If You Want to Sell to Women, Why Not Hire Some?
May 21, 2009
by Judy Silver
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Why are advertisers getting marketing to women so wrong this month? Take Harley Davidson. It has declared May to be “Women Riders’ Month” and its dealers are sponsoring group rides and garage parties across the country, trying to introduce more women to riding. A section of their website is devoted to women riders and their stories. Yet simultaneously, their website uses sexist imagery to sell to men. So which is it — does Harley want women to feel respected and valued as customers, or do they want to use women’s bodies as a tool to sell to men?
Dell Computer bumbled its recent launch of the “Della” website aimed at selling mini netbook computers to women. According to Jenna Wortham of the New York Times,
The site originally featured tech “tips” that recommended calorie counting, finding recipes and watching cooking videos as ways for women to get the most out of laptops.
Responding to criticism, Dell revamped the site. It’s now all about the cuteness of the small size and the pretty colors like Promise Pink and Cherry Red, and about accessorizing with a polka dotted cases. Adorable! As a commenter on JoHo said,
I’m looking forward to Deltoids, its site mainly for men.
Turning from Dell’s silliness to what author Lisa Johnson, in an NPR interview called “creepy,” M&M Mars is targeting women with a new candy bar called “Fling.” In an advertisement for the bar, what appears to be a man and woman disrobing and going at it in a dressing room, turns out to be a woman alone, lost in the pleasure of the 85-calorie treat. NPR reports:
Wrapped in a shiny pink and sliver package, this delicate “chocolate finger” is intended for women. The word “finger” is an industry term for a long, slim confection, Mars spokesman Ryan Bowling says, but with ads that invite you to “Pleasure yourself” in pink lettering, consumers might come to other conclusions. The tag line on the package is “Naughty, but not that naughty.”
As Cara at Feministe says,
Why don’t they just change the slogan to “skinny chicks masturbate with low-fat chocolate” and get it over with? It might even add a bit of subtlety.
What’s going on here? First of all, why does it seem that women – a demographic often taken for granted – are suddenly the focus of so much attention? Even advertising ratings-setter Nielson Company is surfing the trend, releasing its first list of the PowerMom 50, a ranking of woman bloggers who review and plug products so that “Moms Go Power Shopping.” The answer probably is this: according to author Thomas Jordan, women control 80% of all purchases. In this economy, product marketers are desperate to reach us women buyers.
That brings me to a second question, why do advertisers seem to be trying everything – contradictory, silly, and even creepy – shotgun style, the result so often missing the boat? Perhaps the reason is another fact pointed out by Jordan: 70% of advertising is created by men.
My questions continue. Why are ad agencies so male-dominated? It’s not because marketing requires physical strength. Could it be because there are no objective standards for qualification like medical licencing exams or bar exams, and therefore the dominant criterion is the opinion of more experienced practitioners who are men? Is it because ad agencies haven’t adapted their work hours to enable women to keep their careers on track as they raise children? I don’t know. But after looking at these new campaigns, I’d say: Mad Ave Guys, if you’re going to succeed in selling to women, you’re going to need to hire a few of us to teach you how.
Harley Davidson sure missed the boat on that one – can you imagine the tangles in the hair that woman would have after a few hours in the wind and the serious welts from bugs slamming into her exposed skin? They appear to be banking on the sad fact that a certain percentage of women buy into sexism and you certainly are right, sales would dramatically increase if they knew how to sell to women visa-via women directing the sales. that Mars ad is sick and maybe potential women consumers can register their disgust with M&M Mars.
I like pink. I really do. I’m wearing a pink shirt today. (Actually bought it in the men’s dept.) But … I don’t require every single item I own to be pink!! I even saw pink baseball mitts advertised. Great that they’re being marketed to girls. But whatever happened to plain old natural leather?
The flurry of marketing to women is likely because of the bad economy. “Oh, damn! Sales are cr@ppy! Hey! I know. Let’s sell to some chicks!” Except we’ve been buying your items all along, Einstein. We just ignore your male-targeted advertsing, because if we didn’t, we’d never buy anything but toilet bowl cleaner.
And who knows? Someday if we have a seismic cultural landslide, breweries may figure out that women actually purchase beer.
Advertising is all about money and has no actual scientific knowledge to back it up, so it’s treated like a hyperconservative black magic. In other words, it’s still in the 1950s. It’s hideous. And in order to get an account, you don’t have to show that you can appeal to the market. You simply need to appeal to the CEO — in other words, a rich male asshole with a trophy wife who is paranoid about dieting and botox. Imagine what sort of garbage they like.
I’ve worked in marketing for over a decade now, and it’s only since I got into a nonprofit that it’s simply gotten intelligent and results-oriented. I wouldn’t go back to the for-profit world unless forced.
Personally, I’d like to sell a candy bar to women just by having a slim, pretty young GORGEOUS man eating it slowly and sensuously in close-up. Let me tell you, that’ll sell some goddamned candy bars.
But your average rich male asshole in charge of a for-profit corporation with a wife half his age will recoil in horror if you showed it to him, so even thye money is irrelevent. Compared to the shriverling of his testicles, a for-profit CEO is willing to forgo a billion dollars of profits, trust me. They are entirely testosterone-driven.
Like I said, I’ve never worked for a truly intelligent TLA before going into the nonprofit world, and I wouldn’t go back unless I had to. I almost passed out when our CEO told me once, “Don’t publicize this until we actually get the contract signed.” To think of all those years I spent inventing nonexistent products in Photoshop that hadn’t even passed R&D yet!
In my experience, major ad campaigns are often focus grouped and split tested with target demographics before they see daylight. This is especially true now that online marketing has made it so easy to measure ad conversion rates.
So, “contradictory, silly, and even creepy” marketing may be based on actual market research, meaning (and I hate to say it) that these distasteful approaches to reaching women buyers may actually work. Reliance on gender stereotypes is, unfortunately, a proven marketing technique among certain age and income demos. My guess is that this says more about how American women and girls are socialized to be receptive to a certain type of product marketing than it does about the number of women on Madison Avenue.
Perhaps Dell, Harley Davidson, etc. ought to expand their focus groups to include feminists if they want an inside track on the backlash they can expect when they launch sexist campaigns.
Jenn Q. Public, focus group marketing may point to the least bad of a bunch of bad options, but it cannot come up with creative stuff that has genuine appeal to most in the target group (women, in this case). In other words, focus group marketing hides the fact that the good options are not being offered at all and women may be choosing the least bad option from a bunch of crap.
Indeed — if you are expected to choose from six equally dismal options, it’s not really much of a choice.
And again, I have to repeat that IME, if the CEO doesn’t like it, it doesn’t see the light of day. The most highly scored option that he likes will be employed.
I absolutely agree that an array of offensive/embarrassing/ridiculous options is no option at all. But an intelligently run focus group, which granted doesn’t always take place, will include open-ended questions that elicit opinions that don’t rely on comparison. All ads have the goal of getting a targeted group to take a specific action, and market testing should determine if that action is likely to take place. Janis, my experience is with Internet marketing which has highly measurable results and ads that can be tweaked easily and frequently, so I am less acquainted with execs making subjective decisions that run contrary to market data. I’m sure you’re right about that playing a significant role.
We don’t know what kind of market testing was done, so it could very well be that a combination of sexist executives, male-biased creative teams, and either accurate or inaccurate market research is at play here. Ultimately, the marketplace will decide the success of these campaigns, and if sexism doesn’t sell, the CEO will have to answer to shareholders, boards, and consumers.
Here’s my experience as a consumer. I need some stuff, e.g. a cell phone plan. All the options offering that stuff have at least some history of sexist advertising and/or unethical/misogynistic practices. Sprint and T-mobile have had sexist ads. At&T gets away with discriminating against pregnant women. Verizon gives preference to anti-choicers in transmitting certain text messages. I finally choose Verizon for some unrelated reasons. Does this mean sexism sells? From the market research perspective it does. From the reality perspective, it doesn’t.
Kali wrote:
There’s the rub. Market research is reality as far as these companies are concerned, but only up to the point that the bottom line takes over as the best indicator of “reality.” If sales are up and the ad appears to be paying off, the corporate conclusion, nutshelled for brevity, is that sexism does indeed sell. The best way to upset that reality is through social activism and socially conscious purchasing decisions.
With the Verizon/NARAL text message dust-up a few years ago, a Verizon exec called NARAL’s proposed text messages unsavory, but eventually the company flip flopped due to bad press and allowed NARAL to move forward. That’s how we can have an impact on sexist advertising, by making sure blog posts like Judy’s go viral and using this kind of information to guide our consumption.
I should add that I appreciate the thrust of the original post, and would love to discover the answers to Judy’s questions about the obstacles that prevent more women from entering advertising. I just don’t think we can assume that bringing more women into the field will necessarily alter advertising practices that appear to benefit the bottom line.
It’s a matter of bringing womeni n at all levels, including the highest ones, and also goes back to the women CEOs post.
The catholic church is OVERWHELMINGLY women. Every priest in every parish in the world is constantly at a loss to figure out how to bring husbands into church on Sunday as well as wives and kids.
So women far outnumber men in practical membership. But there isn’t a single one in any decision-making capacity at all.
We need not only women working in the industry; we need women greenlighting and judging what’s done, and making the decisions.
Hysterical. This advertising is at least funnier than the crap programing and movies these same morons create and the call “women’s content”. Well boys here is some info that could make you billions…..”women’s content” is content women will pay to consume, there is no other relevant definition. Here is a little piece of advice for you, you need to actually read real sexual research not the load of crap that pornographers pass off as reality if you want to know what women are like sexually. And finally if it is important to you (because it’s the only way for you to make money)to know what women think, ask them, do not ask old men, young men, pornographers, male ad producers, gay men, straight men or women whos primary business skill is kissing the hairy ass directly in front of them what women think. Do the actual research and do it on a cross section of women, then listen and respond to the research. Really, how hard is this?
For the Fling launch, the head product developer is a woman, the Marketing manager is a woman, the VP of Marketing is a woman, the Advertising agency reps were all women. I was an engineer on this project and I am a woman.
The point is, even women can make some really bad decisions and come up with awful, sexist and disgusting Marketing campaigns.
Fling insider: Yikes that is bad news. The ad is disgusting. It makes me not want to buy M&Ms either and I am an addict. The associated females must have been performing for male approval and they undoubtedly got it. I agree put a Rob Pattison type guy slowly eating the candy bar with his shirt off and nothing else in the ad. That would sell some candy bars. Oh but wait what am I thinking! I guess I forgot the entire half of female sexuality where women sit happily on their average sweat panted bums and check out hot men who are seeking their approval does not exist in porno man advertising world.
Hilarious.
Fling Insider, that’s fascinating. If you’d care to share more about the creative and decision-making process, and about how the women involved feel about the reactions they’re getting, we’d love to hear about it. E-mail us.
Any vendor who uses women’s bodies to sell to men cannot truly value women as competent consumers, much less as equals. But, unfortunately, sexy pictures draw attention and once one’s attention is there, then maybe some of the advertising words will stick. At least that is what I think the goal of the ads is… And we have to admit that the “dumb husband” is too often used, too.
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