Why She Buys (24 page)

While
Porn for Women
is clearly satire, it’s a great example of how women’s and men’s fantasies can be so different. And because so much of marketing is about tapping into people’s fantasies of being more beautiful, successful, and happy, understanding that there are differences in how each gender defines what it means to be any of these things is critical.

For MasterCard, a Good Story Is Priceless When Marketing to Women

M
ASTERCARD
Worldwide and the team of people at its ad agency, McCann-Erickson Worldwide, provide a superb example of how one company has mastered the art of gender appeal.

The “Priceless” campaign has leapt over the walls of marketing and made its way into pop culture. It appears in 110 countries and fifty-one languages and has been running since 1997. The campaign is worth studying for many reasons, but for our purposes, it’s because the folks at MasterCard have perfected the art of emotionally connecting to
the world’s most powerful spenders (women) while still retaining the brand’s appeal with men—not so simple in a sector of the financial industry that has all the warmth of sheet metal.

“Priceless” ads tell small but perfectly formed stories about all the things in life that money can’t buy.

“The campaign is deceptively simple, “says Amy Fuller, who runs marketing for MasterCard in the Americas. “But it’s unbelievably difficult to find the human insights that becomes the content for the (television) spots.” Amy has one of those jobs that everyone thinks they can do. Perfect strangers give her their ideas for “Priceless” commercials when they find out what she does for a living, because MasterCard makes storytelling look easy, the way Tiger Woods makes golf look easy.

The details are what’s different

Universal needs such as love, time, family, and children are all considered priceless by most people, but these generalities don’t necessarily make for compelling marketing, because there’s nothing surprising about them. The details are what this campaign does well. The “Priceless” commercials depict life’s golden moments through the seemingly insignificant things that make up our days, like a ready-made lasagna; a pedicure; a rubber ball; or a box of Goobers candy. It’s the specifics in the campaign that make women think,
They’re talking to me—that’s my life
.

Time after time, MasterCard displays a fundamental understanding of female psychology. For one thing, the campaign’s creators clearly know that women rationalize their purchases, especially when spending money on themselves.
(Men just don’t seem to have the same guilt gene that women do.) In one of my favorite executions, a commercial called “That Would Go Great with That,” MasterCard demonstrates how one small purchase has the domino effect of leading to bigger and bigger ones. In the commercial, which features a woman who could be described as lovely but not unattainably beautiful, every new purchase the woman makes is justified by the previous one. Take a look at the copy, which is read to great effect on television by the campaign’s regular male announcer for U.S. ads, actor Billy Crudup.

Pedicure … $28 on debit MasterCard
.

Peep-toe pumps to show off your pedicure … $96 on debit card
.

Adorable dress, to go with your peep-toe pumps that show off your pedicure … $150 on debit card
.

Cut to a screen shot of the woman admiring a beautiful necklace in the window of Tiffany’s, until the voice-over says, “Yeah, right.” She rolls her eyes, smiles, and skips away, laughing at herself for thinking she could justify expensive new jewelry just because she got a good pedicure. She had gotten carried away.

The voice-over closes with: “Living in the moment, priceless. There are some things money can’t buy. For everything you must have right now, there’s debit MasterCard.”

The insight of this ad is that MasterCard understands how women shop. Women don’t have a linear purchasing style; rather, the act of buying one small thing can snowball into a series of unplanned purchases. Interestingly, a woman creative director has run the “Priceless” campaign since its
inception. Her name is Joyce King Thomas, and she’s still with the campaign’s original agency, McCann Erickson.

“Both men and women like the campaign because we take things to a human place,” says King Thomas. “If you can find some big human truth, it’s always better than a purely functional message. The two pieces of this campaign are head and heart. We start with the functional benefit—that you can use your card to buy these things—but we know that there’s more to life than money, and that people want experiences, and something more soulful. Women respond to that, but we also have big, burly men cry when we test commercials.” Joyce is that rare bird, a female creative director at a big New York ad agency. Is it a coincidence that a woman has led one of the world’s most successful and longest-running campaigns? You already know what I think.

How MasterCard avoids alienating men

Credit card penetration is evenly split between men and women, so like most businesses, MasterCard can’t afford to alienate men. Women are bigger debit card users and buy the vast majority of consumer products. So the company develops creative treatments based on the audience of the vehicles in which the ads appear—a male focus for men’s magazines, a female focus for women’s magazines, and so on. In its general-market advertising, MasterCard is adept at addressing the milestones and life stages that are common to both men and women, such as the moment a couple’s kids go off to college. On the surface, these ads appeal to both sexes, but under the surface, they appeal strongly to female psychology. Women are typically in
charge of life’s milestones—the birthdays, the graduations, the celebrations—and thus the ads speak particularly loudly to them, in a way that may be imperceptible to men. Even when MasterCard uses a male star, such as professional football player Peyton Manning, “we show him vulnerable and we let him be a person,” says King Thomas.

Priceless lessons for your business

Key takeaways from MasterCard include:

•
Storytelling is one of the most powerful techniques for creating an emotional connection with women
.

The oldest form of communication is still the best.

•
Ideas centered on the human experience are the ones that translate most easily around the world
.

If you’re embarking on a global campaign, MasterCard offers a textbook example of localized executions created under universal human truths.

•
Give a campaign both a head and a heart
.

Women respond to personal experiences and examples more than they do to product specifications. If it’s women you’re after, make them the heroes, not the product.

Gender Appeal Means Showing Some Personality: Just ask the People at method

B
Y
now you may be thinking,
What about smaller companies that don’t have a tenth of the budget of MasterCard and will
likely never produce a national broadcast campaign, let alone an international one?

Consider this marketing strategy:
stand for something
. It’s a wonderful philosophy for any business, and it’s especially effective for small ones. Small brands need big personalities. They need a point of view. One of women’s core motivators is connecting with other people. If you develop a personality that invites women to connect with your brand based on a shared point of view or shared values, then you’ve really got gender appeal.

For inspiration, look no further than the category-disrupting entrepreneurs at the helm of method Inc., based in San Francisco. method produces high-design, great-smelling, ecofriendly household cleaning products that people display in their homes like artwork. It’s elevated humble soaps and cleansers to a level of hipness once reserved only for designer jeans. The products (which cost just a few dollars) come in containers with beautiful and aesthetically pleasing shapes, like soap bottles that look like postmodern bowling pins. But the brand is more than just good looks: it stands for something. Gorgeous with a worldview, method is quite possibly the Angelina Jolie of the house-cleaning aisle. That’s because method’s founders view their company as a cause, and they market it that way.

Though it’s now a $100 million firm with 150 products, the company was founded by two childhood best friends, Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, in the year 2000, when they were both still in their twenties. Ryan and Lowry had the idea of infusing design and ecofriendliness into the cleaning products category, the dullest aisle in the grocery store. But their bigger idea was to create nothing short of a revolution against dirt.

“A great company doesn’t start a company, it starts a cause,” declares the charismatic Ryan. “Our cause at method is getting a bunch of dirty things out of the world. We think of our brand as a movement.”

Spend a few minutes with Ryan and you’ll walk away feeling like you, too, want to change the world, and are slightly ashamed that you haven’t—yet.

Most entrepreneurs start a business based on something they love. Not these guys. Ryan hated to clean. His bedroom was a mess. He knew he wasn’t alone. “Our big insight was that your home is a very high-interest, high-emotion place, and even though people don’t love cleaning, they do love home design, and they take a lot of pride in their home,” he says. “We thought that if we connected the love and emotion of your home with the products that you need to care for it, we would probably have the basis for a business. It’s like what Williams-Sonoma did by focusing on the joy of cooking, not the chore of cooking.”

Ryan and Lowry felt strongly about creating an ecofriendly business. They thought it was ironic that chemicals with skulls and crossbones on the labels were used to clean the most sacred space in the world: your home. “Why are we using poison to make our homes healthier? This stuff should actually be good for you,” says Ryan. And that’s how the idea for method was born.

People against dirty

method developed a philosophy of environmentally friendly design through every aspect of its business, and then built the entire brand around it. The company created a manifesto that has culminated in a witty grassroots marketing
campaign called “People Against Dirty: Dedicated to the Fight Against Dirty, in Whatever Form it Appears.” method’s definition of dirty is broad, encompassing everything from animal cruelty to poor indoor air quality.

The big idea is that by buying its products, method’s customers can join the company’s fight to rid the world of toxins and ugly chemicals inside the home, and everywhere else, too. There is a “People Against Dirty” blog. There are fan sites. There are advocates. method’s customers are predominantly women, and many feel like they’re making a statement about themselves every time they put one of the company’s pretty bottles next to a faucet. The products say,
Not only do I have great taste, I am also ecofriendly
.

“We think of our customers as people against dirty, and we think of ourselves as people against dirty,” says Ryan. “Essentially we think of our customers as an advocacy group.” method treats its most vocal customers as public relations conduits. The company sends them the same press kits and samples it sends to traditional journalists. These customers then blog about the products, and voilà—method pops up over and over again in all the social media everyone else is chasing.

Your budget can be small if you’re willing to think big

method didn’t use a big marketing budget to put itself on the map, mainly because it didn’t have one. The “People Against Dirty” manifesto captured the imagination of the press and the public. It was the right message at the right time—the environmental movement was just gaining steam
in the United States. The combination of a strong, ecofriendly philosophy and high style proved to be a recipe for generating truckloads of publicity.

Ryan and Lowry felt so passionate about style and its potential as a marketing tool that they were able to persuade world-class industrial designer Karim Rashid—who is known for creating award-winning products for companies such as Umbra—to create a modern, clean, understated design for the new line. From day one, the products generated media coverage in women’s magazines, on television shows, and on websites. “I believed from the beginning that our packaging could be a marketing vehicle,” says Ryan, who was a marketer himself before founding method.

The company has now expanded into the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia and is creating distribution relationships in other countries. It recently broadened its product offerings by introducing personal-care products for babies, calling the line “Squeaky Clean Baby.” With these new products, method has cleverly leveraged the credibility it has with women and extended it into a line they will buy for their children.

If you’re part of a smaller company with a tight marketing budget, it’s worth asking a few questions: What do you stand for? What do you stand against? When a woman buys your product, what does that say about her? How can you align yourself with an idea bigger than the product itself? How can you make a woman feel smarter simply by using your product or service? The exercise just might lead you to a more refined positioning that women can connect with. Women are always looking for what they have in common with someone else. What does she have in common with you?

Key takeaways from method are:

•
If you’ve got a small brand, give it a big personality
.

When you’re up against major spenders, an outsized personality helps you compete against outsized budgets.

•
Align your brand with a bigger idea
.