And Today’s Marketing to Women Edge Goes To…Sustainable Business
With this “mad rush” to the women’s market to save brands from their recessionary woes (again – what took them so long?), it is all the more interesting to observe businesses that seem to have an inherent competitive edge on that front. Even if they never officially thought about marketing to women, businesses built on and following sustainable business practices are just doing it. And, it’s not because that realm is full of women. No, no, no. Rather, they have the advantage because the type of people who get involved with such practices or are employed by sustainable businesses are likely to be pre-disposed to non-gender stereotyped, balanced-brain thinking.
As pondered by Joel Ann Todd and Gail Lindsey in an interview for Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design:
Todd: One thing I find about working in this field [environmental consulting] is that there tends to be less stereotypical division along gender lines. And, later: “People tend to be very collaborative instead of competitive.”
Lindsey: It may be that we all have masculine and feminine sensibilities, and this topic empowers us to cultivate both parts.
Did Lindsey’s comment strike you as much as it did me? Certainly, she is talking mainly about her experience with sustainable design (as in building/architecture etc), but what of the general idea that each one of us has masculine and feminine sensibilities we could be empowered to cultivate?
Therein lies the key. Sustainable business naturally reaches women well because the people behind those practices tend to think in the more typically “female,” or right with left brain, ways. And, using those ways is how more businesses can reach the twenty-first century consumer of either gender.
As the authors, Kira Gould and Lance Hosey, outlined their perspective in the Women In Green introduction, it …“is less about the “ascendancy of women’ than it is about the growing value of those sensibilities commonly associated with women.” My point exactly.
Let’s keep men with balanced brains, or anyone learning to more equally tap their masculine and feminine traits, in this new marketing equation. Sustainable business practices have grown so quickly because gender stereotypes don’t rule their backrooms – but collaboration and holistic thinking do. And, that is worthy of an award.
