Why She Buys : The New Strategy for Reaching the World's Most Powerful Consumers

by Brennan, Bridget

• ISBN13: 9780307450388
• ISBN10: 0307450384
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-07
• Publisher: Crown Business

Summary

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle. Women are the engine of the global economy, driving 80 percent of consumer spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over. Just when executives have mastered becoming technology literate, they find there's another skill they need: becoming female literate. This isn't always easy. Gender is the most powerful determinant of how a person views the world and everything in it. It's stronger than age, income, or race. While there are mountains of research done every year segmenting consumers and analyzing why they buy, more often than not it doesn't factor in the one piece of information that trumps them all: the sex of the buyer. It's stunning how many companies overlook the psychology of gender when we all know that men and women look at the world so differently. Bridget Brennan'sWhy She Buysshows decision makers how to bridge this divide and capture the business of the world's most powerful consumers just when they need it most. No Matter Where You Live, Women Are a Foreign Country: You'll discover the value in studying women with the same intensity that you would a foreign market. Women grow up within a culture of their own gender, which is often invisible to men. Brennan dissects this female culture and explains the important brain differences between men and women that may cause your female customers to notice things about your products, marketing campaigns, or sales environment that you might have overlooked. The High Fives: There are five major trends driving the global female population that are key to determining their wants and needs. These global shifts are just beginning to be tapped by businesses, and learning about them can provide you with an invaluable blueprint for long-range planning. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Find out how the best and brightest companies have cracked the female code, and hear horror stories about those that haven't. Through instructive case studies and interviews,Why She Buysprovides practical, field-proven techniques that you can apply to your business immediately, from giants like Procter & Gamble and Toyota to upstarts like Method home-care products and lululemon athletica apparel. At a time when every company is looking for a competitive advantage, Bridget Brennan offers a new and effective lens for capturing market share. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

BRIDGET BRENNAN is the CEO of Female Factor. She has pioneered marketing and sales strategies that appeal to women and has worked with major companies to put them into practice. Throughout her award-winning career, Brennan has worked for clients such as Whirlpool, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate-Palmolive, Pizza Hut, and United Airlines. She is a popular speaker who has lectured at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She lives in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Women are Females First and Consumers Second	p. 1
Women are the Mother Lode: What They Didn't Teach You in Business School	p. 17
Getting to Know the Locals: A Tour of the Genders	p. 43
The Five Global Trends Driving Female Consumers	p. 83
Pink Is Not A Strategy: Creating Products with a Female Focus	p. 143
Marketing to Women: The Difference Between Sex Appeal and Gender Appeal	p. 183
The Last Three Feet: Fundamentals of Selling to Women	p. 227
We Have Seen the Future, and it is Female: Applying the Knowledge to Your Business	p. 267
The X to Y Mencyclopedia: Bridging the Gender Gap, One Word at a Time	p. 279
Notes	p. 299
Acknowledgments	p. 307
Index	p. 311
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1

Women are the Mother Lode

What They Didn’t Teach You in Business School

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female.

If the business world had a sex, it would be male.

And therein lies the pickle.

New research shows that male and female brains are so different that it’s almost as if we’re each living in our own gender-specific realities. You may already have suspected this—perhaps since kindergarten—but the implications for businesses are just beginning to be understood, and they are nothing short of revelatory.

Women are the driving force of the global economy, and men drive the majority of senior-level business decisions. Which means that men are usually the people who have the final say in designing and approving products that are aimed at women; developing marketing campaigns that target women; creating retail environments to attract women; and setting up sales training programs that motivate women to say, “I’ll take it.”

Yet when profit goals aren’t met, when products aren’t moving, or when marketing isn’t working, it rarely occurs to executives that sex might be the problem. Not sex the verb, but sex the noun. Instead of thinking, Perhaps we just don’t understand our female customers, people will tell themselves that the media mix wasn’t right, or the distribution strategy didn’t work, or the agency didn’t do its job. But there is another possibility: that one sex is making its purchasing decisions differently, in a way the other just can’t see.

There are some obvious reasons this can happen. From the moment we’re born, gender identity is a crucial part of our personality development. Masculinity itself is often defined as that which is not feminine.1 From the time they’re young, boys learn to reject or repress all things feminine to be accepted by their peers and society at large, which is just one reason you don’t see a lot of six-year-old boys wearing frilly, pink outfits to soccer practice.2 Throughout their childhoods, boys are under pressure to prove their masculinity by shunning or even mocking feminine traits. The penalty for being viewed as even removely feminine is to risk being humiliated or ostracized for being a “sissy.”

Then when they grow up, many men find themselves graduating from college (and some from the über-masculine world of fraternity culture) and entering jobs in which their paycheck suddenly depends on understanding, identifying with, and selling things to women. Fresh out of business school and poof, they’re a junior brand manager on a dia-per product. Once on the job, few executives of either sex get any kind of formal training on gender differences. They are just expected to informally “pick up” this knowledge through colleagues and vendors. For many people in these positions, achieving success has historically involved some trial and error, lots of smarts, and just enough consumer research to be dangerous. But in a era where businesses are struggling and every sale counts, that old formula isn’t enough anymore. Now, most consumer-driven companies must mas?ter female psychology to survive, because when it comes to consumer spending, women are the sex determining their fortunes. Just when executives have mastered becoming tech literate, they find there’s another skill they need to keep up: becoming female literate. It’s a subject that can seem overwhelming when you stop and think about it. How well can the sexes ever really understand each other? The fact that we don’t—and that we often want different things from life—is what drives sitcoms and drama plots the world over. It’s the foundation of everything from Shakespeare’s plays to my husband’s insistence on setting our alarm clock to his favorite Rush song (Lime

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Excerpted from Why She Buys: The New Strategy for Reaching the World's Most Powerful Consumers by Bridget Brennan
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