Why She Buys (23 page)

Based on input from women golfers, instructors, and designers, the clubs are engineered with female-specific ergonomic
adaptations for head design, head size, swing weight, shaft weight, shaft flexibility, and grip size.

By enabling women to hit the ball better, Callaway hopes the Gems line will increase women’s confidence and reduce the intimidation factor that keeps many out of the game.

Callaway has women on its product development team, and a woman heads up marketing for the Gems line. “There’s nothing worse than having a bunch of men trying to decide what women would prefer,” laughs Fellows. “We do what any other consumer-products company would do. We show our product to our target market, and we ask them what they think.”

Experience is on Fellows’ side. As a former “lipstick” guy, he understands women’s shopping patterns better than most of his peers in the golf industry, or any other industry, for that matter. And although he doesn’t have control over the way golf courses are run, he and his team evangelize to the people who do about the opportunity women provide for the industry.

“Women represent a more robust financial model because they spend more money than men,” he explains. “Some of that spending happens to be in fashion and the other accoutrements of playing golf, but why does that matter? It just makes them a more attractive target.”

W
OMEN
: G
ATEKEEPERS TO THE
N
EXT
G
ENERATION

Women are also critical to bringing in another target audience: the next generation of golfers. This is because when women get involved in an activity, their families follow. Golf is one of the few sports in which the whole family could spend an entire day playing together, as opposed to most
other sports, in which parents must sit patiently (or possibly impatiently) in the stands watching their kids. And since people have smaller families these days, it’s easier to accommodate an entire family in just one golf cart.

“If you’ve got the mother, the father, and the kids participating in a game of golf on the weekend, time is no longer an issue,” says Fellows. Quite the contrary: time now becomes a friend, because it provides an opportunity for family togetherness in a beautiful outdoor setting. “It’s absurd that we as an industry are not doing more to promote this,” says Fellows. “Then instead of golf rounds being flat, you’d see them grow.”

Fellows’ formula is clearly working for Callaway. The company finished 2008 with the second-highest sales level in the company history.
⁷
Callaway’s board of directors voted to extend Fellows’ employment as CEO, based on the company’s exceptional performance. Whether the rest of the golf industry—the people who run the courses and clubs—takes advantage of the opportunity remains to be seen.

Key learnings from the Callaway story include:

1. Women can help grow a flat industry
.

If you’re in a product category or industry that’s hit a plateau, focusing on women may help bring in new customers and revenues.

2. Women are key to the next generation of customers
.

If you want children and teenagers to participate in an activity, get their mothers excited about it.

3. Women’s participation has a multiplier effect in terms of people and purchases
.

Not only do women bring their friends and family members to companies and activities that they’re thrilled with, they spend money differently, and often more of it, on the accoutrements.

Success Stories from Overt Strategies

S
OME
exceptional companies have transformed unisex products to specifically target women. The phrase “game changer” is overused, but in Nintendo’s case, it’s accurate. From the moment of its introduction in 2006, the Nintendo Wii broadened the audience for gaming, specifically targeting moms and women of all ages with its new system. It effectively tapped into a market most of the gaming industry had long ignored, with the notable exception of the Sims franchise from Electronic Arts, which has long been a female favorite. Nintendo’s efforts have taken root fast. As we’ve seen, 40 percent of gamers in the United States are now female, and 50 percent of the Wii’s purchasers are women.
⁸
With Wii Fit, the follow-up product that Nintendo introduced in May 2008, the company continues to attract women in droves, and as of this writing, the product is poised to overtake one of the world’s most iconically male video games, Grand Theft Auto, in sales.
⁹

The Nintendo Wii does so many things well that it’s hard to narrow them down, but the effort deserves a try. First, the company promotes the fact that all members of the family can take advantage of the game’s wide range of activities, which is smart because women are interested in how other members of the household will be affected by the products they buy. Second, it shows normal-looking people in its advertising,
making the product approachable and unintimidating. Finally, it actively promotes the fact that Nintendo wants women as players, through its overtly female-focused “play dates” and promotions at women-centric conferences and events. As Nintendo North America president Reggie Fils-Aime remarked to a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
, “We’re seeing demand from a whole new market. Of the people who stood in line [for Wii Fit] in New York, 60 percent were working women. This is a demo that arguably has never bought a video game, and they’re buying it for themselves.”
¹⁰

All that Wii playing requires a lot of energy, which brings us to another category: food. The Luna brand of whole-nutrition energy bars for women has become one of the top-selling brands in the category in the United States. Created by privately held Clif Bar & Company, Luna was designed for women’s specific nutritional needs, and the brand represents the growing trend of food products created just for women. In fact, the burgeoning category of so-called functional foods has found a responsive audience in women, especially in the forty-plus age group. From products such as Activia yogurt from Dannon (which aids digestion) to the countless orange juice brands and other beverages promoting calcium as an ingredient, food manufacturers are capitalizing on women’s innate interest in health and well-being by marketing products just for them.

Women are also tearing down the dingy drywall of the home-improvement industry, adding color, style, and revenue to this traditionally male-dominated realm. Firms such as Barbara K Enterprises, Tomboy Tools, and Girlgear Industries have reinvented everything from power tools to hammers, toolboxes, and tool belts. The redesigned products
have been created with women’s anatomy in mind (the tools are easier to grip, hold, and lift) as well as women’s style considerations (the products feature bright colors and sleek designs).

Creating products for women isn’t about sacrificing one gender to gain the business of another. Ideally, it’s about broadening your reach and increasing your revenues by adding more products that appeal to the world’s primary shoppers. Once you’ve got the product right, the next critical step comes into play: making women want it.

5

MARKETING

TO WOMEN

The Difference Between Sex Appeal and Gender Appeal

What do women want?
Don Draper, creative director, Sterling Cooper Advertising
Who cares?
Roger Sterling, partner, Sterling Cooper Advertising
—From season one of the AMC drama
Mad Men
,
set in a fictional ad agency in 1960

M
arketing, and especially advertising, its most glamorous representation, is the public arena in which a company’s insights about women—or lack thereof—are most vividly on display.

We already know that women buy the vast majority of consumer products. What’s less well known is that more than 90 percent of U.S. ad agency creative directors are men, and the majority of top chief marketing officers (nearly 70 percent) are men, too.
¹
At many agencies, the creative department is like a boys’ club, complete with foosball table.
Campaigns that are meant for women often end up being filtered through the eyes of men, and sometimes things get lost in translation. Not always, of course—there are incredibly talented men working in marketing. But one has to wonder, in an economy in which women dominate consumer spending so thoroughly, what if the tables were turned? What if 90 percent of the world’s creative directors were women instead of men? Would marketing look different? Would sales results look different? My guess is that they would. And it does beg the question of why, nearly fifty years after the setting of the television series
Mad Men
, which focuses on the lives of employees in a male-dominated ad agency, the creative department still so often looks like something out of the Eisenhower administration.

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I do know that no matter how complex the marketing function becomes or how cluttered the media environment is, there are still only two sexes on the receiving end of a marketing message. Understanding the one that does most of the buying is crucial, especially when there’s such a big difference between gender appeal and sex appeal.

Gender appeal
is the type of marketing that resonates strongly with the culture of a particular sex. Its messages and images tap into a gender’s collective consciousness—its rites of passage, milestones, communication styles, body issues, desires, and motivations. The pain of adolescence is universal, for example, but the memories and feelings associated with a first period are very specific to women, just as the memories of a first (public) erection are very specific to men. Yet people overlook gender the way they overlook oxygen, which is a mistake, since we now know that gender is
one of the primary filters through which people understand and interpret life.

Sex appeal
is different—it defines words, images, or people that others find arousing. And when it comes to being aroused, most of us have lived long enough to know that women and men have different ideas about what’s sexy and what’s not.

Right now I’m staring at a poster for Rémy Martin cognac. It features two gorgeous women in a provocative embrace. An imaginary wind blows through their hair. One woman has the other woman’s necklace in her mouth and is clenching it with her teeth. It looks like something wild is about to happen between them. The tagline reads, “Things are getting interesting.” The ad stops me in my tracks. Its implication is that men who order Rémy Martin may be rewarded for their choice by seeing two beautiful women get it on. What a way to sell cognac! I can’t help laughing when I realize this ad is so thoroughly steeped in male culture, it could never work in reverse.

Imagine it: a similar ad targeting women, featuring two scantily clad men in a provocative pose, with one of them clenching the other man’s jewelry in his teeth. Ludicrous! It’s safe to say that not only would women laugh at the ad, they’d assume it was targeted to gay men. The Rémy Martin ad, like so many others similar to it, demonstrates the gender canyon between what men and women fantasize about, what they aspire to, and what motivates them to choose a product. Understanding this difference between gender appeal and sex appeal is one of the most fundamental principles in marketing to women.

Luckily for men, a woman’s brain is much less interested
in how a man looks than in how he thinks and acts.
²
Research has proven what we all know from experience—that men devote much more time to thinking about sex than women do. “When asked to think of nothing, women are thinking about relationships, while men are thinking about sports or sex,” confirms Dr. Daniel Amen, the brain-imaging expert and author of
Sex on the Brain
. With so many male creative directors, is it any wonder that advertising is filled with such an astounding number of sexualized images of women—not to mention sports references?

Every marketer knows that the most effective campaigns create an emotional connection with audiences. But what if one audience has an entirely different emotional reality than the other? As we have seen throughout this book, women have different emotional perceptions, responses, and memories than men do. When these differences aren’t understood well enough, campaigns fail to connect with their targets. They become instantly forgettable, which is why the world is littered with campaigns that most of us couldn’t recall at gunpoint. The good news is this: armed with the right knowledge, both men and women can learn to create marketing campaigns with gender appeal.

What’s Hot and What’s Not:
It’s Different for Women

F
OR
an entertaining example of gender appeal, check out the photo book series
Porn for Women
, which is a spoof on the qualities women find sexy in men.
³
The books feature pictures of handsome, fully clothed men performing mundane household tasks and complimenting an unseen woman—
the reader—in ways that women fantasize about. The books are filled with images of men staring into the camera and saying things like “Antiquing makes me
hot!
” “I’m so excited for your sister to have her baby!” and “Hey, guess what? I just paid off the mortgage!” The books possess off-the-charts gender appeal, because hearing these kinds of phrases is a genuine fantasy for many women. There’s even a great new word,
choreplay
, that describes the happiness and fuzzy glow that women get when men pitch in with the household chores.