Communicate Magazine featured and article by Aquitude CEO, Christina Ioannidis. The piece brings together learnings from the book – Your Loss and recent research by Aquitude into attitudes of female consumers in the Middle East and other markets.
The Article titled – In The Pink can be downloaded here… Communicate Magazine Feb 2013
Excerpt – In the Pink
Can male marketers understand the female psyche? This question immediately evokes images of Mel Gibson’s fruitless attempts to understand “What Women Want”. The truth is that as a consumer demographic, women are the hardest market to sell to: their decision-making processes are complex, and capable of baffling the most sophisticated marketing communications professionals.
Hard growth.
The end of the last century and the beginning of the 21th century has seen the booming of the fastest growth demographic – women. In a 2009 piece entitled ‘The Female Economy’, the Harvard Business Review claimed that “Women now drive the world economy. Globally, they control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that figure could climb as high as $28 trillion in the next five years. Their $13 trillion in total yearly earnings could reach $18 trillion in the same period.
In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined, more than twice as big, in fact.”
However, business owners and marketers have been challenged to cater to this highly discerning demographic. According to the Boston Consulting Group, over 91 percent of women state they are misunderstood by marketers; and 81 percent of our global “Marketing to Women” survey respondents agreed that marketing professionals in every sector should recognize that women have multiple roles and adapt their communications accordingly.
Moreover, a similar percentage of our panel agrees that male and female consumers are different and should be marketed to in different ways.
Other topics covered in the article include:
- Deal Breakers
- Perceptual Differences
- Being ‘Gender Savvy’
- Engaging her Heart
- Going the Extra Mile
- Working with her Mind
- Building sustainable relationships.