Making Marketing to Women Obsolete: My First eBrandMarketing.com Contribution
This week I launch my contributing editorship with eBrandMarketing.com, a Glam Media publication, with a post on my mission to make "marketing to women" obsolete. The non-gendered end goal = marketing to the highest customer standard, whoever that customer may be (and, yes, she may well so often be a woman). No more messing around… !
Here’s an excerpt from my piece:
For lack of a better way to put it, let’s consider “marketing to women
2.5” to be the place in time at which we no longer need to go on and on
about female consumers as separate from male consumers. Instead, let’s
start talking about marketing to everyone’s perhaps more feminine brain
traits and how, if we tap and serve those, we are actually just serving
the overall highest level of customer expectations (and not “marketing
to” anything or anyone…)
It won’t be a sad day, but a historic achievement worth noting, when "marketing to women" finally seems irrelevant. The consumers of the future will thank us for tending to the issue when we did (in the late 1990s/early 2000s), for raising the bar on customer experience for all, and for developing marketing efforts that speak their less gender-conflicted language.
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I’ll be posting to eBrandMarketing 2+ times a month, and those pieces will tend to be slightly more trend- than tactic-oriented. Just as with my HuffingtonPost contributions, I will let you know when I have a new post on that site. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reading your comments there, as well.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I think it’s possible. Once companies get in touch with their feminine side, they won’t like going backwards. No one likes living in a space that isn’t warm and inviting. Before the marketing to women movement, ad space was just that, uninviting. I think it’s the sign of a maturing society.
December 7th, 2007 at 4:23 am
(as posted on eBrandMarketing.com) I think I’m with you on this, Andrea, but it’s a powerful shift. I’m not real sure that all of the issues are settled on the old his/her front, but my gut tells me you’re right on this. One thing for sure, the last decade has been an interesting ride. I still have one tee shirt left with a URL I bought a decade ago—carwomen.com. Thanks for taking the leap first.
December 10th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Count me out. I am a die-hard marketing to women professional. Genders are different, from the get-go. You can’t market to them the same. It’s a fact of nature.
December 10th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
While I do think there are some gender differences that will always play a part, I do agree that marketing to a higher standard or customer experience is the direction to go for all marketing.
Andrea - if you want proof to back up your thoughts, read Firms of Endearment by David Wolfe. The book focuses on how we are transitioning from a “having” society into a “being” society. If talks about taking a more right brain, humanistic approach to be successful in the coming years. (both typically thought of as female traits)