The Art of Marketing to Women

The current way companies appeal to women is to take a male product and paint it pink.
–Michael Silverstein, a partner at Boston Consulting Group

First, I feel the need to make the economic argument for why marketing to women matters. The World Bank predicts that the earning power of women will hover around $18 trillion by 2014, which is $5 trillion increase in current income, and more than double the estimated GDP for growing economic forces like India and China combined.

And if that wasn’t enough to convince you that women make an enormous market for business, check out a few of these facts courtesy of Think Progress:

60% of American women are now the primary or co-breadwinner of the family

87% of women hold at least four years of high school or higher education as compared to 86% of men.

58% of undergraduate degrees in the US were awarded to women in 2010.

78% of mothers with children between 6 and 17 years of age are in the US labor force.

Now without getting into a feminist argument about the fact that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man in the US economy earns, a statistic that has virtually gone unchanged over the last 10 years; or the fact that only 12% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female, let’s explore the economic viability of marketing to women. A vastly under served market.

Why marketing to women matters –

Baby boomer women make 95% of the purchase decisions for their households. Women have discretionary income. Over 50 women whose children are finished with college, spend 2.5 times what the average American spends. Affluent working women are increasing in number at a rate of nearly 2:1 over their male counterparts. They access the internet heavily while radio, television, newspapers and direct mail has all declined in reach within this group.

Women are found to be more likely than men to share a positive experience or recommend a product or service to a friend. Word of mouth communication is higher for women and with the rise of social media connections online, it’s easier than ever for women to share those experiences, good, bad or ugly.

Channing Tatum as Magic Mike, male stripper.

Now on to the fun stuff. The reason behind my epiphany about this post was seeing the movie Magic Mike. Well that and hearing Cindy Gallop on an interview panel at Benchmark NYC on May 9th this year. Benchmark was an event consisting of numerous case studies from Fortune 500 companies, huge media and non-profit concerns all revolving around the ROI, engagement and measurement of social media and what they have discovered withing their own campaigns.

It was a fascinating, day long exploration of how big business is succeeding (or not) with the Internet and social media. Cindy Gallop was a panelist at Benchmark during one session entitled Women: Your Secret ROI Engine. Of course the title was interesting to me, but I’ll confess, I had never heard of Cindy Gallop until that day and didn’t know what one of her pet projects was about, but she did get me thinking. Gallop is an advertising consultant and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn project amongst many other things.

But her comments about the porn industry struck me in terms of marketing to women.

She made the argument that because the porn industry was made by, run by, driven by, funded by and managed by men, that it was men who determined what sex was all about on film. Okay, you might say, so what? You read the statistics at the beginning of this post right? Women make up more than half of our population and most of its consumer demographics and educational consumption. Shouldn’t the porn industry be concerned with marketing to women  when it comes to sex? After all, women are a huge market that consumes at a larger rate than men.

So maybe women don’t consume porn in the same quantities as men. I’d buy that argument. But that doesn’t mean women aren’t interested in sex, on film or other media, if it’s delivered in a way they feel comfortable with. Case in point: Fifty Shades of Grey, the mommy porn trilogy of Twilight fan fiction that has swept the nation this year. Fifty is a Twilight fan fiction that earned it’s own mainstream audience in spite of the BDSM subject matter.

Hot on the heels of Fifty this summer was Magic Mike. Though the stories have absolutely nothing to do with each other, the consumer is the same. Women, women who like hot men, and sex. So maybe the porn industry should wake up and smell the scented oil. Marketing to women is an important aspect for every industry and that includes local business.

Women are responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from automobiles to health care. Women represent the majority of the online market. Women process information and make buying decisions differently than men. Take the failed Dell Computers netbooks campaign three years ago where they made everything pink and told women, “You’ll find netbooks can do a lot more than check your e-mail.” No shit.

Marketing to women is necessary for successful growth of your brand. Those same women will share their love, or hate, for the products and services that do a good job serving their needs without patronizing them or assuming that painting it pink is the key to success. If the film, book and porn industries are beginning to figure it out, the rest of us should be doing the same.

All businesses including local business should be thinking in terms of marketing to women specifically regardless of the product or service because women consume more, have more money and more education. Figuring out what women want and how they want it, well, that’s a bigger problem. But I think we can figure it out because marketing to women is too important to ignore.