Marketing to Women For the Common Man
One of my soapboxes lately has been the "language" of marketing to women. My Change This manifesto ( in PDF format) just published so I thought I’d share an excerpt:
Geek Talk
Similar to Car Talk, but one that seems to have invaded daily life even more. Geek Talk is exemplified by the way a laptop is described with numbers in a sort of better/stronger/faster approach:
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 740 (1.73 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
The problem is, however, that unless computers are my hobby, I really don’t know how those numbers apply to the way I use my laptop or how my use of it may be evolving. Just stop a minute and read the above line again. Whether you are a man or a woman, what does it really mean for you on first glance? Now, compare it to copy that hits the key lifestyle connectors for a new laptop:
"If you check your email a few times a day, occasionally type up documents, do your bookkeeping online and surf the Internet a few times a week, this is the perfect laptop for you."
As long as those numbers and tech specifications are accessible, it shouldn’t hurt to market products in a non-geek way, first and foremost. Lifestyle details serve as filters for women, who will then look into the tech specifics. Men, on the other hand, may filter on the technical specifications, but find it helpful to consider the lifestyle aspects as well.
Another example is the digital camera industry. The box for my fairly new model says this:
5.0 Megapixels. 3x optical zoom. Extra large 2.7" LCD
Fine. My comments and questions for my camera-store owning friend included these:
- "Wow. That screen is big! And there is no little box you have to look through."
- "How does the megapixel number translate for my life? Is it good? Will the photo files be too large to email?"
I speak in one language, but the camera features are presented in another. Only industry insiders (or otherwise industry savvy people) call the screen "LCD" or the little box a "viewfinder". Only those same people would know that 5.0 megapixels means that you end up with a big enough photo file to create high quality enlargements bigger than 9 x 11 (which only certain people may really need).
When it came down to all the other little accessories I would need to get the photos to and from my computer and so on, I entered a whole other world of thumb drives and memory cards. I was lucky I had a translator…
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Again, if you are interested in reading more about women’s market translation, here’s the link to my manifesto PDF. (Many thanks to Todd Sattersten, Kate Mytty and the ChangeThis team!)
