With women influencing up to 85% of all car purchases and outnumbering men in holding drivers licenses, automakers are beginning to make them a focus in their marketing efforts. We’re happy to be included in the Automotive News article below.
Spots slowly shift from soccer moms to empowered professionals.
You’ve heard about it. Content Marketing. By its simplest definition, Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of different types of media designed to create a relationship with your customers and build loyalty for your brand. What could be more perfect for reaching women?
Women, like any other consumers, want information about the products and services that we’re spending our hard-earned cash on. But we’ve pretty much turned a blind eye to traditional marketing — fast forwarding through TV commercials, ignoring magazine ads, and hitting the “X” on banner ads. Great content, whether it is a blog post, infographic or video is perfect for giving us the information we need when making purchasing decisions. We can comment on it, and share it. However, when creating great content that is designed to resonate with women, marketers need to remember a few rules:
Using old stereotypes and clichés is one of the quickest ways to turn off a female audience.
All women are not the same, and they don’t respond to the same messages. Understand generational and lifestage differences and structure brand messages accordingly.
Look for ways to help female consumers not only build relationships with your brand, but with each other.
Don’t try so hard; we’ll see right through it. A subtle, more nuanced approach is more effective.
Emotions play an important role in a woman’s purchasing decisions and brand loyalty. We don’t always buy a product or service because it’s the best value for our money; many times our choice is driven by an emotional connection.
An infographic by Marketing Zeus shows the power of the female consumer. Sources include Girlpower Marketing.
Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that women think differently than men. We’ve talked about how a woman’s brain has four times as many connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain as a man’s. All of those signals hurtle down the superhighway into her right brain – the home of emotional memory, intuition and experience. A woman’s heart is in her brain – tell her a story that is filled with emotion, and explain why your brand is relevant to her.
Storytelling is the marketing buzzword of the moment. Storytelling certainly isn’t a new concept – in the world of PR it has been a critical part of everything we do since the beginning of time. But with the onset of content marketing, the concept of storytelling as part of a strategy for marketing to women has become of increasing importance.
Stories help women consumers decide if they like, trust, and want to do business with a brand. Stories set the stage to begin a relationship that can last for years to come. Every brand needs a story to be a competitor in today’s marketplace, largely because social media has provided a forum for consumers to have conversations with brands, and stories set the stage for those conversations.
The reality is that consumers, especially women, are not drawn to a particular brand or its marketing goals. They’re drawn to good stories. Stories that entertain, enlighten and inform. Regardless of whether those stories make a female consumer feel happy or sad, they do make her think and feel. And the brands that know how to tell a good story will increasingly have her attention.
Kudos to LeanIn.org and Getty Images for coming together to offer a special collection of images that represent women and families in more realistic ways than the traditional stock photos of a businesswoman in a suit with glasses, or a mother pouring milk into their child’s cereal bowl.
There is an appetite for the images: The three most-searched terms in Getty’s image database are “women,” “business” and “family.” As Getty subscribers search images they will now see these new images alongside the usual ones, or they can specifically search Getty’s Lean In collection.
It’s nice to be validated by the Harvard Business Review! As we’ve been saying, marketers seem to have missed – or ignored – the arrival of Boomers, particularly women boomers, online. What do these women want marketers to know? They want them to help women age well: it’s about looks, finance, dreams, work, parents and kids. As Morra Aarons-Mele points out, even the original cadre of “mommybloggers” have reached an age where their kids are older, and their lives and blog content are expanding to reflect that. The fullness of a woman’s life demands a 360-degree view from marketers; her interests cannot be contained to a narrow lens or a defined age group.
Check out this great read!
Emotions play an important role in a woman’s purchasing decisions and brand loyalty. We don’t always buy a product or service because it’s the best value for our money; many times our choice is driven by an emotional connection.
Brands often develop exclusive campaigns and programs to build and maintain this brand loyalty. The recent success of P&G’s ‘Thank you, Mom’ campaign focused solely on females, is a great example. Brand loyalty now is a two-way relationship; businesses demonstrate their loyalty by listening to the needs and concerns of their consumers, actively engaging and responding to their issues, and using that information to anticipate market trends. In this way, customer loyalty is a mutually beneficial relationship, rather than a one-way flow of products and information.
The 2013 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index® indicates that brands driving the highest level of emotional engagement were ABC (evening news category) with 97 percent, Amazon (online retailers category) with 96 percent, and three companies at 95 percent– Pampers (diapers), Dunkin‘ (packaged coffee), and Subway (quick-serve restaurants). Other category winners include:
• Credit card: Discover, 94 percent
• Automotive: Ford and Hyundai at 93 percent
• Luxury cosmetics: Clinique, 93 percent
• Natural food stores: Whole Foods, 93 percent
• E-readers: Kindle, 92 percent
• Tablets: Amazon, 92 percent
• Breakfast cereal: Cheerios, 91 percent
• Gasoline: Shell, 89 percent
• Discount retail store: Walmart, 89 percent
• Social networking sites: Facebook, 88 percent
• Airline: US Airways, 85 percent
• Search engine: Google, 85 percent
• Pizza: Domino’s 84 percent
• Car Insurance: State Farm, 82 percent
• Casual Dining: Applebee’s, 82 percent
• Luxury hotel: Inter-Continental, 82 percent
• Bank: JP Morgan Chase, 79 percent
It bears repeating that women are the top marketing opportunity in today’s economy. They make 85 percent of all consumer purchasing decisions, and account for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending. Savvy marketers understand this, and will continue to look at ways to build brand loyalty with this key consumer.
Women baby boomers know their own strength – but brands are still having a hard time recognizing it.
Because I’m a baby boomer and specialize in the marketing-to-women space, I’m particularly conscious of how I’m treated by brands. I’m certainly not ready to be stored in the attic, and neither are my friends. Yet, as boomer women we’re continually marginalized by brand managers (primarily male) who don’t think any women of value exist over the age of 39. What they must realize is that those inconsequential 45+ women are the ones that have the most money to spend on everything from vacations, to new homes, and from cars to cosmetics. Some interesting statistics on the purchasing power of Boomer women:
In addition, this group of women will experience the largest population growth over the next 10 years, and the largest transference of wealth from inheritances left by parents and husbands. Yet rarely if ever does one see a marketer’s target audience that extends beyond the age of 49 unless it’s for the senior market.
Marketers and the media need to finally realize that the women most ignored are the ones who can do the most good in this economy. The time for patronizing ads and ignorance is long gone.
So marketers, take it from Katherine Hepburn: boomer women are older, but certainly not old. They’re strong, capable and generally pretty badass!
We’ve spoken often about how women baby boomers are the most affluent consumer segment today; yet they are continually underrepresented or (worse yet) completely ignored by marketers. BOOMbox Network conducted a survey with women over the age of 45 to see how they feel about their beauty at this life stage. As the survey notes, it was no surprise to find respondents lamenting about how most beauty brands do a very poor job of communicating with them. Details of the findings are in the infographic below, but some highlights of the findings include:
Beauty marketers, are you listening to these Baby Boomers?
by Pia Mara Finkell and reprinted with permission from CRT/tanaka
Before becoming one myself, any term modified by “mommy” made me wince. Mommy blogs, mommy marketing, mom(my) jeans. Barf. Now that I have an adorable, bubbly, giggling, non-sleeping baby at home, I’m warily starting to take notice. I find myself secretly reading some of these mommy blogs, thinking about buying some of those mom-targeted products, and contemplating the rising waistline of my jeans. It’s unavoidable, I guess.
One that I really get, now more than ever, is why wine is increasingly marketed to women, particularly young moms. In my house, we call it mommy juice, and apparently, we’re not the only ones. Someone’s already packaged a product with the same name, and there’s no shortage of others trying to take advantage of the fact that, according to a recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of women prefer wine, compared to 20 percent of men, and according to The Beverage Information Group in 2011, make up 58.1 percent of wine buyers. Mommy’s Time Out actually filed for trademark infringement due to MommyJuice’s use of the ubiquitous word in their wine marketed to women. Mad Housewife, Lulu B.(which, full-disclosure, I used to represent as their North American Brand Ambassador), Girl’s Night Out, Bitch Wines, and on and on and on. Needless to say, there’s a lot of competition for my evening tipple of choice.
This has become such a hot topic that even The New York Times recently wrote an article, Marketing Wine as a Respite for Harried Wine Women, discussing the brands above, as well as popular Facebook groups, such as “Moms Who Need Wine,” (640,000+ followers), and “OMG I So Need a Glass of Wine or I’m Gonna Sell My Kids,” (127,000+ followers). Interestingly, this article also discusses a new campaign primarily targeting women from a brand that doesn’t obviously target women through name alone, Chateau Ste. Michelle. Targeting their wines at women like me, 25 to 38 and referred to as “reluctant adults,” Chateau Ste. Michelle’s ads and Facebook campaign use an “engage-with rather than talk-at approach,” asking women to declare and share how they most enjoy wine.
Chateau Ste. Michelle is betting this choose-your-own-adventure method of engagement will make women feel the brand really “gets them,” affording them a sympathetic sound board, as well as an evening buzz after the kids’ bedtime. Something tells me they’re not the last wine brand to go down this path. As for me and what will fill my glass tonight, now that my little guy is finally sleeping, it will likely come down to taste, how well it pairs with the dinner my lovely husband made and, to be honest, the speed at which it’s poured.
Cheers!
