women

Customer experience futurist, author, and speaker Blake Morgan and I recently bonded over common views on women and customer experience.  (Our conversation is a part of Blake’s terrific Modern Customer podcast – check it out here.)  We ended up concluding that women are uniquely positioned to lead customer experience.

To be honest, there is nothing that new in this report. Its research base is 250 interviews with the 50+. If you study the older consumer marketing you will have encountered most of the findings before - probably more than once.

A recent Harvard Business Review blog post titled Why the Financial Services Industry Is Showing More Women in Its Ads contained the following:

Earlier this year, I was interviewed about what women want from digital technology. (Thanks to Robin Raskin, Maria Bailey, and the team at MommyTech TV for the interview!) I’ve studied the topic ever since my years heading up brand and strategy at Sony Electronics. 

This is big news for guys. For years, I’ve gently mocked my half of the species for being far-too-easily influenced by female images. Babes in bikinis alter male behavior, but it doesn’t always take that much. Simply including a photo of an attractive woman in a loan offer was enough to boost the response rate as much as a 4% lower interest rate (see A Pretty Woman Beats a Good Loan Deal). 

At the end of last year I blogged about P&G's decision to target older consumers with the launch of a new (modified) set of products under the Crest brand. I was not that impressed with the ad and the marketing messages that it had adopted  - have another look for yourself at the ad below.

I am afraid to say that this marketing campaign has passed me by. What a brilliant idea.

The campaign from Dove to make "women feel beautiful" by providing the capability for them to create Ads and ensuring the outbid 'negative' ads on Facebook.

With the fashion industry emerging as one of the driving forces of innovation within the Internet world, it could have an important impact on the number of women who explore technology-related careers. The rapid adoption of Tumblr as a micro-blogging platform, the rise to prominence of mobile photo-sharing networks like Instagram and the continuing popularity of “flash sales” websites like Gilt Groupe can all be attributed to early female adopters within the fashion industry.

Today we get to hear from Marti Barletta, the foremost authority on marketing to women. Marti is the author of the groundbreaking books, Marketing to Women: How to Increase Your Share of the World’s Largest Market, and more recently, PrimeTime Women™: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Business of Boomer Big Spenders.

Last week I returned to Dublin to talk at the Business of Ageing Conference. More details about the conference in future posts.