gallo has created a nonintimidating, cleverly marketed French wine for a new generation of brand-obsessed consumers. With a website laden with recipes and headlines such as “You Grow, Grapes!” Gallo clearly had women in its crosshairs when it created the brand, but its label is subtle enough for men. Hold on to your berets—but in the short time since its 2004 introduction, Red Bicyclette has become the number one premium French wine sold in the United States.

The Lesson of Callaway:
Women can revitalize flat industries

Myth:
There are just some things, like golf, that will always be a man’s game.

Reality:
Given the right equipment and a welcoming environment, women will not only get involved, they’ll bring the next generation with them.

Targeting women with a sex-specific product has the potential to shift an entire industry. That’s what one company is hoping will happen with golf, that bastion of (white) male power and prestige. The number of golf rounds played has been flat since 2005. The game’s player pool has shrunk 7 percent over the last five years.
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Many in the industry think the only way to grow the sport is to get more people into it. Who might these people be? You guessed it—women.

The obstacles are many. One is the matter of time. Few people under retirement age can regularly take a day off to play eighteen holes of golf. In our blink-and-you-missed-it world, it now feels like too much time away from the office or the family (or the cell phone). Golf is still a costly sport, and at many courses both the price and intimidation factor are enough to keep newcomers away. In some places, the snobbish golf environment spoofed in the movie
Caddyshack
still exists (except it’s not nearly as funny). Even now, women who wander into pro shops get asked if they’re lost, and sometimes they have a hard time getting good tee times because the premium slots are saved for men. Discrimination against women at golf clubs still exists. The Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, for example, is one of the most revered courses in the sport—the setting of the Masters
tournament each year—and yet it still does not allow women as members. Here’s a story from an avid golfer in her late thirties, named Sarah, who lives in Indianapolis.

There used to be a group of women at my club who would play bridge out on the terrace. One day they overheard some men using a lot of profanity on the course. The women complained to the manager about the language they’d heard. What was the club’s response? The next day they put a sign up saying that bridge would no longer be allowed on the terrace
.

On paper, there’s no reason golf shouldn’t be wildly popular with women. The sport requires finesse instead of brute strength. It’s social. It’s peaceful. It’s played in the most beautiful settings imaginable. It’s coed. The fashion is great. Cocktails and conversation await at the end of every game. Yet women make up a paltry 25 percent or less of all golfers in the United States, which is one of the reasons the game is stagnating. Golf equipment manufacturer Callaway is one company that believes offering women the right products might get more of them onto the greens and revitalize an industry that’s hit a growth plateau. We know that women have the balls to play golf. But do they have the clubs?

That’s where Callaway comes in.

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Callaway Golf makes the Big Bertha, one of the world’s most famous clubs. The company is a leader in the golf equipment industry, and Callaway’s CEO, George Fellows, has a deep knowledge of women consumers—unusual for a
golf executive—because he’s the former CEO of Revlon. When Fellows arrived at Callaway in 2005, he saw an opportunity so large it was nearly blinding: get more women into the game and grow the game itself.

“It was a glaring opening,” says Fellows. “Women were being ill-served.” As the father of two daughters, Fellows has long advocated for women’s participation in all aspects of sports, business, and life. He’s concerned that women see golf as an exclusionary sport, and he wants to help change those perceptions by creating more products for the other half.

“For some reason, our society still hasn’t caught up to the fact that women should participate at the exact same levels as men in a whole host of activities, but in order to do that appropriately, they’ve got to be equipped in the right way,” says Fellows.

When golfers are saddled with ill-fitting equipment, they don’t hit the ball as well, and therefore don’t feel confident out on the course—which subsequently keeps them off it. Women have long been at a historical disadvantage in the sport, because “women’s clubs were largely men’s clubs with pink shafts,” says Fellows.

The opportunity thus identified, Fellows and his team embarked on creating new clubs for Callaway’s Gems line, to accommodate the physical differences of women. Instead of tweaking men’s clubs, Callaway specifically designed the Gems line for women’s bodies.

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