It’s an age-old question. It’s most obviously asked by the men in women’s lives, but marketing and advertising companies also want to know because women typically make 80% of buying decisions in a household. It has been said that the female market is worth upwards of two trillion dollars so the more companies can effectively market to the female audience, the bigger slice of the pie they’ll have.
Beyond “Shrink It and Pink It”
Companies used to think that all they needed to do in order to capture female consumer was to follow a simple formula – take something like a laptop computer or a toolkit and make it smaller and pink. They ignored factors like how the device or tool fits the size of a woman’s hand. Women have seen through this and often view this approach as patronizing and out-of-touch. What is really needed is for someone to take the time to see what truly resonates with women in order to convert them into consumers of their products.
Smart Design’s enclave of women focused design called the Femme Den and Mullen’s Frank About Women are a couple of examples of marketing and design firms attempting to answer that unanswerable question by taking a different, women-centered approach, toward design. They design for women through research. They talk to women about their experiences with certain products, their drivers for choosing one product over another and downsides of miniaturized unisex products such backpacks that simply don’t work with a woman’s body.
So, What DO Women Want
A couple of immediate takeaways gleaned from the sources above include the following:
- Women want something designed for their bodies. For example, if you’re selling a bike or skis, they need to conform to the physiology of a woman’s hips. Women’s hips are wider and have different geometry.
- Women don’t want to be sold features and specifications. They want something that is intuitive. Women think about products holistically like how the product will fit with their lifestyle, home, and family versus gigabytes and horsepower.
As more research is done and women centered design becomes a reality, more will be revealed about this topic but let’s hope we retain some of our mystery, too.