Why She Buys (4 page)

Naturally, their gut instincts are
male
. Since their clients are also male, they think Trey and Steve’s ideas are right on. They’re currently embarking on a concept that’s so edgy it’s in danger of alienating the very women they’re trying to attract. But they can’t see that, because for Trey and Steve and their male clients, masculine concepts don’t seem “masculine”—they seem normal.

I’ll fast-forward to the end of Trey and Steve’s story. After the campaign proves ineffective and doesn’t “move the needle,” the client will fire Trey and Steve’s agency and go on the hunt for another hot shop to deliver the elusive big idea. It will never occur to any of them—to Trey, to Steve, or their clients—that the reason for the campaign’s failure might have been a lack of understanding of the opposite sex.

You know the old expression that goes, “I know 50 percent of my marketing budget is wasted. I just don’t know which 50 percent”? Here’s the answer—it’s the 50 percent that doesn’t appeal to women.

Trey and Steve and their clients are a composite of several teams I’ve worked with over my agency career who were part of the inspiration for this book. I’ve also worked with incredibly insightful men who taught me a thing or two about tapping into people’s emotions. But as of today, there are still too many executives like Trey and Steve out there, of all ages, who are out of touch with the very target audience with whom they need to connect. It’s hard to blame them; the lessons they must learn are teachable, but no one is teaching them. In most businesses that rely on a predominantly female consumer base, there’s no formal structure for learning about gender psychology. It doesn’t appear anywhere on the organization chart, but it should. Surprisingly, women also find this gender education valuable as well, because they have been taught the rules of conventional wisdom, which are often rooted in masculine values.

Still Relevant After All These Years

S
OME
people think talking about gender differences is passé—just a hangover from the twentieth century. We’re all equal now, right? Gender is so 1970s! Women fought the good fight in the liberation movement, they’re beginning to outnumber men in the U.S. workforce, they graduate from colleges in higher numbers than men, there are (a few) Fortune 500 women CEOs, and there’s Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. And many men will tell you, “I’m surrounded by women at work.” Right?

Well, not exactly.

The matter of the glass ceiling is not what we’re here to discuss
(and yes, it still exists). This book has a different goal—to help you see your business through the eyes of women, and to identify the blind spots that might be weakening your financial performance without anyone in the company realizing it. There is an unseen female culture in this world, and whether you’re a man or a woman, the job of this book is to help you identify it at one hundred paces, understand it, and leverage it for mutual success—yours and that of the women you serve. In a depressed economy where women are keeping an even tighter hold on their purse strings, understanding women should be job one, because no one can afford to guess.

Women Are Females First and Consumers Second

H
ERE’S
the rub: women are females first and consumers second. If you don’t find that surprising, then here’s what is—the lack of serious thought and attention that’s been given to gender differences in product development, sales, and marketing, when it could be argued that these are the differences that matter most. Knowing your audience as women must be accomplished before you can begin to understand them as consumers.

Some people still need to be convinced that studying women is important, even though the knowledge that women are the world’s power shoppers is so intuitive and well supported by market data, society, sitcoms, husbands, magazines, and late-night comedians. An outsider from another planet could be forgiven for assuming that most businesses conduct themselves accordingly. It would be natural
to believe that executives are constantly engaged in the study of this “alpha consumer,” creating products that ergonomically fit women’s bodies, retail environments that appeal to female sensibilities, sales training programs that address women’s speaking styles and body language, and marketing campaigns rooted in female gender psychology. All with the goal of increasing stock price and market share. Right?

Wrong.

It’s human nature for people to assume that their own preferences are natural, normal, and “right” without realizing that these preferences may in fact be rooted in gender. Once you become aware of this, you’ll start noticing it a lot in your personal life, as I did a few weeks ago. My husband and I were over at another couple’s house for dinner when our friend suggested we watch a movie on cable—the violent, computer-enhanced film
300
. Our friend is a cultured guy who likes all kinds of movies, but this night, he wanted an action flick. When his wife and I protested because the violent scenes from the movie’s advertising campaign had turned us off, he said, “Come on, it was a big hit!” and then read aloud this summary of the movie from the popular website
IMDb.com
to convince us:

When the ambitious King Xerxes of Persia invades Greece with his huge army to extend his vast slave empire, the brave King Leonidas brings his personal bodyguard army composed of three hundred warriors to defend the passage of Thermopylae, the only way by land to reach Greece. Using courage and the great battle skill of his men, he defends Thermopylae until a treacherous Greek citizen tells King Xerxes a secret goat passage leading to the back of Leonidas’s army.…
³

Goat passages? Was he kidding? We laughed out loud. We couldn’t believe he thought this description would persuade us to watch the movie. It is an understatement to say it had the opposite effect. In this instance, our friend’s masculine instincts about what was exciting did not match ours.

Watch Your Blind Spot

T
HE
point of this story isn’t that all women hate action movies or that all men love them, because it simply isn’t true. (I myself am a huge fan of the Bourne trilogy.) The point is that sometimes words and images that can be exciting for men can cause a negative reaction in women. This is a misunderstanding that can be harmful to businesses, and you see it repeatedly in advertising—especially automotive advertising. As an example, consider the print campaign for the Ford Flex SUV. It shows a car driving through the darkness in a way that seems either scary or exciting, depending on your point of view. Here’s how the copy reads:

FORD FLEX: CPR FOR THE DEAD OF NIGHT

Go stimulate something. Like the idea that a vehicle with three rows of seats can also be a nimble-footed, refrigerator-equipped, 24 mpg head-turner. Discover the strikingly original Flex at
fordvehicles.com
.

Now let’s see. This car has three rows of seats, with capacity for seven people. It’s got a fridge. It sounds like a family vehicle to me, which means that women will be buying and influencing the purchase of this car. Perhaps it would be better not to use words such as
CPR
and
dead
to headline a campaign for a vehicle in which women are going to be transporting
their families. The ad is stimulating, all right, but not in a good way.

The American automotive industry is an easy target, I realize. But is there any doubt that a lack of awareness of customer preferences has played a role in its downfall? The industry is littered with ads written from a masculine point of view, even though women purchase and influence more than half the car sales in the United States and even though these ads frequently appear in women’s media. The campaigns are a reflection of an automotive culture (specifically Detroit’s) that clearly emphasizes masculine ideals. Models like the Yukon, Navigator, Expedition, Suburban, Hummer, Durango, Escalade, and Ram, to name just a few, are four-wheeled monuments to size and power. If you played a word association game involving the names of American cars, you’d likely come up with adjectives such as
hulking, horsepower
, and
guzzling
. If you played the same game but substituted the names of Asian imports, you’d probably hear more “feminized” words such as
small, nimble
, and
practical
. Asian cars used to be mocked by some people for these quasi-“feminine” traits, but clearly, no one is laughing now.

With a few notable exceptions, the design and marketing of American cars scream “masculine.” Detroit has clearly and painfully missed the boat on changing consumer tastes in the last few decades, including female tastes. The predominantly male management teams have assumed for too long that their own values and design tastes are the same as consumers’. Only time will tell if they will recover from this near-fatal blind spot, and I am rooting for them that they will.

There Are Two Sexes in the Human Race, and One of Them Does Most of the Shopping

I
T’S
no secret that women make or influence the majority of consumer purchasing decisions for the home—about 80 percent in the United States. Women are the primary shoppers for their households, which means they’re buying not only for themselves but also for everyone else—spouses, kids, friends, family, colleagues, and often their older parents—which multiplies their buying power and influence. If a married man needs a new pair of socks, there’s a decent chance his wife will be buying them.

The gender gap in business is illustrated by the fact that men occupy 97 percent of all Fortune 1000 CEO positions,
⁴
the majority of top chief marketing officer positions (66 percent),
⁵
and nearly all the head creative director roles at the major advertising agencies (always north of 90 percent, though the exact figure depends on the day).
⁶
Men hold 85 percent of clout titles (those higher than vice president) in the Fortune 500.
⁷
Studies show that even now, women feel misunderstood and ignored by marketers. A recent body of research from the Marketing to Moms Coalition (of which I am a founder) demonstrated that nearly half of the women surveyed—46 percent—felt that marketers were not doing a great job of connecting with them. That’s a lot of room for improvement, and it represents a massive opportunity for the brands that can break through their competitors’ ineffective messages. As if the economic benefits of reaching women weren’t compelling enough, there are social and political implications as well.

We’re actually getting to a point where gender understanding might be legislated. In 2008, members of the
European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in support of a report on the negative effects of marketing on gender equality and stereotyping. Though not legally binding, the report will be used to draft new European Union legislation that calls for businesses to stop using unrealistic and sexist images of both genders in their advertising.
⁸
Could a lack of gender understanding eventually go from being unwise to illegal? Probably not, but this new development from Europe is certainly enough to give one pause.

As I write this, people in every conceivable industry are being challenged to create products and programs with female appeal, particularly in gender-neutral or traditionally “male” categories such as consumer electronics, insurance, finance, and, yes, automobiles. This is because women have never been more powerful in terms of their buying power. Historically, they’ve always had
informal
purchasing authority for their households (meaning they were in charge of shopping for it, though they often were spending their husbands’ income), and they still do, but they now have the added weight of
formal
shopping authority—they’re earning money themselves, and enriching their households while they’re doing it.

Goodbye Bunk Beds, Hello iPods

T
HE
entire economy has benefited from women’s labor. Almost all the income growth in the United States since 1970 has come from women working outside the home.
⁹
Before women starting working in large numbers, America lived in a world where families had one car, one television, and one stereo, and the kids shared bedrooms as depicted so cheerfully in the popular 1970s television show
The Brady Bunch
.
Then millions of women went off into the workforce and their incomes slowly created a new norm—households with multiple cars; kids with their own rooms, television sets, and computers; each member of the household with his or her own cell phone and iPod. The mass affluence we’ve grown accustomed to in industrialized countries has been driven in large part by women’s incomes.

In addition to increasing their households’ purchasing power, women are driving consumer trends, from the mass luxury movement to the design movement to the do-it-yourself industry. And because more women than ever are running their own households (27 percent of all U.S. households are headed by a woman, according to the U.S. Census), they’re often the only one in their homes making the purchasing decisions, large and small. Women are also the dominant sex earning bachelor’s degrees in most of the world’s industrialized countries, which means that the trajectory for their earning power will be even higher in the years to come.