BONNIE ERBE Marketing to women: It's about time!
Here's some good news for holiday shoppers and post-holiday bargain-hunters: Companies may finally be wising up to the need to market to women.
Why should women care? Because once Madison Avenue realizes we belong to a coveted demographic group, we are showered with media attention, products are designed to meet our every need and we become, in a word, important.
Volvo may be leading the way up a mountainous attitudinal change among automotive manufacturers. The Swedish carmaker has just announced it is rolling out a concept car in March that will be designed by and for women. Bravo for Volvo, and it's about time!
Some of the 100 women now designing Volvos for affluent, independent buyers are concocting the concept car, basing their work on intensive research and surveys of female drivers. USA Today reports it will be "a silver, sporty coupe with gull-wing doors, a 225-hp engine and tons of storage space." Gull wing doors? Easier to open, perhaps. Tons of storage space? Definitely a woman "thang." All that sounds great. Others seem to be not particularly gender-oriented.
Convenience
They include: an oil change needed only once every 30,000 miles (how convenient); dirt repellent paint and glass (verrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyy female); machine-washable seat covers (if only men and children were machine-washable); tires that run flat (now wait a minute, the "S-heroes" among us can change our own flat tires if we have to); and my personal favorite, headrests with a valley down the center for ponytails.
Seriously, though, I've been waiting for some recognition for a long time. Consider what happened just last month. Nielsen Media Research, the monopoly that provides TV ratings that determine how much is charged for commercials, dropped a nuclear bomb. Nielsen reported that prime-time viewing among the most-coveted viewers, men aged 18-34, careered downhill by 7 percent this TV season. You could have thought the globe had split in two or Armageddon was upon us or, God forbid, they had to cancel the Super Bowl. Network chieftains accused Nielsen of prevarication, fabrication and worse. And yet, does anyone care if female viewership drops? Not hardly!
This just doesn't make any business sense, and it doesn't pay women consumers the respect they (we) deserve. Women are variously reported as controlling somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of every consumer dollar (deciding where and how it's spent) from food to health care to housing to -- yes, Matilda -- even major purchases. Women write the checks or take out the loans for 50 percent of the cars purchased in the United States.
Women are starting new businesses at twice the rate of men. Women Impacting Public Policy, an advocacy group for women small business owners, recently reported that one in 13 American women owns her own business. Small businesses are the job-creating engine of the now-recovering economy.
Marketing guru Faith Popcorn wrote three years ago, "It was through my marketing consultancy that I began to realize how neglected the female market truly is. On the one hand, I watched as the statistics that tracked women's economic power kept going through the roof. On the other, I would sit in meeting after meeting of the Fortune 500 where women were constantly described as a 'niche market,' 'segment,' or 'special interest group.'"
Attraction
Still, on the shuttle last week between New York and Washington, D.C., I was flipping through a magazine targeted at audio aficionados. One ad, several pages long, sported a shot of a physically unattractive man standing alone on the first page. Turn the page and there he stood again, but this time with a bikini-clad hyper-sexualized woman on his arm. What brought about this dramatic transformation? He'd purchased some fancy piece of audio equipment. Get it? Buy the speakers, get the girl. How putrid!
Somehow I can't imagine Volvo or any other automaker producing ads that try to convince women they secure the company of a physically attractive man if they buy a fancy car. It wouldn't win my business. Yet perhaps it will be a sign of gender equity if it ever does happen.
XBonnie Erbe, host of the PBS program "To the Contrary," writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service.