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May 17, 2012

What Women Want: Strategies for Reaching the Female Market

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By Deanna Utroske

Women make 80% of consumer purchasing decisions in the United States. And, according to the November  2011 Ad Age white paper, Always On Women, sponsored by Meredith, “Women are adopting mobile technology… and are beginning to drive trends in that space, like mobile video viewing and mobile payments, as well. So many women use technology every day that segmenting and targeting all of them becomes difficult.”

On Dec. 6, NYWICI presented its Cocktails & Conversations event “What Women Want: Strategies for Reaching the Female Market”. Led by moderator Lesley Jane Seymour, Editor-In-Chief of More magazine, a panel of marketing experts shared their approaches and advice for reaching women, the “chief curiosity officers,” and for tapping their tremendous purchasing power. The panel began by exploring the unique points of marketing to women:
  • Sarah DaVanzo, Strategic Planning Director, Trends + Culture with The Kaplan Thaler Group, introduced “moodgeisting” — marketing that taps or changes the consumer mood and is enabled by emerging technologies: pulse monitoring, facial recognition (as on Facebook) and even the sentiments  relayed by  emoticons. Sarah illustrated moodgeisting with sites like sharehappy.com and The Smile Machine on YouTube. She recommended using WeFeelFine.org  in combination with the Gallup Poll’s well-being index. Wefellfine.org reads self-reported mood by aggregating blogs and Twitter in real-time and allows results to be sorted according to gender, age, weather and country.
  • Tracy Chapman, a Principal with Just Ask a Woman, acknowledged that companies recognize that while there are core truths, all moms are not the same, all women are not the same. She advised marketers to discover what differentiates each segment, what else a customer is interested in and then to target those.
  • Mary Wallace Jaensch, CEO of Semprae Laboratories, Inc., agreed that marketing goes so much further than demographics. She pointed out that “demographics are like the ABC’s: You can't write a novel without them, but you must move beyond them.”
Women seem to misrepresent themselves when responding to marketers. To the question whether women know they're lying, Tracy clarified that “women have and project the best intentions.” They “want people to think that they take care of themselves,” for example, by taking regular spa-style baths and working out daily.
 
In order for marketers to get women to tell the truth, Mary advised to ask questions so women don’t feel judged or evaluated. And Jackie Bird, CEO & Chief Insights Officer of Redbean Society, explained that women “give the answers they think you expect.” So, “ethnographies are better than simple questions.”
 
Regarding the opportunities that social media present, Sarah applied the old adage — women are like cats and men are like dogs — to emphasize how they engage with social media. Women watch rather than participate, while men are, for instance, busily changing Wikipedia articles. In addition, Sarah dubbed women “the chief curiosity officers” and encouraged marketers to intertwine some sort of play, initiating “a delicious cycle of curiosity” and the “sense of a better mood” for their customers.
 
Tracy Chapman pointed out that women post to social media sites, not only to share what we're doing, but  because we want feedback. “We get social currency from sharing information.” And Jackie described Latinas as ”expressive, connective and social,” and she explained that social media are a strong connector, facilitating communication and participation for Latinas, who can be far from their country of origin. For the Latina market, brands often speak both Spanish and English. But those brands should “let the customers choose their [personal] language and speak to them with culture.”
 
Mary believes that through social media, we are “communicating with the whole world”  in much the same way we did before TV — by word of mouth, small-village style. Broadening the conversation to include the greater digital landscape, Sarah proposed that marketers, looking to be on the cutting edge, attend doctorial thesis shows like those at MIT, Carnegie Mellon and NYU, for a preview of the technology coming on stream in a year or two. She went on to remark that “we've gone through a major cognitive shift in the past decade.” The capacity to zoom-in on screen, which she likened to a fourth dimension, can stand in as a technological metaphor for current expectations. Marketers and individuals need to be ready to provide an elevator spiel as well as lots of detail. And Tracy admonished marketers to “keep going back to the consumer” and not “get caught up in technology.”
 
Wrapping up the panel conversation, the experts shared a few take-away tips:
  • Sarah reinforced that networking is not about being introduced. You instead must give information or insight. Ask, “How can I help you?” She insisted that marketers be nice and be curious. “Seed and harvest curiosity in your brand and in yourself.” In addition, humble brands, those that acknowledge their flaws, go along way with women.
  • Mary recommended that marketers shouldn't believe what women say but they should rather watch what women do. She also added that while the internet is efficient, it requires skill and strategic thinking to be an effective marketing tool.
  • Tracy proposed that marketers push for the truth and empathize with women: value what they say, ask often and pay attention to all the places they are in (not simply your sector). As women, we trust our “board of directors,” she added.  When considering the comments of anonymous influencers, women “look for a collective voice, a consistent story.”
  • Jackie advised that Latinas are the single largest source of growth in the United States and emphasized that not all Hispanics fit in the same box. “We live in two cultures and move in and out of two cultures.”
Written, Read and Recommended by the panelists:

All images by Maryanne Russell. View more pictures here. No usage without permission. ©maryannerussell.com

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Location:

 Warwick New York Hotel