Companies can’t sit back the way they once did and expect to do business as usual and still keep their female customer base.

IF THERE’S ONE motto I’d like to see on every desk (corporate or home office), it is EVEolution EVEryday. It would serve as a reminder that the concept of marketing to women is something that should be held up as a benchmark for virtually all business decisions made today.

It was through my marketing consultancy that I began to realize how neglected the female market truly is. On the one hand, I watched as the statistics that tracked women’s economic power kept going through the roof. On the other, I would sit in meeting after meeting of the Fortune 500 where women were constantly described as a “niche market,” “segment,” or “special interest group.” Beyond being insulting, it simply isn’t true. How could women be considered a sliver of the market when:

• They buy or influence the purchase of 80% of all consumer goods, including major car purchases. Women actually buy 50% of all cars sold.
• Females purchase 51% of all consumer electronics. I am not just talking toaster ovens. This includes half of the personal computers. Surprising to many, today’s young generation of girls is edging slightly ahead of their male mcounterparts in amount of time spent online. Even more startling, women over 55 are the fastest-growing group on the Net.
• Women influence 80% of all family health care decisions and buy 75% of all over-the-counter drugs. They are the ones who know how to mix and match herbal remedies, vitamins, and minerals. The issue is control—of bodies and selves.
• The most powerful symbol of economic clout—stock ownership— shows that 48% of investors in the stock market are female. Half of all women own mutual funds in their own name. These numbers are growing rapidly. Just peek into any Fidelity center and see who is standing on line, checks in hand.
• In families where both spouses work, the wives out-earn their husbands in 22.7% of these households. Women head 40% of those households with assets of over $600,000.
• There are more than 9,000,000 female-owned businesses in the U.S., generating 3.6 trillion dollars in annual revenues. “Niche” market, indeed.
  

Even when businesses come to realize that they should be marketing to women, another question quickly arises: How to market to them? Is this a big problem? I call it a huge opportunity.

Besides the overwhelming economic reality, there is a second reason that EVEolutionary marketing is so critically important to the marketplace. It’s the biological one. Women are different from men—very different. Like all the great truths, it is simple, but complex. The point is that females process information differently because their brains are wired differently. They hear, acquire, and use language in their own way, which accounts for the fact that girls generally speak earlier than boys, articulate their feelings more easily, and see themselves more as links, not as loners.

This isn’t merely idle patter. It is wild in its implications, yet a subject that rarely comes up in any marketing plan or strategy session. That is not so surprising. Tell a marketer that he needs to develop a program based on the neurological differences between women and men, and he will get a panicked look in his eye. EVEolution can turn that blink of panic into a depth of prosperity. Women have greater economic traction than ever before, and they can’t be approached by using the same traditional strategies that have worked with men. So, what’s next? How does a brand, service, or company turn its business around and become more relevant to the women who will decide its fate?

Remarkably, perhaps even shockingly, this subject has been virtually ignored by writers and business journalists. This has been one of the biggest business gaps (and gaffes) of the last 10 years. Drop by your local bookstore or a big Barnes & Noble (even check out Ama zon.com) and you’ll see what I mean. You will find a vast acreage of books about the ways women differ from men. You will find fields and fields of books on marketing theory. Yet, never do the twain meet. Marketing to women is a big and echoing void. The answer is fear. After years of listening (or at least partially listening) to the women’s movement, men have become hyperparanoid about anything that smacks of gender stereotyping. It just hasn’t been politically correct to think about, talk about, or, worse, capitalize on the differences between women and men.

THE EIGHT TRUTHS

Times are changing, though. It is now safe to identify, analyze, and celebrate the distinctions between women and men, and to develop products and programs that women will need and want and relate to and own. The truth is that the failure to explore the EVEolutionary road has set marketing to females back about two decades. Here is the chance to make up for lost time—and lost business. The following are the eight truths I have developed after years of interviewing, positioning, and marketing to women:

1. Connecting your female consumers to each other connects them to your brand. This is based on the fact that women love to share ideas, feelings, dreams, fears, and, most of all, information. They form spontaneous communities, whether it’s at the playground, gym, or out in cyberspace. What does this mean for those on the selling end? This is not word-of-mouth marketing. This is not relationship marketing. This is not a quick hit—a short-term promotion that catapults women together as a gimmick. It is about building and supporting a community of females— a healthy place where your brand is a prominent, helpful, active, fully contributing member. Remember: Women are three times as likely as men to learn about a product from other women.

2. If you are marketing to one of her lives, you are missing all the others. Women have the ability to multi-task Men are more direct-driven to the destination goal, while women meander, enjoying the journey. They are jugglers, trying to stay in control while working hard, yet still being the ones whose job it is to get the food on the table (or at least in the fudge). They have to be the command center of all information in the household, the mediator of the most complex negotiations among family, friends, and business associates; the appointment maker; the taker to lessons; the keeper of the pet—all while squeezing in time to go to the gym and get their hair cut. Because women lead these 24/7 multiple lives, a marketer needs to be there to help women integrate home and work more seamlessly, or miss out on creating a loyal bond.

3. If she has to ask, it’s too late. Women secretly hope that businesses (as well as everyone else in their personal lives) will be able to anticipate what they wantahead of time, and they will reward those who do. It always has been puzzling and frustrating to females that males seem clueless about their needs, because it is first nature for women to be sensitive to the faintest pulse of what men might desire or require. If women have to go out of their way to track you down; if you make them jump through hoops to get service; if your attitude is take it or leave it, they will leave it and take their billions of dollars elsewhere.

4. Market to her peripheral vision and she will see you in a whole new light. A full frontal attack is not the way to turn a woman on. Nor are women impressed because you’ve spent your advertising budget on a one- minute spot during the Super Bowl. (They will be thinking instead of all the social ills a sum of mo ney like that could have helped cure.) Women receive and evaluate information differently. They have retractable antennae that scan everything—seeing and hearing the world on all levels, picking up clues, weaving together threads, intuiting, and inferring the inner meanings. Some might refer to this phenomenon as female observation. I have labeled it peripheral vision. That is where you want your product to appear—in a surround-sound of opportunity found in the natural settings of her daily life.

5. Walk, run, go to her, secure her loyalty forever. Most marketers continue to operate under the “Field of Dreams” slogan: “If you build it, they will come.” Until now, most women have, because they had no choice. However, the notion thatfemale consumers are magnetically drawn to your product is over. The idea that women consumers need your product more than you need them is Neanderthal thinking. The new marketing truth is to figure out all the ways to “get to her, go to her.” The idea to concentrate on is convenience —selling to a women at home, or wherever she may roam.

6. This generation of women consumers will lead you to the next. It is an essential reality of marketing: Brands overlaid with the nostalgia of warm fuzziness stir our memories through scent or taste or look to remind us of our do-right mom or our almighty dad. Then, you might ask, why don’t more marketers strive to build brands that can be passed down from generation to generation? Why don’t more marketers create their own roadmap for brand-me-down success? Just think, if marketers follow this truth, they will have an endless supply of tomorrow’s shoppers—already loyal and ready to renew their bonds.

7. Co-parenting is the best way to raise a brand. Whether it’s a child, puppy, cockatiel, or brand, nurturing women will protect their own. So why don’t marketers recognize that parenting is part of females’ makeup and leverage that part of them? I mean that marketers should develop complete honesty in a relationship with a consumer, allowing access to every nook and cranny. I mean never failing a customer or embarrassing her by failing her friends. I mean establishing consumer visitation rights, far beyond an 800-number and a standard website. I mean actively soliciting her opinion and suggestions for change. By doing these things, a marketer gets the chance to gain the deepest loyalty—a marketing mother-love, unconditional and unassailable.

8. You can’t hide behind your logo. When it comes to marketing to women, nothing—not a famous logo, clever ads, a Fortune 500 ranking, or even the expertise of your salespeople—can protect you. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Women are demanding customers and are becoming even more so, from measures as lofty as values and morals to those as prosaic as cleanliness and courtesy. If your company is accustomed to business by spin, you will either have to reform now or close up shop. It’s that simple.

These EVEolutionary truths are meant to be not only a marketing directive to Corporate America, but a wake-up call to women to be aware of and start wielding the economic power they possess. The direction that women consumers are taking, such as using computers as an endless conduit for connection to bring the world closer or wanting to know more about a product than its price and positioning, is the way that all consumers are currently headed.

EVEolution isn’t about doing things partially. It’s a process, but one that needs daily progress. Remember: Species that don’t EVEolve, die.

By Faith Popcorn With Lys Marigold