Today’s Super-Sweet Cellphones All Started With Women
You can see it… the hesitation in their eyes. Many a marketer from a traditionally male-oriented brand responds to the idea of "marketing to women" like this: "But, if we "’feminize’ the product, won’t the men hate it?"
Argh, to that misconception. The truth is that men will hate it only if you are telling consumers that the product is for women or that you did a lot of research with the women’s market.
Technology may be the most shining example of an industry that long resisted the women’s market focus, but then realized - ta da - that seeing things from "her" perspective actually serves everyone better. Michael Fitzpatrick wrote a great piece for the London Telegraph about feminized gadgets and how they have influenced the entire industry. Here are a few telling sentences:
"When Asian telecoms firm DoCoMo commissioned a woman to design a mobile internet service, she asked women what they wanted from their phones. It proceeded to launch the most successful mobile phone service ever - i-mode - and a range of slick ‘clamshell’ handsets that set world standards.
The (usually male) designers in the West scoffed - ‘too small’, they said; ‘too feminine’. Who needs cameras on mobile phones? It won’t catch on here.
Wrong, boys. Today’s slinky mobiles resemble the early Japanese versions, while the handsets churned out by the West to support WAP web-browsing technology were so clunky they put people off browsing the internet by mobile."
If I held a big clunky 8 year-old cellphone (masculine) in one hand, and held one of today’s sleek, small, clamshell-type cellphones (feminine) in the other hand - we’d all, every single one of us - prefer to check out the latter. As Fitzpatrick’s article mentions, many of the hottest products out there might be considered such: any Mac product or Canon’s lxus, for instance.
So if THIS is what happens when "feminine" becomes the standard by which we judge products, what’s to fear in serving women?
The brands that have gotten it right in recent years have certainly been inspired and guided by women from early on, but they have kept their mouths shut about it. The average male consumer, whether he admits it or not, may still feel a stigma in possessing a product or shopping in a way that might be perceived as more feminine. But he sure does like what the female-consumer has been inspiring…
So - read that insightful Telegraph article one more time and resolve not to be the brand "in the West" that keeps the clunk and masculinity in your products for fear of the feminine.
Listen and learn from women, most definitely - but be stealth about it. Your competitors will only wonder at your successes…
June 5th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Marlboro were originally made for women. If marketers just market products without any sort of gender-bias, it would be great. Why produce products that are just “feminine?” Why produce products that are just “masculine?” Why don’t we reintroduce soul by producing products that are for “humanity” as a whole?