Getting Around Gender In Marketing to Women
Do you know how rules and regulations, or self-imposed parameters for a project, tend to make for more creative and effective results? Well, in my mind, the same goes for marketing to women. What if you were forced by a state law not to be obviously gender-specific in your marketing efforts? There may be something to at least pretending this were so, and I’ll explain – but first:
An article in the latest issue of Pink mentioned how the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan got creative in reaching out to women, specifically for their executive MBA programs. Because state law prohibited the school from offering gender-based scholarships, they did the research and realized that a lot of non-profit executives happened to be female. So, Ross focused its scholarship money there. Brilliant. The school figured out a commonality that had nothing to do with gender – and learned how to reach THAT group effectively.
It’s called transparent marketing, people (as covered in my book – Don’t Think Pink). By operating under those state-issued rules, the Ross School was guided and inspired by the women they tend to serve. And, they didn’t alienate men. Because they could not go “all girly” or they’d break the law(!), they came up with something even better for reaching women.
So how might this translate for brands? If the legal department in the corporate office had a fine toothed gender-mention comb, a brand’s marketing team would be forced to look deeper than the man/woman difference – they’d have to dig into psychographics and determine what their core consumer was really all about. They’d have to do more research and get to know their customers intimately. It sounds like it would be, frankly, a lot more time and budget-consuming. Perhaps. But, this front end in-depth exploration would be the incredible foundation for every step that brand took with this particular market from then on. I’d venture to say such a brand would be blown away by the insights and cleverness that emerged.
Sure, the market a particular brand serves may be predominantly women, but why tell anyone else that? My point is that, in a lot of cases, the best marketing to women has gotten around the gender question by serving humans/individuals who may so happen to be women. Bridget Brennan just published a great piece in Forbes about how Apple discreetly markets to women, and that is a brand example I often use as well. That company’s savvy marketing team surely doesn’t want Apple to be known as a “women’s brand,” so they have not publicized any “women’s initiatives,” nor have they been caught dead (in public) doing any specific gender-focused research. And yet, it is clear that they get women better than a lot of brands that are trying with all their publicity power to be a famous “women’s brand.” It is as if there was some corporation-wide legal restriction against an obvious gender focus, and Apple has gotten around it very, very successfully.
I have written in the past about how I’d like to work myself out of a job – where “marketing to women” becomes an obsolete field, and “marketing to the highest customer standard” (sounds so obvious, doesn’t it?) gets all the press and business study. Gender is a factor in how you serve your market, yes – but let’s just say your legal department won’t let you talk about it, or put “for women” on any web site, brochure or press release at all.
What, praytell, are you going to do?
