Why She Buys (6 page)

W
INE:
55
PERCENT OF ALL PURCHASES MADE BY
WOMEN
¹⁹

The beer industry has been trying to crack the women’s market for ages, with little success. (I’ve heard women referred to as the “holy grail” by beer industry executives.) Women remain loyal to wine, and their participation in wine consumption has led to a host of female-friendly brands such as Red Bicyclette and Barefoot, both from E. & J. Gallo Winery.

G
AMING:
40
PERCENT OF PLAYERS ARE WOMEN
²⁰

Gaming continues its long march into the mainstream by steadily adding more women customers. The Wii from Nintendo has made huge inroads with women of all ages, and has ingeniously brought the “other half of the population”
into the world of gaming in a way that’s far more appealing to them than the violent games created for young men.

Many companies have yet to effectively track their buyers by gender. Yet in virtually every category, women have buying power or influence over the product purchase. The word
influence
may sound soft, but make no mistake, it’s important. It means that when a woman and her spouse make a purchase jointly, as with a new car or home, the woman is the primary influencer; if she doesn’t approve of something, her husband (or her kids) probably won’t get it. It works the other way around, too—if a woman wants something, she’ll often find a way to persuade her husband or other family members to get it. This combination of purchasing power and influence is the reason women dominate the consumer economy.

Having Women on Your Team
Is Not Enough

I
F
you’re tasked with creating something that depends on a female audience for success, it would be foolish to exclude women from your team. But I see it happen all the time. Sure, women will be in the focus groups, they’ll be represented in the research reports, and sometimes they’ll be in midlevel or junior positions on a team, but too often they’ll be absent from the senior management teams calling the shots on the project, and that’s just myopic. If you were targeting the Chinese market with a new initiative, you’d certainly want the opinions of Chinese people on your team, and the situation is similar when it comes to men and
women. If you don’t have strong female representation, you’re in danger of missing the important nuances that will connnect you with your target. At worst, you may inadvertently offend them.

It’s crucial to understand that women find themselves between a rock and a hard place on this matter. Many are hesitant to point out and defend gender differences with male coworkers, because they are in effect reminding their colleagues that they’re different, and most women work hard to prove they’re not.

The reluctance stems from the fact that qualities traditionally considered feminine, such as empathy and a focus on the well-being of others, are not really valued outside of the human resources department. And when they are, they’re usually part of a mission statement that gets lip service only. Women don’t want to be stereotyped at work or have gender biases used against them. Older women are particularly conscious that until recently they were excluded from jobs simply because of their sex. This means that both genders in the office need to be fully engaged in understanding the primary consumer. An inability to grasp and appreciate feminine qualities will keep both men and women from connecting with their target.

Genuine knowledge of women’s brain structures, priorities, worldviews, and demographic patterns can provide you with genuine competitive advantages. It’s time to jump on the situation before your competitors figure out that this is what they need to be doing, too.

2

GETTING TO KNOW

THE LOCALS

A Tour of the Genders

D
id you know that drowning victims are overwhelmingly male?

It’s not because they don’t take enough swimming lessons. Experts believe it’s because boys and men have a tendency to overestimate their abilities, especially in dangerous situations. The same confidence that gave men the courage to chase ten-thousand-pound mastodons back in hunter-gatherer societies is the same instinct that gives them the confidence to swim in rough waters today, believing that nothing bad will happen to them. It is also the same kind of overconfidence that drives high-risk financial bets, as the 2008 crash of Wall Street attests. The male brain can find it exhilarating to meet danger head-on. After all, no guts, no glory.

This gender difference about male confidence, which is
clearly a generalization and doesn’t apply to every individual male (especially Michael Phelps and Greg Louganis), nonetheless provides context for some of the bold business decisions we read about in the news every day. It also underscores one reason smart companies may be underperforming in their markets. Simply put, many male executives overestimate their knowledge of women consumers. They understand women on a superficial level, which they mistake as being deep—and in a female-driven economy, that’s what’s known as swimming in dangerous waters. Yet it’s a problem easily rectified through a little education.

Here It Is: A Little Education

A
S
we examined in
Chapter 1
, it’s hard to be an astute and vocal observer of women’s insights if you live in a society that pressures men to repress “feminine” behaviors—which arguably describes every major society in the world. If you scoff that this is old-school thinking, check out the “Get Some Nuts” British campaign from the Snickers chocolate bar brand, which features hypermasculine actor Mr. T attacking men who exhibit signs of “feminine” behavior, which apparently includes things like speed walking, yoga, going to wine bars, and moaning in pain after an injury. Astonishingly, Snickers appears to have chosen bullying as its brand platform—even in our supposedly enlightened age—proving that men are still under pressure to conceal feminine traits in public, lest they be viewed, in the words of the ads, as a “disgrace to the man race.”

Men are not born knowing how to please women consumers and it can be considered emasculating to ask, given
the pressures of male culture. And it can be awkward for female executives to bring up behaviors they believe men will find foolish, simply because the behaviors are perceived as feminine. Here’s a simple example. A woman named Jenny is working on a project to update an insurance company’s website. Her colleagues, a couple of guys, have chosen to use a stock photo of a couple sitting next to each other on a couch as one of the site’s primary images. Jenny believes the photo would be more effective if it showed the couple cuddling happily, not sitting shoulder to shoulder staring straight ahead.
The couple doesn’t even look like they know each other
, she thinks. Before she brings this up, however, she has to consider some of the implications of voicing her opinion.

First, she knows that even using the word
cuddling
with her male colleagues might result in good-natured ribbing at her expense, because it sounds so “girly.”
Cuddling
is one of those words, such as
sweet
,
cute
,
adorable
, and
amazing
, that are associated with women and therefore rarely used by men. She can imagine their reaction:
Cuddling! You want them to cuddle?

Then there’s the chance that the conversation will turn to the topic of whether Jenny likes to cuddle at home with her husband. She doesn’t want her colleagues to picture her cuddling, or to tease her about enjoying cuddling (which of course she does enjoy, and they probably do, too, though none of them will admit it). She knows that any admission of her enjoyment of cuddling may undermine her reputation as a competent executive and could have lingering effects. If she brings up something equally “girly” on the next project, she could get a reputation for being soft, sappy, and not serious.

In the end, Jenny gives her opinion but is careful about
how she does it. She doesn’t use the word
cuddle
, and she frames everything from the perspective of the target audience and not as her own opinion, even though, as a professional, she is paid to make these kinds of judgment calls. Women find themselves treading carefully at work all the time, even when it comes to helping their colleagues understand what will appeal to an audience of women.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that until now, actionable information about brain differences and gender hasn’t been widely available to a business audience. Luckily, there has been a great amount of new research that can help illuminate the differences that matter in business. This data can help both sexes overcome the perceived subjectivity and biases of ideas crafted for a female audience.

Men’s and Women’s Brains: As Distinct as You’ve Suspected

T
HERE’S
an old joke that the brain is the largest sex organ in the body. Since the brain is the organ that drives behavior, this joke is rooted in truth.
¹
In the last several years, researchers have found mounting evidence that the brain works differently in men and women and that these differences impact how each gender sees the world.
²
Gender differences come into play in just about every mammal that’s been studied. These differences influence how we learn, how we play, how we fight, how we process emotions and information—and, ultimately, how we respond to business messages.

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, and medically speaking, it’s still poorly understood. All that gray matter between our ears is shaped by our genetics, biology,
and culture. Arguably, women’s brains are even more poorly understood than men’s. For most of history, women were excluded from all manner of medical research because their hormone fluctuations, menstrual cycles, and pregnancies “interfered” with testing standards. Subsequently, the “generic” patients in medical studies of all kinds—including those of the brain—were usually male. Generally speaking, outside of the reproductive organs, women were considered smaller versions of men. It’s only relatively recently—within the last three decades or so—that awareness of gender has begun to change the way medical research is conducted on a broad scale.

Back in sex education class, between all those giggles, many of us learned about hormones like testosterone and estrogen, which play a major role in driving the behaviors of each sex. But how about the biology of the brain itself? Is it different between men and women? Are we wired differently from birth? Where does nature end and nurture begin? Why do men like Rush and women like Sarah McLachlan? And what are the implications for business?

Researchers are increasingly finding that male and female brains are indeed different and that there is no such thing as a unisex brain. Imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans are demonstrating that brains in human beings have sexually dimorphic regions, or areas that are different between the genders. These include:

• Amygdala—Our center for emotions, fear, and aggression

• Hippocampus—The principal hub of emotion and memory formation

• Hypothalamus—Our control center for body organs and systems

• Limbic system—The part of the brain that produces emotions

• Visual cortex—The part of the brain that processes visual information

• Corpus callosum—Our transmitter of brain signals, which connects the left and right sides of the brain

Consumer research is a vital part of any business, but sometimes it merely shows us the tip of the iceberg. To truly understand what drives the behaviors and motivations of women consumers, it’s important to go deep into the biological differences that impact how they view the world. The full extent of our brain differences is still uncharted territory, but here’s what scientists have determined so far:

•
Emotion
. The limbic system, or emotional bonding center of the brain, tends to be larger in women, which may explain why women are the primary caretakers for children and the elderly in almost every society in the world.
³

•
Memory
. The hippocampus (the hub of emotion and memory formation) is larger in the female brain, which is likely the reason that women are better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events than men are.
⁴
This is why women can recall every word of a major argument or special event, even years later, often to the chagrin of their partners.

•
Speech
. Women use both sides of their brains for speech, while men use one. Women also have more nerve cells in the left half of the brain, the seat of our ability to
process language. This may be why women find verbal communication easier than men do, and tend to have richer vocabularies.
⁵
(When was the last time you heard a man use the word
mauve
?) Men tend to be more to the point in language.

•
Sex
. Men have more than twice the brain and processing power devoted to sexual drive that women do. At puberty, boys develop twenty times as much testosterone as girls do.
⁶
Among other things, this is a biological explanation for why the worldwide pornography industry is supported almost entirely by the male sex (in case you were wondering).