The Online Gender Agenda
Men tend to think more linearly. Women tend to think more relationally. These are truths you hear or read over and over as you study the differences in the ways men and women buy. But, how does that really translate for the shopping world?
Well, Kelly Mooney, President and Chief Experience Officer of Resource Interactive got a little bit more specific last week at the M2W conference in her presentation, "Women’s Love Affair with the Web." After hearing her, I was inspired to go online to find "The Gender Agenda" study. The five "gender divides" the Resource Interactive team came up with showed how men and women experience online shopping, in particular:
- Women feel empowered. Men feel powerful.
- Men’s inner shopper is awakened. Women’s inner shopper is enriched.
- Men are enticed by product, then lifestyle. Women are enticed by lifestyle, then product.
- Women scan. Men Dig.
- Women expand the mission. Men stick to the mission.
My favorite of these is the "enticement" factor, which shouldn’t be a surprise: for men it is product first, and for women it is lifestyle first.
Perhaps men and women aren’t so different after all. They are looking for the same things, but go about it in a different order. Any store that lets you search by product name (lawnmower) or brand, as well as lifestyle groupings (such as yard & patio) may be a very basic example of this bi-gendered marketing.
While theses gender divides do seem to fall under the larger "linear thinking" versus "relational thinking" umbrella - for me, they present more helpful visual images: scanning versus digging, empowerment versus feeling power, and expanding the mission versus sticking to the mission.
Since the latest Tom Cruise movie has just launched with way-too-much hype, this fact from a ComScore 2005 study caught my eye: Men are 2x as likely as women to buy online and pick up in-store (mission accomplished). 
It’s definitely worth a good look at the Gender Agenda study if you are re-designing or launching a new retail site where women may be the bulk of your customers, but you don’t want to neglect men.
Feel empowered and be powerful at the same time? You bet.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Hey Andrea!
Did the Gender Agenda offer up any insights on the way men and women read/interact with blogs at all? Just curious.
Ann
May 18th, 2006 at 10:56 am
The Resource Interactive study - or at least as much as was shared on their site - did not get into details about women/blogging, Ann. However, Synergy Blog had a whole discussion about women/leadership/involvement in blogs/blogging in April - to which I contributed: http://synergyweblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/andrea-learned-provides-insight-to.html
And, there are a lot of other interviewees and comments there that shed further light on the topic.
My general thought was that women may be a bit more focused with their time online and so be less apt to participate in blogs, unless it is something they are really passionate about. So - women scan and enhance *shopping*, as mentioned in the Gender Agenda report, but outside of shopping, they may be more careful of spending even more time online reading blogs.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:05 am
I asked that question because (as someone who’s been reading a lot of blogs lately), I’ve noticed an overwhelming number of male “commenters,” but far fewer female commenters. Evidence purely anecdotal, of course, and from a control group of 1.
So I’m wondering — if women are so connective, and blogs are so connective, why wouldn’t women be chiming in more? Why do blog comments appear to be dominated by men?
Hmm…do I feel a blog post coming on?
June 7th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
I think the online gender agenda is fascinating. I didn’t see this particular Resource Interactive presentation but saw one late last year that was great.
My question is, when it comes to technology, are women early adopters? Is creating a blog seen as ‘technical’? Surely its an early adopter thing and aren’t most early adopters of technology male????
There’s tremendous relevancy to my interest. I’m involved with a company that’s created a new kind of 3D web browser. It creates a window shopping experience. Not just for shopping but also for browsing web content.
We’re in the early stages, but in our usability testing we found that women had a particularly positive response to it.
But there’s no question that men are more willing to download a piece of software than your average woman. So here we have a great piece of technology that we know women like. But they need to get it onto their machines.
Now if you take men v women in terms of technology available. There is a glaring hunter v gather divide. Your earlier quote:
“Women expand the mission. Men stick to the mission”. I love search. But search is sticking to the mission. Browsing is about expanding the mission.
Slightly off topic, but there is this great nugget in a book called Why we Buy by Paco Underhill. He sampled shopping in a housewares chain:
Women shopping with female compaions: 8min 15 sec
Woman with children: 7 min 19 sec
Woman alone: 5 min 2 secs
Woman with man: 4 min 41 secs
The companion shopping kind of stands out there!
April 25th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I own htmarket.com a web site that retails mostly to a male audience however we see more women getting involved in this area, we see that women often buy more items than men when shopping for home theater products they buy for the lifestyle, we see men buy less items. How can we get Men to browse more of our store on line, in short get them to see what we have versus what they are looking for at the time.