Marketers Don't Understand Women

 Women are not happy with the vast majority of marketing and advertising aimed at them,” says Holly Buchanan, coauthor of The Soccer Mom Myth – Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys. According to She-conomy.com, 59 percent of women feel misunderstood by food marketers; 66 percent feel misunderstood by health care marketers; 74 percent feel misunderstood by automotive marketers; and 84 percent feel misunderstood by investment marketers. In a separate survey, also by She-conomy.com, 91 percent of women said that they don’t think advertisers understand them. What’s causing this disconnect between marketers and female consumers? According to experts, it’s not because of a lack of technological capabilities; the problem stems from a limited understanding of this powerful and influential cohort.

The biggest mistake companies make is to say all women think alike or want the same thing and therefore will respond to the same message. Inevitably when companies think ‘woman,’ they think ‘mom says one industry expert. When appealing to women shoppers, as opposed to their male counterparts, particular common notions do prove to be true, but not without a caveat. The assumption that women care more about aesthetics and the design of a product is absolutely true; a study by BlogHer and Create with Context, titled “Women, the Web, and Their Wallets,” found that 93 percent of participants wanted technology products to be beautiful. However, 63 percent of those women said that the beauty of a product did not override the product benefits, debunking the idea that if a remote control is dipped in pink, a woman won’t bother to compare the features to those of another device.