Key Takeaways from Our Panel Discussion on Marketing to Women

By Lippe Taylor / Posted on 06 July 2012

From left to right: Maureen Lippe, Stacy DeBroff, Aliza Freud & Jen Drexler

Women account for 85% of consumer spending but only 50% consider themselves to be brand loyalists. Why is that? Our founder and CEO, Maureen Lippe, decided to gather some of her most successful female peers to find out in a Procter & Gamble Alumni panel. Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central, Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks, and Jen Drexler, an expert on marketing to women, agreed that brands just don’t know how to speak to female consumers in ways that they can relate. Here, the top three areas in which marketers can communicate better with female consumers:

Relationships:

  • Nobody wants to be told what to think, and women are no exception to this rule when it comes to marketing.
  • Trust is a key factor for purchasing decisions. Brands need to realize that the higher the trust factor the higher the rate of purchase; 90% of women trust products more after hearing about them from friends.
  • Brands can capture and keep the attention of female consumers by creating two-way dialogues. This is a very different model than the traditional marketing approach.

 

Social Media:

  • Women participate more in social media than men.
  • Marketers have not figured out how to successfully engage with consumers; a “like” on Facebook doesn’t count as engagement; while 55% of women are more likely to purchase from brands that they connect with through social media, this figure was at 78% just six months ago. The problem is that many marketers don’t understand social media because they don’t use it themselves.
  • Looking into the future, the platforms that will continue to be successful are those that allow for two-way communication and those that lead women to outside websites, coupons, etc; this includes Pinterest and Twitter.

 

Benefits Not Features:

  • Women don’t have time to read between the lines when it comes to product features; they want benefits upfront. For example, women don’t want to hear all the features of automatic deductions on their credit cards, they just want to know that they’ll benefit by saving time.
  • Word of mouth and product reviews have the biggest influence over purchasing decisions because they’re benefit oriented; 65% of women poll their female friends before trying a new product; 82% of women read online product reviews before buying a brand they haven’t tried. Marketers could learn from this.