Marketing to women shortcuts to key points

Marketing to women

The buying power of women

The tremendous influence of women in the consumer marketplace is widely accepted, but the statistics can still be surprising. According to Marketing to Women: How to Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market by Marti Barletta, women are responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases, including 94% of home furnishings, 91% of houses, 89% of new bank accounts, and 80% of healthcare spending. Women buy not only for themselves but for their families and their businesses.

And many women go beyond mere influence. They don't just decide what to buy, they personally fund the purchase. In March 2009, Marketing to Women Datafile reported that 1 in 5 women earn more than twice their significant other's salary Buying power surprising stats Women are also responsible for 93% of over-the-counter pharmaceutical purchases, 93% of food purchases, 92% of vacation buying decisions, 66% of personal computer purchases, and 65% of new cars. (Source: Too Busy To Shop: Marketing to Multi-Minded Women) (its source. Women's Health), and market research firm Synovale's 2008 survey of 4,500 women worldwide found that 64% of American women felt financially independent—even during the Great Recession.

"In 2005, a magical statistic stood out: for the first time in history, young women under the age of thirty in the largest American cities overtook men in earning power," notes Paco Underhill in What Women Want. "Here’s an obvious fact: the more highly educated you are, the better chance you have of being successfully employed in a well-paying job. …Currently 140 women are awarded bachelor degrees for every 100 men in the United States. It’s a gender gap that’s only expected to increase."

If that doesn't strike you as surprising, this might: with women responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases, it follows that, as Too Busy to Shop: Marketing to Multi-Minded Women notes, "[M]en only buy 15 percent of all consumer goods and services." Today, men are the niche market.

It's changing the way even Fortune 500 firms do business. Traditional male bastions Best Buy, True Value Hardware, and Harley-Davidson have announced woman-focused intiatives. Office Max has begun carrying product lines specifically for women consumers (see CNN's coverage of this woman-focused marketing move), noting that women make up 80% of its customers. A key part of their female-oriented strategy? Attractive visual design in everything from file folders to paper clips.

And yet, despite the recognition of women's buying power by so many key players in the marketplace today, a surprising number of companies are still getting it wrong. Too Busy to Shop author Kelly Skoloda lists some statistics:

~ 59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers
~ 66% of women feel misunderstood by health care marketers
~ 74% of women feel misunderstood by automotive marketers
~ 84% of women feel misunderstood by investment marketers

And acording to Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World's Largest Fastest Growing Market, women are seriously dissatisfied with entire product and service categories apart from marketing, from banking and life insurance to personal computers and lodging:

~ Banking (46% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Life insurance (44% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Physicians (41% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Car insurance (39% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Work clothes (37% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Hospitals (36% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Personal computers (34% of women consumers are dissatisfied)
~ Lodging (33% of women consumers are dissatisfied)

Part of the problem is in product design, but a hefty portion is still the responsibility of the marketer. (See our quick marketing to women case study on insurance below.)

Women consumers on the web

Just as women represent a slight majority in the US, they represent a majority online. Internet market research firm eMarketer estimates the number of female web users will rise by 2011 to 51.9% of the total online population, or 109.7 million women, up slightly from a few years ago.

Are you ready for them?

Small businesses are especially suspectible to well-intended errors in marketing to women online. "Many marketers ... are still leaving their web design in the hands of young male programmers. These guys may eat megabytes and breathe gigahertz, but they're not well-versed in how women shop the net," says Barletta. "If online construction crews don't understand which website features women value and which ones just frustrate them, now would be a good time to get up to speed on gender culture."

Why She Buys author Bridget Brennan notes that even large firms can inadvertently make the same mistake. "[W]ho markets and sells products to women? The answer—overwhelmingly—is men, who occupy 85 percent of all Fortune 500 corporate officer positions, the majority of chief marketing officer positions (nearly 70 percent) and corporate executive sales management jobs, and over 90 percent of top creative director roles at major advertising agencies."

Part of the challenge is valuing women's time online. The typical woman is busy and takes a dim view of companies that waste her time. "Time has become today's currency," say Johnson and Learned. "[I]nadequate online services, lengthy forms and hard-to-understand copy are all things that require your scrutiny and tweaking when your goal is to serve women better." Requiring customers to type out complaints and failing to provide ways to quickly reach a human being, they add, are some of the top complaints of female web users.

Time-starved women appreciate clean web design, too, and this can be surprisingly hard to find. If you think about it, a clean, well-organized room allows a woman to quickly step through it and spot what she needs. Why would she want to slog around a cluttered website, then, hunting for the product or link she needs, increasingly stressed as precious minutes tick by?

"The female of the species likes and appreciates—you might even say she demands—clean," writes Paco Underhill in What Women Want. "It’s hard-wired. “Clean” and “unclean” register for most women instantaneously. For a majority of the world’s females, Am I in a clean environment? is an intuition, an undercurrent, a sixth sense, a vibe they pick up… Clean matters to women—can I be any more clear?"

Last but not least, most women are relationship-oriented... and they don't just build relationships at work or on Facebook, they build relationships with you—your company, your customer service representatives, your website. "[Men] buy instruments of technology, whereas women buy instruments of relationship. Women relate to computers as interactive and collaborative. They form a relationship with them and with the websites that they browse," says Underhill.

All too often, though, companies display a decided lack of social skills. "A site that requests too much information too soon is like being chatted up by a creep," Underhill says... accurately.

Appealing to affluent women in web design is a category all its own. If women in households earning $50,000 to $200,000 are part of your target market, visit our affluent web design page to discover the essential elements you'll want to include.

Why visual design is so important in marketing to women consumers

People of all genders are highly visual. Few things show that more powerfully than a 2008 multi-country survey conducted by GfK Group. Of the 2,020 men and 2,332 women surveyed, twice as many people were afraid of going blind as were afraid of premature death. In other public opinion surveys, blindness is regularly named in the top three most feared afflictions.

And yet women have an even greater sensitivity to design nuances than men, according to Barletta, a widely recognized expert on communicating with women.

"Women appreciate the subtleties, they look for the nuance," agrees Faith Popcorn, a trend analyst who advises Fortune 500 firms, in an October 2008 David Report interview about key design trends. "They are not very good at responding to aggression and head-on approaches—in design or marketing."

"Women are taking it all in—much more so than men," write Lisa Johnson and Andra Learned, authors of Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy—And How to Increase Your Share of This Crucial Market. "They're noticing the palette of your web site; and they're getting a feeling of your brand by reading your site's copy or marketing materials. They're taking note of the music, words and feel of your ads, and they're getting a sense of touch from the materials you use to make your shop's doors and door handles."

Even powerhouses and professional service firms aren't off the hook. "Women will pay attention to aspects of a product that salespeople, particularly male ones, may consider unimportant or irrelevant, whether it's the number of electrical outlets in a new home, [or] the style of reports submitted by a consulting firm," writes Bridget Brennan in Why She Buys: The New Strategy for Reaching the World's Most Powerful Consumers. "Been to a Sears lately? The out-of-date decor, peeling paint, and drab fixtures are just a few of the things keeping female customers away from the once-mighty retailer."

If design has been an afterthought in your marketing before, it's time to reconsider your approach... quickly.

Before you can tell women consumers all the reasons to do business with your firm, you've got to prevent them from clicking away from your website or tossing your brochure—more so than men. "Gender-based spatial concepts play directly into marketing design," writes Joseph Carrabis in Gender Marketing: Web Design Differences. "Consider a webpage or a brochure as an example. It's well understood that the material must capture the eye before it is acted upon. Gender-based spatial concepts also indicate that women will give that initial interaction—the capturing of the eye—much more weight than men will.

"Women, the strategists supreme, want to know now that something will be worth their time and energies later. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to pick up and scan a brochure or click on a link to the next page. A way to think of this is that women want to know more upfront than a man does; men are more willing to gamble a bit in the hopes of a greater reward."

In short, appealing design isn't just nice to have when marketing to women, it's essential if you want women to move onto the next step in doing business with you.

Other marketing to women tips

Sales success with storytelling

Women tend to base their thinking on examples, experience, personal details, and the context of a situation, says Barletta. This all adds up to: stories.

If you're short on ad space, don't worry; done well, a convincing story can be communicated in a photo and a few words. Barletta describes a McCormick ad that does just that: "It shows a smiling but clearly tired woman at the end of a tough day, and the headline reads, 'If you're a vegetable by the end of the day, just add chicken.' It goes on to give an easy stir fry recipe ... McCormick says, 'We get it. We understand what your life is like. This woman is just like you, and if our solution works for her, it will work for you too.'"

For women, details are juicy. "Men believe in starting with the main point and supplying specific detail only if the listener asks for it," Barletta says. "To women, the details are the good part." And because women search for the best product or service solution to their needs, rather than the first nominally acceptable solution, the more details, the better.

Be careful how you present those details, though. Women care little for the technical specifications of a product; instead, they care about how the product will help them fill a need in their lives. The number of cylinders or amount of horsepower is much less relevant to many women than whether a car has enough spunk to let them pass an 18-wheeler comfortably and quickly on a lonely two-lane road.

Focus on the human element rather than the product, and you'll come out ahead.

Acknowledge that women fill more than one role

This may seem too obvious to mention. After all, everyone knows women juggle multiple responsibilities, from family to careers to the tennis team... right?

Everyone but a lot of advertisers, it seems. Glance at most ads and you'll find women starring in the role of mother and... well, that's it. Mothers pertly wiping up spills with super-absorbent paper towels as smiling husbands look on, mothers driving children to school in shiny vehicles with plenty of seating and ultra-safe tires, and so on.

(There's a problem with this approach: one in five American women don't have children, according to an August 2008 Guardian article, so this kind of advertising is leaving 20% of women out in the cold. Of the women who are mothers, many have children who have long ago grown into adulthood, so such marketing messages no longer resonate as they once may have. And according to a 2006 US Census Bureau report, the traditional nuclear family with mother, father, and children is now a minority in the United States, something that's seldom acknowledged in advertising.)

This isn't to say that it's unwise to ever advertise to moms—in fact, we have a page just on marketing to moms —rather, it's an opportunity for you as a small business to appeal to the other sides of your women customers.

In many cases, it's low-hanging fruit.

"Women's relationships with their close women friends are some of the most cherished elements in their life," says Barletta. "Yet most marketers have barely begun to explore the possibilities to tap this insight for advertising and other marketing. ... Women in small groups, animated by lively conversation and laughter or warmed by caring concern, are a brave new world beckoning."

Women business owners? Despite the numbers (as of 2008, 10.1 million US businesseswere owned by women entrepreneurs), they're still nearly invisible in marketing. The few times we've spotted them, they were presiding over a clothing boutique and a fashion design house... rather than a construction firm, technology company, or green energy organization, the types of companies where women business owners are indeed making inroads.

A striking exception to the rule is a print ad celebrating women in business (in this case, baby boomer women in business) courtesy of Paine Webber. "It shows a woman, probably in her late 50s, sitting outside with her 30-something daughter, who appears on the left as you look at the page," says Barletta. "The copy reads, 'You're psyched about the future. You're full of new ideas. You're looking to start a business. You're the one on the right.'"

Recognize that women are individuals—with individual taste

Occasionally, when male business owners discover we're a successful web design company with a specialty in marketing to women, they get a little nervous. We're not certain, but we suspect they hope we won't design a pink website sprinkled with purple unicorns.

Not to worry! Done well, most websites and marketing materials that appeal to women also look good to men. Consider: the majority of Americans are women, so one might expect that America's favorite color is pink or red or lavender, no? Wrong. According to a 2004 survey by the color experts at Pantone, the most popular color among American consumers—including women—is blue. In fact, according to a landmark study, there's only one color preference difference between men and women: women prefer yellow to orange, and men prefer orange to yellow.

It's time to throw away the stereotypes. We know a successful businesswoman whose dream home includes a mahogany-paneled library with sleek club chairs in front of a fireplace; she could care less about the kitchen. Mauve, lavender, and pink are the last colors she would ever choose for any purpose... and she's not alone by any means. Marketing to her and her ilk with frilly, flowery ads would create absolutely no resonance.

Do well while doing good

For many women, authenticity and social responsibility, including environmentally friendly practices, can be powerful marketing tools.

"In all the green issues studied, women popped up as being more concerned than men," said Pam Danzinger, an expert on marketing to affluent consumers, in an August 2008 Retail Info Systems News article. "This is an important signal for luxury marketers to sit up and take notice, as women are often the major shoppers for a family, making the primary decisions about the products and services the family will purchase. For luxury consumers, an increasing number are looking to a company's environmental practices before making a purchase."

"For businesswomen—entrepreneurs and employees alike—the environmental friendliness of a product exerts a major influence on their consumer purchasing decisions," agree Johnson and Learned. "Many of these women also agree that the social responsibility of the company offering the product or service is a major influence on their decision to buy or not."

Honesty is a substantial part of authenticity. A recent survey of 12,000 women in 40 countries, conducted in 2008 by the Boston Consulting Group, noted that 51% of women respondents said honesty is one of the most important values they hold, topping emotional well-being (48%).

Baby boomer women—the generation with the deepest pockets—are some of the biggest fans of authenticity and socially responsible business. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) notes that women of the baby boomer generation pay special attention to a company's practices, especially in terms of giving back to the community, social responsibility, and how respectful and understanding it has been to her in the past.

"She wants a relationship with the company—and she wants it to be sincere," says Carol Osborne, co-author of Boom: Marketing to the Ultimate Power Consumer, the Baby Boomer Woman.

Social responsibility isn't just about environmentally friendly practices, though. In a National Consumers League survey of 800 US adults, respondents variously defined social responsibility as a company's commitment to its employees (including paying a livable wage and daily treatment of staff), commitment to its community and society in general, commitment to provide quality products, and responsibility to the environment.

For a real-life example, our own Aio Design creed addresses many of these issues. We developed our creed before becoming aware of this research, though, and therein is a major key: social responsibility can't simply be a marketing ploy. If it's insincere, consumers will quickly detect it and are likely to spread the word, particularly in today's web-enabled world where customer reviews, blog posts, and tweets are commonplace.

The National Consumers League survey also supplies a revealing statistic: only 21% respondents thought US corporations were actually socially responsible, despite all the focus in recent years on social and environmental responsibility. When asked whether corporations had improved in the past few years, only 30% answered in the affirmative. And dishonest corporate behavior is rarely in short supply, with the Wall Street and BP oil spill debacles standing out most recently.

The good news? For truly socially responsible, authentic businesses, it's surprisingly easy to stand out.

Respect her time

We've saved one of the best tips for last, and it cannot be understated: a large majority of women are short on time. The 2008 Boston Consulting Group Global Inquiry into Women Consumerism, which surveyed 12,000 women in 40 countries, found that 84% of women are chronically and often severely short on time.

If you don't respect a woman's time, to her, you're showing disrespect for her. If you want to increase your sales, this isn't something you want America's most influential consumer group to perceive from you.

At the top of this page we mentioned that 44% of women customers are dissatisfied with the entire product category of life insurance... and we posited that part of this is marketers' fault. Using life insurance as a case study, let's examine one way a creative marketer might team up with your company's IT team or create an alliance with a software company to delight female prospects and close more sales.

First, consider this statement:

"Products that require them to spend time in ways they don’t want, or see as unnecessary, are villains."
- Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre in Women Want More

Now consider this headline, from a recent bank mailer selling life insurance:

"Is helping to protect your family's future worth a few minutes on the phone?"

The marketers score a huge point for leading with a product benefit that appeals to nearly all women (helping to protect her family), but they lose that point—and then some—with the last seven words: "... worth a few minutes on the phone?"

We understand what they're trying to do. And yet, if you've ever shopped for life insurance in the United States, you know that shopping for life insurance takes more than just a few minutes. Oh, no. There are forms to fill out, personal medical histories to be recalled (or dragged slowly out of a reluctant husband) and shared, credit histories to be checked, saliva swabs to be taken, money to be paid every month... you get the idea.

Implying that obtaining enough life insurance to protect a family's future will take just a few minutes is like saying a brand new American-built car will cost just a few dollars. Marketing like this disrespects the savvy customer's intelligence... and more importantly, it disrespects her time.

Most women are in charge of the family's finances, so you've got to win her over... but the entire buying process is set up for the convenience of the seller, not the customer. The female customer knows this, and that makes you the villain. (Remember: "Products that require them to spend time in ways they don’t want, or see as unnecessary, are villains.")

Could this be a contributing factor to women consumers' dissatisfaction with the entire life insurance industry? It's likely.

But how can you provide an accurate quote without the necessary information? It's a quandary, no doubt, but not one that can't be addressed with a little creativity. As just one example, consider Google Health.

Google Health's website describes its service this way: "Google Health allows you to store and manage all of your health information in one central place. And it's completely free. All you need to get started is a Google username and password." It goes on to list the benefits of its service, one of which is: "Share your health information securely with a family member, caregiver, or doctor."

Imagine the delight of a time-starved female customer who, upon approaching the daunting task of shopping for life insurance, finds that your company offers a free service that will allow her to input the necessary information into a single, completely secure database that protects her privacy... and share it with other life insurers to whom she gives permission. She'll still have to dredge up that medical history, but this way she'll only have to do it once. And because you've set it up so nicely, with one click she'll be able to share it with the insurers she selects (yours would be selected by default, of course), review the quotes that arrive, and make her decision.

Some companies may not immediately see the benefits of making it easier for women consumers to obtain quotes from competitors, but believe us, she'll notice and remember your efforts on her behalf. (If you're still on the fence, consider the fact that one auto insurance company already markets its ability to share the quotes of other auto insurers.)

That's just one way you might respect a woman customer's time. Hopefully this has helped your creative juices start flowing, whether your company sells insurance or something else. Keep brainstorming; there are many ways you can help a time-starved woman customer—and reap the benefits!