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Don’t Get Caught in The Gender Trap: My Interview in AdWeek

The concept of transparent marketing first presented in my book, Don’t Think Pink, is defined as being guided and inspired by the women you serve.   In most instances, those women are not going to guide or inspire your brand (diet or skincare industries, for example) to exclude men as part of serving them well.  For example, if you, the marketer, came right out and asked women "should we exclude men in order to serve you better?" – the answer would most often be.. "uh.. no."  It would probably be the same in the reverse – men don’t expect a brand that is perhaps more focused on them (cars, boats, sports, beer) to exclude women unnecessarily.

Rather, gender is not even on a consumer’s radar most of the time.  We all live, breathe, work and play in a co-ed reality.   And, everyone appreciates a higher standard of customer experience, whether they think to ask for it or not.

Why do I bring this up?  Plenty of brands are still "thinking pink" and leaning, very unnecessarily, on stereotypes in their marketing messages or approach.  For some reason, beer and wine examples of this have caught my eye most recently, but it happens in a much broader range of industries/categories as well.  Joan Voight, a Senior Editor at AdWeek interviewed me (reg. required) on this topic recently, and we got into further discussion of the pitfalls of gender-specificity in marketing.

If you don’t even bring up gender, but instead focus on the other commonalities of your core customer group (they diet, they use skincare, they ride motorcycles, they own homes, they go to church…), you may find more compelling insights as to how to best serve them.

If we made "marketing to women" obsolete, and instead focused on marketing to a higher customer standard (which women may happen to represent), would the world end?  Check out the AdWeek piece and let me know what you think.

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Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 in Announcements, Events and Miscellany, Grading The Ads, Marketing to Men, PINK Thinking

  • http://www.lipsticking.com Yvonne DiVita

    Ah, Andrea, are you defecting to the other side? Women and men ARE different. Even when they use the same products and services. Approaching them differently just makes sense. Women struggle to find respect in advertising because, as you note, we’ve been talked down to for so many years. But, the reality doesn’t change – sell me products primarily meant for men (power tools, lawn mowers, even cars) by recognizing HOW I use them, WHAT I use them for, and, how I want them to look.

    Do NOT sell me those kinds of things as if I have no gender. And no, I don’t want them in pink…but, I know lots of women who do.

    Conversely, selling skin care products to men as if they weren’t men, but just ‘people’ who need skin care, can’t work. Men have a preconceived notion of those kinds of products. If you don’t approach the men with an attitude that addresses their maleness, you won’t get far.

    Ah, in a perfect world we would all be the same. YIKES! Not so! Being different is good. Market to me as a woman… not as someone without a gender, and not as a man.

  • http://www.lipsticking.com Yvonne DiVita

    And now, after reading the interview, while I agree with much of what you say… I take umbrage with the idea that we can leave gender outside the door when we plan marketing campaigns.

    Once again, because women are women and men are men and the good Lord, or the Universe, made us that way on purpose… we in the marketing world need to remember that, not set it aside.

    I guess we can agree that people are just that, people, to begin with. But, at some point, you become a part of a group; the very first group you become a part of is the group that includes your gender.

    The happy middle ground is worth pursuing… but don’t forget that your market does have a gender… and while remaining true to the product or service, to not consider it from a woman’s point of view or a man’s, could easily get you in trouble.

    And no, that doesn’t mean thinking pink. Or thinking rough. It means thinking smart.

  • http://www.learnedonwomen.com Andrea Learned

    Not defecting, Yvonne – just taking a look from a different side. No matter what you, I and all the other marketing to women authors/experts say, many brands still take the very very feminine approach on the gender pendulum when they first think “hey, let’s market to women.” I’m just arguing that consumers have matured and marketers should start to get it. Marketers are still thinking pink and female consumers who may have needed the telltale sign that they were indeed being paid attention to at first, are more sophisticated and flat out expect it without a “for women” tag. Tend to the subtleties and nuances without all the feminizing, and you are still marketing to a woman’s higher standard – perhaps just more transparently. The differences in how men, women think and buy are certainly there, but in a lot of cases, I think it is the lazy way out to just make gender the biggest point of differentiation and leave it at that. I’m still digging around in all of this and will keep reporting in. One of my goals in changing my perspective a bit is to try to make “marketing to women” less a thing that only women care about, only women attend conferences about and only women read books and blog about.

  • http://www.stauberdesign.com Joy Stauber

    I say RIGHT ON! to the thought that an artificial concept of “marketing to women” ought to become obsolete. What it’s really about is BAD (ill informed, dumb, or insulting) marketing to women. Because marketing well to anyone, regardless of gender, means (this is the most basic tenet…) really knowing who your audience is, what they care about, and what will resonate with them. If an organization is doing a bad job of marketing to women, it simply means they are doing a bad job of marketing, period. It’s not about gender. It’s about knowing who your audience is and then connecting with them in a relevant way.

  • http://www.tranzend.eu Ying Cheng

    Andrea, I share your views completely. We’ve all seen the cell phone companies are painting their phones pink, without having a female soul into the services and designs.

    Now, what about in the fashion industry, do you think the marketers there are going reverse: knowing increadibly well their women audience, and much less on the male audiences? We used to say women buy fashion, men simply buy clothes. This has been rapidly changing.

  • http://www.learnedonwomen.com Andrea Learned

    Great point, Ying – yes, fashion industries are so heavily focused on women that they forget about men. There is no longer the huge stigma about heterosexual men caring about how they look – and those guys are happily spending a lot of money on it. I just think marketers swing the gender pendulum in extremes and never calm down to see that things are a lot less polarized in many industries.

  • Karen Barnes

    Finally got around to reading this post and wanted to share a few thoughts. First of all, I agree with the comment from Joy – good marketing is knowing who your consumers are and what’s important to them. I like to think of good marketing as understanding values, attitudes, behaviors and expectations – and then leveraging those unifying mindsets and insight to create resonant messaging. If demographics are no longer the “right” way to segment your audience, how much longer will we need to say that gender is the “right” way to market? I’m not saying that there aren’t fundamental differences between men and women – clearly there are – but if m2w becomes universally accepted as simply good marketing, then we will have done our jobs.