Marketing to Women

One of the interesting things about my job is working with creative and innovative meeting planners who know their speakers and get the most out of them. Stacey Heiss Educational Director from Western Exhibitors, who runs the San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland Gift Shows is one of these people. Over half of the programs that I do on a regular basis were born from ideas that Stacey had. However, last week I spoke at the Aqua Show, a trade show for the pool and spa industry, where I encountered Kathy Newkirk, another one of these meeting planners.

This meeting planner asked me to do a program on Marketing to Women. At first I didn't feel qualified--after all this is not one of my core topics. But little did I know it should become one! I ended up doing the program and uncovered so many things I just didn't realize about myself and my core marketing beliefs.

I realized that my basic marketing positions are deeply rooted in the values that women hold dearly. The reason for that is simple: for 25 years running my women's apparel store, I specialized in marketing only to women. When I started to do the research for this topic, I kept on reading the suggestion to observe the way women's apparel retailers market to women. That is who I am. Let me share some of my findings so you can better understand these differences in marketing:

1. I believe in soft sell tactics. Women resent being pressured.
   
2. Women are far more detail oriented. When a woman says she is just looking, she is really looking and observing.
   
3. Because women are more thorough in their buying process, education initiatives (which I strongly believe in) are so important.
   
4. Women generally have more of a sense of fashion and style. Yes, there are exceptions, but a man will go into a store and ask for a replacement for his navy blazer. A woman will rarely do that.
   
5. Women tend to believe that change for sake of change is good where a man wants the same old thing.
   
6. Women will recommend products they like 57% more frequently then men do. That means those women are better at creating word of mouth advertising for your business.
   
7. One of the exercises I did in the workshop was asking all of the men how many Preferred Customer cards they owned. The response was either 1 or 2 but very few of them had those cards in their possession. Women, on the other hand, averaged at least 3 and 97% had them in their possession.
   
8. Women love signage because it gives more detail.
   
9. Women communicate via connections with people, where men communicate via status.
   
10. Men will buy in a straight line; they need it and buy it. Women will buy with a curving line that stops at asking a friend, reading a catalog, checking it out online, visiting a store, and then finally making the purchase that also has a higher probability of being exchanged. This is not a negative thing-- it is just because of the attention to details that women have.
    

Let know show you some facts about the changing women's market that completely confirm that men have lost the battle of the sexes:

1. 73% of new businesses started in this country are started by women.
   
2. By 2010, women are expected have $1 trillion or 60% of the country's wealth.
   
3. Women purchase or influence the purchase of 85% of all consumer goods, including stocks, computers, and automobiles.
   
4. As of 2003, high growth fields such as health care, education, and professional services that require college degrees, mostly employ women. Just look at the TV show Grey's Anatomy.
   
5. The number of women earning $100,000 or more has tripled in the last 10 years.
   
6. Women earn more than ½ of all accounting degrees, four out of every 10 law degrees, and almost that many medical degrees.
   
7. Women continue to purchase online at a slightly higher rate than men (73% vs. 72%) for the third consecutive quarter.
   

There is some good news, guys:

• Growth of blue collar manufacturing, transportation, and construction fields that do not require education beyond high school is the largest growth area for men.
  

What it all means is that many of the old boy traditional ways of marketing are as extinct as the dinosaur. But just pinking up a product won't do it for you either. It must be transparent or the same for both male and female. But the single most important issue in marketing to woman is the issue of stress. Stress was the one single common denominator among all women, from the 20 something's to the time starved working moms (by the way all moms are working but that's another issue) to the sandwich generation of the boomer woman who is being stressed by both parents and children.

Look at what you sell through her stressed eyes. Focus on her reality of stress, not your version of it.

I hope you are as fascinated as I am with these findings and remember to ask yourself the following questions when your market is to women:

1. Does your business save time and how?
   
2. Is it easy to use & understand? Not because they can't figure it out but because they don't have the time to do so.
   
3. Does it replace something that is slow or cumbersome?
   
4. Is it easy to find? Including your website.
   
5. Is it easy to buy? Don't put up obstacles.
   

So thanks to Kathy Newkirk from Aqua for opening my eyes and to all the folks who attended this program.