Most rules of marketing are based on a male gender culture - and we don't even realize it. Such rules are based on focus strategies; such as only include one message in your advertising. But many of these "rules" simply won't work for women! There are three different focus strategies marketers must accommodate when marketing to women. These are:
- Details, Details
- Integrate versus extricate
- The Perfect Answer
Details, Details
Women notice and care about details more than men do. If you can touch it, taste it, hear it, see it or smell it, women are probably noticing it at some level, and it's figuring into their assessment of your product, service and communications. Researchers and salespeople get confused when they hear women talking about criteria that seem minor in the grand scheme of things (storage pockets and a security purse holder in the minivan, for example) and sometimes conclude that women have different needs than men. The way it really works is that women want all the same things as men- and then some.
Even beyond the five senses, women possess a more hidden sensory ability. They can read subtle variances in tone of voice, facial expression, gestures and body language, which gives them a sort of emotional X-ray vision. If you're face-to-face with a female customer, any insincerity is likely to be much more apparent to her than you may realize.
Integrate versus extricate
Women integrate. Men extricate. When men make a major decision, they strip away all the details and focus on the bare essentials. But women look to add information, not cut it away. They believe details not only add richness and depth but are necessary to an understanding of the situation. Women desire to know and integrate all the details into a rich whole before making a decision.
The Perfect Answer
The combination of valuing details and integrating result in women seeking what I call "The Perfect Answer." Women set the bar higher than men do, and if that means it takes longer to get over the bar, so be it. Women don't settle for "good enough."
I had a friend who drove two hours to get the cell phone color she desired - Ocean Blue. While the color of the phone was not the most important factor in her decision, it was the deciding factor. Having Ocean Blue or having some other color was the difference between having 100% of what you want vs. 90%. And to a woman, that matters.
Considering these different focus strategies, how does your marketing measure up?
Women allocate their time differently than men do. Learning about women's life/time factors will help marketers understand how this affects their purchasing decisions.
The most obvious life factor is that women live longer than men- so older women possess the purchasing power of their generation. We need to understand how modern women age. They are far different from the stereotype of the mild, inactive grandmother. A Grey Advertising study found that the great majority of women feel stronger and more confident in themselves as they grow older. And with advances in healthcare, older women can look forward to many years of an active lifestyle.
We next consider the life/time factor of the woman's "double day" of home and work. The majority of women work outside the home, and the majority of work inside the home is still done by women. In the 1990s, marketers tried to relate to women by portraying their lives as harried and overwhelming. However, studies show that women themselves don't feel that way.
Most women today don't feel exceptionally stressed out - they see their lives as full and busy but not disjointed or unmanageable. Mostly, they feel there is just not enough time in the day. Time is the single most importance resource for women. Research shows that when given the choice of more time or more money, women picked more time by nearly two-to-one. Knowing that women value time more than money presents significant marketing opportunities, doesn't it?
To compensate for lack of time, women multitask. This is one of the most consistent and systemic differences between the genders - men typically are focused and single-minded, while women are multi-minded and integrated. This multitasking has several results:
- Women can accomplish more, just less predictably (they always try to add something to the mix - sorting laundry while cooking, for instance)
- Women look for tasks to group together (such as going to the grocery, post office and dry cleaners during an errand trip)
- Women maximize instead of prioritize (get as much done as possible instead of getting the most important tasks completed first)
So marketers, here's your challenge. With this knowledge about how women view life and use their time, how should you change your marketing to be meaningful to them?
Social values are the core beliefs and values that shape motivation. Men and women, in general, have different underlying principles that make up their social values. Here is an at-a-glace view of some very significant differences:
| His Social Values | Her Social Values |
| People + Things + Theorums | People First, Last and Always |
| Soloist "Every man for himself" | Ensemble Player "All for one, and one for all" Guardians of civilization |
| Winner "May the best man win" | Warmer "The more, the merrier" |
| Pyramid "The few, the proud..." Envy | Peer Group "All people are created equal" Empathy |
It's not that one way is right and another way is wrong - it's that men and women are different. For marketer's, we need to understand those different social values and how they motivate women to buy. Sometimes a word choice or the wrong visual is all it takes to transform a difference into a deficit.
What men see as copy conveying healthy ambition and the natural drive to be in charge may strike women as self-aggrandizing baloney. What male advertisers see as an image of autonomy and freedom may have overtones of isolation and loneliness to women consumers. For example, an investment company ad showing a woman paddling a canoe in the wilderness, free to go where she wants may visualize financial independence to men, but to a woman it may appear less reassuring - a woman all alone in the middle of nowhere.
The only way to understand how to market to women is to understand the factors important in women's decisions. Women make decisions based not only on the culture they live in, but their own gender culture as well.
We at the TrendSight Group have identified the four dimensions in which women's gender culture differs materially and relevantly from men's. We call this the GenderTrends Star:
Over the next few articles, I will go into each aspect in detail. For now, here is an overview of the four star points:
- Social Values - Different beliefs and attitudes about how people should relate to each other.
- Life/Time Factors - Implications of the ways in which women's roles differ from men's.
- Focus Strategies - Consistent differences in how women perceive and process.
- Communication Keys - Different patterns and rituals of expression.
After this article series, you will understand how women and men differ and how you can use this information to speak to women in your marketing efforts.
Everyone views other people in relationship to themselves. We do this to make sense of the world and develop understanding. If we saw each person for the individual she is, we would be overwhelmed with sensory data. Advertising uses these relationship categories as a shortcut to our emotions, so it is essential we understand them when marketing to women.
Men and women categorize differently. While men stack people vertically, women arrange them next to each other. Men are always conscious of where they stand in comparison to others, measuring and evaluating everything. They view the world as a hierarchical pyramid, and they want to get to the top of that pyramid. It's a given that when men say "get ahead," they mean "get ahead of others."
A woman's outlook is relational without being hierarchical. She groups people by how similar or different they are, if they do or don't know her, if they are far or near, and so on. Women believe that all people are created equal (to update the wording from the Declaration of Independence). Combined with the perspective that people are the most important and interesting element in life and that caring and consideration are high-priority values, a place at the top of the pyramid is going to look pretty unappealing. It's lonely at the top.
Women prefer to think in terms of everyone getting ahead - not ahead of anyone else, mind you, just moving forward together. Women don't want to be looked up to, any more than they want to be looked down on. In the world of women, the ideal position is side-by-side. The operative emotion is empathy (not envy).
In advertising, it has been taken as a given for years that aspiration- the drive to be like someone higher up the pyramid- is a fundamental motivating factor for everyone. How many ads have you seen founded on the premise, "When I get this product, everyone else is going to be sooo jealous!"?
But for women, making other people jealous is sort of petty and small-minded. Women are more likely to relate to the premise, "Yep - that looks like my life. If that product works for her, it'll probably work for me as well." When you advertise to women, think empathy, not envy.
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