Showing how your product or service can emphasize what women take pride in can be a big boost to your sales. Before you can see success from this marketing to women strategy, you first have to know what those motivations are (and some are not what you’d expect).
What Women Take Pride In
- Their own efforts to be caring, considerate, thoughtful, generous and loyal. Consider: how do your corporate halo efforts encourage women to share a sense of pride with you?
- Being needed. The important revelation here is that women feel powerful when others come to them for help (as opposed to men, who feel powerful when they attain autonomy). Be careful not to make “love of power” an overt message, though.
- Making the world a better place. This motivation is linked to being needed, but on a macro scale. As I’ve written before, a survey showed that 85% of women view making the world a better place as a key aspiration in their lives. Will your products or services help women make the world a better place? How do you let them know?
- Multitasking. Women are proud of being able to juggle a lot of balls at once- especially when they can manage to make it look easy. Help women truly multitask, and you will help your bottom line.
- Recognition. Just because women don’t boast and push themselves forward doesn’t mean they don’t like being recognized and admired – in the right way. Marketing messages that acknowledge women’s accomplishments are appreciated not only by the honoree but also by the female audience, which feels that very often deserving women get passed over for this kind of recognition.
And last but not least, the stereotypical considerations…
- A warm, comfortable and orderly home. Yes, women do take pride in this. The key is to keep in mind that it’s not the only thing they take pride in, romanticized home care advertising notwithstanding.
- Appearance: figure, clothes, jewelry, hairstyles, grooming and the like. Remember, just 53% of women see being more attractive as an aspiration in their lives- so this is not the all-consuming passion that some might think. But recognize that taking pride in appearance, in most cases, is not simply about luring men. Many women have discovered, to their chagrin, that most men simply don’t notice elements like hair, clothes and shoes. Not to worry- at least other women can appreciate good taste. And besides, these accessories make such good compliment props!