Should Marketing To Women Be The First Budget Cut?
If your agency or marketing department still considers the women’s market an aside, definitely cut it from your budget. The sooner the better. On the other hand, if reaching the most influential, “chief household operating” consumer is your goal – such a cut would be marketing suicide. Do I have you attention now?
When you look around outside your product or clientele silos, you’ll see a few emerging trends which reflect just how critical women’s market intelligence should still be. These include:
IN BUSINESS – sustainable, or getting there, businesses are attempting to maintain their pre-September momentum.
IN THE MARKETPLACE – a mass consumer market that is giving much more mindful and deliberate consideration to each purchase (toothpaste to cars).
IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOR – an evolving male consumer emerging from this already changing marketplace.
Why should any business focused on sustainable practices stay attuned to how women buy? Women have been driving the “light” to “dark” green environmental and social responsibility movements all along. They are the first line of consumers who will make decisions to buy those products or not.
How does the fact that every consumer is getting more deliberate with their purchase process apply to your marketing to women budget? Women are the ones who learned for themselves and then taught men how and why to demand so much more from the products and services they buy. Marketers have started to live up to expectations that can’t be reneged.
Now, what about marketing to this male consumer? Aren’t we talking about women? Yes. The reality is that all the budget you put into better serving women’s ways of buying is now also reaching a new more right-brain type of consuming man. A recent Datamonitor study showed that 8 out of 10 male consumers believe health and personal appearance are important. This should speak volumes not only to those particular industries but to anyone tracking a general shift in what and how men buy.
And, whether it is obvious or not, the marketing to women expertise you pay for is very much still worth it. It is simply, and literally, insight-full marketing. If we could go back in time and call the field “marketing to the new extremely demanding customer,” would that be a line item to cut in a bad economy? I think not.
If the “women” part of the label is what calls into question your marketing to women budget – you have my permission to call it something new. The study of gender trends and culture actually fits very very well into the “insightful marketing” department. Wouldn’t all brands and agencies maintain a healthy budget for that, even in a recession?
