Can men really market to women? Perhaps that is the question that needs asking as traditionally male categories such as cars, electronics, liquor and financial services gingerly open their arms to a demographic that they have largely ignored.
The results of their efforts, unfortunately, are not always pretty. Simply turning a product pink, like one Sony Vaio incarnation, does not do the trick. As All About Eve CEO Linda McGregor points out, women are still confronted by unwieldy stereotypes or “feminine cues”.
“These are over-used by marketers in order to shout to the fem-target, ‘this product is for you as a woman, honest!’,” says McGregor. The risk, of course, is that female consumers end up alienated by the kind of marketing that is too overtly ‘female’.
“It’s offensive to use the lowest common denominator, and nobody likes to be manipulated,” points out Y&R regional creative brand planner Rob Campbell. “It’s got to be marketing on more than a superficial level. Nobody needs a pink computer.”
The pink computer is just one example of stereotyping gone awry. Another famous one comes from Taiwan, where one bank attempted to attract female customers by featuring adverts in their windows picturing a naked woman holding thousand dollar bills to her chest. Instead of appealing to women, it offended them, prompting the bank to take the posters down.
Agencies, it appears, are finding out that effectively reaching out to women is less about advertising specifically to them, rather than understanding the reasons behind the gap in the market. Leo Burnett Singapore planning director Angela Koch points to the Motorola Razr as a good example of a product that got it right, launching a phone that appealed to women without being specifically aimed at them - even if the brand did relent and release a pink version later.
Rather than making a misguided attempt to tailor products for women, accordingly, marketers might be better off by simply aiming for a tone that is more inclusive.
A good example of a male product category that has a limited amount of success marketing to women is liquor. At Diageo, category director David Gates notes that “women in Asia are reasonably dissatisfied with their choices in alcohol” because they do not feel included, and they do not feel like there is a beverage choice that suits their particular needs.
Diageo has made significant inroads in this regard, particularly with its Bailey’s and Smirnoff brands, creating an atmosphere and theme around these liquors where women do not feel they are portrayed as inherently different from male drinkers, but as equal, just with different needs.
Bailey’s features female protagonists as the lead characters in its adverts, something rarely seen in the world of alcoholic beverage advertising, and Smirnoff has partnered with MTV, holding contests that invite both sexes to participate. “The key is to include women without alienating your male consumers,” Gates explains. “You need a sense of contemporaneity.”
Communications channels, unsurprisingly, form a critical component of any strategy that attempts to include women. Where men tend to prefer information presented as bullet points, women look for more in the way of details - similar to the way they share stories.
Companies can accomplish both objectives with platforms like product websites:
“Drop-down levels in websites offer snippets of information initially, but also the option of detailed information if a woman wants it - and women always want more info than men,” explains McGregor. Alternatively, if it is a case where a specifically female aim is needed, relying on conversational mediums such as women’s magazines and women’s websites can be more effective.
Many brands, says MEC Global Solutions MD Connie Chan, neither understand how women use and interact with their favourite media, nor the mindset they are in at the time.
She believes that there will be an in increase in multimedia campaigns that rely on “different parts or levels of the message through different mediums, cross-referencing them to build her personal opinion of the brand and its appropriateness to her and her needs”.
A good illustration of Chan’s argument may come from the credit card industry, which has had relatively little success in effectively targeting women in Asia. This, despite the fact that any discussion of female consumers often trots out the rather trite observation that women, apparently, love to shop. As Yuan Ze University professor Liao Shing points out “women use credit cards three times more than men.”
But Koch notes that credit cards often assume that a woman’s inherent product needs are somehow different from men.
“Why should a woman’s money be handled differently than her husband’s?” asks Koch. It is a question that American Express is attempting to answer, by researching strategies by which to increase its visibility among women in Asia. In cases where the product is decidedly business-oriented, it appears that women are interested in precisely the same aspects as men. To hand out Hello Kitty credit cards — as one Japanese bank did for a short time - runs the risk of demeaning the female customer, rather than inviting her in as an equal.
Unfortunately, says McGregor, “good examples in the male category are still fairly few and far between”. Much of this, furthermore, may be down to a simple calculation; it is likely to require a significant response in this space for male-oriented brands to really wake up to the use of female-friendly initiatives.
