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I came across an interesting web site recently, and wanted to share it with you.

WomanMotorist.com is its name, and it's a site devoted to, you guessed it, women motorists. It was established in 1996, claims to be the oldest and largest consumer automotive magazine for women in the nation. It boasts of 1.5 million readers a year, or about 200,000 per month, and it is entirely free. You'll find helpful articles on new and used vehicles, tips for your dealings with dealers, travel stories and destination articles, pretty much anything you might need or want to know about purchasing, maintaining, and driving your car or truck. The site also offers “live” chats on the first Tuesday of each month on new car test drives, and maintenance and repair Q&As on the last Thursday of each month. It's another example of somebody who “gets it,” and that makes it newsletter-worthy this month.

A recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that women are different than men, not only psychologically but also physiologically, and these differences need to be understood. Now, I've always known that women and men are different, and there is certainly enough assembled knowledge already to prove this. Seems, though, that beyond the obvious and well known differences, women and men are even more different than we realized. The report states that major illnesses (heart disease, lung cancer, and many others) are gender-influenced, and women's treatments for them need to be different than the approach used for men.

There's lots of new data on gender-based approaches to the treatment of illnesses, and this is only one. Suffice it to say we'll be keeping our eyes on the subject in the future, and will, from time to time, share our findings with you. Those in the medical industries need to be aware of the concept of gender-based treatment, and marketing of services and products need to adapt accordingly, too.

In last week's special edition of my newsletter, I brought to your attention the “buycott” being promoted by the organization known as 85 Broads. I promised we would revisit this exercise and offer our observations and opinions, and I always honor my promises.

So, what happened? Did the earth shake and quake? Did boardrooms cower? Please remember the first line in last week's newsletter: “It's easy for something that starts small to grow surprisingly quickly.” It did start small, but the power of the Internet should not be underestimated. The grass-roots online effort does seem to have generated a substantial amount of support, and we would estimate that millions, yes, millions, of people around the world got the memo on this one.

The intention of the organizers, 85 Broads, was to accompish two things:

1. to raise awareness of women's economic clout and influence on the global economy; and,
2. to generate legitimate, serious and substantive discussion on the subject of speeding up the abysmally slow progress of workplace advancement for women, and narrowing the space between their purchasing power and their presence in board rooms and corner offices.

Measuring the success of the “buycott” will be, at best, anecdotal for now. The 85 Broads group estimates that a quarter of a million women participated, and bases this estimate on email traffic from 350 locations around the world. While acknowledging that measuring the exact dollar amount unspent on October 19 is difficult, 85 Broads nonetheless has offered the figure of $13M, a not insubstantial amount.

The media gave good, not great, but good, coverage of the event and its organizers, with pieces in Newsday, and from CNN, ABC News, CNBC and other media outlets. The number of CEOs who might have been aware of the event is unknown, but I suspect the Fortune 500's eight women CEOs were. The 85 Broads group has promised to keep an eye on any changes in the boardroom and corner office landscape, and we'll be watching with interest as it reports.

In last month's newsletter, we discussed the extent of the economic power that was being tested, noting that women purchase or directly influence the purchase of 85% of all products and services, and nearly 2 out of every 3 automobiles today, as an example. Corporate America, and beyond, simply can not ignore that power and expect to stay healthy, or even survive. If that corporate mindset remains as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby, the developing wave will crash overhead with a wealth of $14 trillion, and leave a lot of companies behind.

We say “Great Start” to 85 Broads for the spotlight they shined on these issues. We suspect Buycott II plans are already underway for next October, so I'll probably have more to say in another year on this effort. In the meantime, what are you doing to understand, reach and increase your share of the world's largest market segment, readers? I really don't want to see you washed away by that wave. This “buycott” started out small, but it grew surprisingly quickly.

Our eyes are on the women's market. Are yours?