Why She Buys (13 page)

9:00: Both kids are asleep.

9:15: Jamie and her husband turn on the TV to find something they both like. Each of them uses their laptop while watching TV. Jamie looks at her e-mail to see if anything new has happened since she left the office. She answers some messages and starts thinking about the day ahead. Has some fun reading news, personal e-mails, and celebrity gossip online. Starts to relax.

9:45: After thirty minutes, Jamie feels like she’s relaxed long enough. She puts the dishes away and checks the laundry to make sure everyone has clean clothes for tomorrow. She picks up the living room and looks at the mail.

10:45: After watching a recorded show from their DVR, Jamie and her husband set the alarm for 5:15. Before she goes to sleep, Jamie spends fifteen minutes looking at women’s magazines in bed. As she flips the pages, she imagines herself in all the beautiful clothes, shoes, and homes, and dreams of being as thin and gorgeous as the smiling celebrities. She looks at the beauty tips and makes mental notes for the next time she’s out shopping. Maybe she
should change her hair color. Maybe Target will have some good, cheap knock-offs of the expensive styles in the magazine. Maybe she should get some flats—looks like they’re in this season.

To Jamie, her stash of magazines is the perfect way to wind down at the end of the day with some harmless fun, and she considers them a little reward for working so hard. Her husband makes fun of her
Us Weekly
subscription, but she doesn’t care. It’s only about $50 a year, and to her it’s worth every penny, because it and the other women’s magazines on her nightstand are her harmless guilty pleasure. They also keep her in touch with what other people are talking about around the euphemistic “water cooler” at work. Like countless women around the world, Jamie dozes off thinking about new clothes, a fitter body, a more glamorous self, and all the things she has to accomplish tomorrow. She sums up her life this way:

I feel like I’ve had a full day of work before I even get to work. As a working mom, I almost feel like an athlete in training. During the Olympics, the reporters always talk about how the athletes trained every day for ten years starting at four o’clock in the morning, and everyone wonders how they did it. That’s the best analogy I can think of for what it feels like to be a working mom. I’m like a professional athlete, just without the perfect body
.

Is Jamie an extreme example of a working mom? No. A day like Jamie’s is reality for millions of women, the majority of whom still carry the burden of household responsibilities
when they’re off the clock of their day jobs, in a phenomenon known as the “second shift.” For single working mothers and those earning lower salaries than Jamie, the days are even harder. These women tend to rely on family members for child care and have very little time and money left over each month to spend on themselves.

Stay-at-home moms are often just as busy. The term itself is a misnomer, since most of these women are out and about all day, working hard on behalf of their families. In fact, many women who identify themselves as stay-at-home moms are actually engaged in some kind of outside labor activity—whether it’s freelancing, selling products in the direct-sales industry, or volunteering—in addition to their career managing their families. Many lead lives that are just as busy and complicated as those who work outside the home.

Imagine that your customer is Jamie, or any other busy working woman. How could your company help her? Consider the following:

• Working women need services, not just products
.

In the era of working women, customer service could be your most compelling advantage. It all comes down to that little four-letter word:
help
.

No matter what your business, there’s room to improve your customer service. What can you do to ensure that your product or service helps women in a way that goes beyond their expectations? How can you maximize their productivity and make them feel smarter just for choosing you? A few weeks ago I walked into a shoe store in Berkeley, California, that had a pedicure station in it. For a store in a climate where lots of people wear open-toed
shoes, it’s a simple example of a
why-hasn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-before
service that complements a product offering. What broader context of your own product or service can you leverage to create a complementary service? What company or other brand could you partner with that you haven’t already?

• Working women need extended hours and more delivery options
.

Every morning on her way to work, Jamie passes an Ann Taylor shop that doesn’t open until ten a.m. She says she often finds herself looking longingly in the windows, knowing there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she’ll be able to get there once the workday begins. However, if the store opened a few hours earlier, she might just find the time to go. Extended hours can provide busy women the incentive they need to stop what they’re doing during the day and pay attention to your brand. Whatever you can do to make Jamie’s life easier, especially during the week, can help you stay ahead of your competitors, who may use only weekend-specific campaigns and promotions.

Delivery options in all kinds of categories can find a receptive audience with busy women. The Sleep Squad is a Chicago-based mattress retailer that shows up at customers’ homes with a mobile mattress showroom in a specially designed truck. Customers can take a “test rest” on the mattresses, and if they like one, the Sleep Squad will install it in their home on the spot and take away the old mattress at no charge. What a stress-free way to shop for a new bed, without the awkwardness of having to lay down on mattresses in a busy, public shop.

• Cars are second homes to many working women
.

Working women in North America, and in particular those who are mothers of young kids, spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars.

Casual service restaurants, such as Outback Steakhouse, have recognized the stuck-in-the-car phenomenon and revitalized their weeknight offerings through curbside take-out services, where customers can take a hot meal home without ever getting out of the car and without feeling like they’ve resorted to fast food. Snack brands, from gums to candies and crackers, now offer packaging in round shapes that fit into a car’s cup holders for easy grabbing while behind the wheel. In-car DVD players have become a godsend for family road trips. In a nutshell, the car has become like a second home. Whether it’s audio books from business-to-business companies or mini refrigerators from home appliance manufacturers, it’s worth considering how to adapt your own product or service to the environment of the car.

It still shocks me that FM radio, that mainstay of automobile entertainment, offers so little in terms of women’s programming. Women dominate viewership of morning breakfast shows on television, but where is radio? It’s strange that talk radio is almost exclusively the domain of men, when it’s actually women who are society’s biggest talkers and who spend so much time in their cars running errands and shuttling kids around. It can sometimes seem as if the terrestrial radio industry is not paying attention to half the market, when it should be using every tool in its arsenal to compete with iPods and satellite radio. Even in an age when everyone is chasing digital media, radio remains a wide-open frontier for
advertisers to get creative and come up with programming that has female appeal.

• Errand running and shopping compression occur on weekends, with the kids if she has any
.

Because they’re often too busy to shop during the week, working women save their big shopping excursions for the weekends, which is precisely when the stores are crowded with everyone else. Because school’s out and the babysitter’s off, weekend shopping warriors tend to be with their kids. Naturally, the kids’ presence completely transforms any kind of retail outing, and not necessarily in ways that make things easier.

Look at what happened when Jamie tried to buy a car with her husband.

We decided to buy a new car because we had a second child and needed something bigger. So we went to the Mazda dealership, where we had to bring our children and our car seats. When you’re a family, you have to bring your children with you to make sure they fit in the car, especially where car seats are involved. Not only did the dealership have nothing aesthetically pleasing in their sales area—just desks and chairs—you couldn’t even get water. There was one broken vending machine. I had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a four-year-old with me. The car-buying experience for anyone seems to be at least a three-hour process from start to finish. It was excruciating for us as a family, because our youngest child was going crazy. The only thing to play with inside the sales area were the new cars. The outside area was dangerous because it was a parking lot filled with moving cars
.

We eventually ran out of food, water, and toys. (We didn’t expect it to take three hours.) I actually had to leave my husband there to complete the transaction, and then I had to pack up the kids in the car again and go pick him up two hours later. It was a nightmare experience for us. It was clear that there was not an ounce of thought given to families. They had nothing for children. Even a balloon would have bought us a half hour. Yet I would guess that 80 percent of the cars on the lot were for families—SUVs, minivans, et cetera. It wasn’t like we were at a Porsche dealership. Because I had to leave the transaction early, I don’t even have my own name on the title—just my husband’s, which is ironic because I’m the primary breadwinner. It was shocking. All they needed was a kids’ play area. It’s such fierce competition in the car business, it’s like all you need to do is offer a pleasant experience and you can get the families. Why don’t they know this?

Being kid friendly can offer a major competitive advantage. Kid factors can be taken into consideration for everything from how wide the parking spots are (wide enough to get strollers out the side door of a minivan?) to what kind of entertainment is on offer for them once inside an establishment.

There are lots of other complications to shopping on weekends, and not just the obvious ones such as fighting the crowds. For one thing, research shows that working mothers like Jamie often do their big weekly grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons, which is a bad day of the week to buy fresh foods, since there are typically few store deliveries that day.
¹²
It’s easy to see why online shopping has such huge appeal for working women.

In many ways, traditional businesses have yet to catch up to the activity patterns of working women. This means there’s an opportunity to create all kinds of helpful offerings to accommodate their time and convenience issues.

• Working women develop a sense of humor as a coping mechanism
.

Jamie uses humor to deal with her stress, but most marketers shy away from being funny with women. This is certainly not true with men’s brands, such as Anheuser-Busch and Old Spice, just to give two examples, which produce very funny ads to great effect. Thus far there has been no female equivalent of anything like Budweiser’s famous “Wassssup!” advertising campaign. As Jamie likes to say, “No one could use a good laugh more than a working mom.” So why do so few companies offer her one? Humorous portrayals of life in all its messy glory are a powerful and underused tool for connecting with women, especially mothers.

Suave is one brand that’s used a humor-based campaign successfully. Working with the lighthearted theme “Motherhood isn’t always pretty,” the hair care brand’s marketers, in conjunction with telecommunications giant Sprint, created an “In the Motherhood” online community that featured stories inspired by real mothers (who submitted them to the website) acted out in short video “webisodes” by actresses Leah Remini, Jenny McCarthy, and Chelsea Handler. Women found the tone funny, authentic, and fun, and the webisodes were viewed more than twenty million times. In a kind of reverse leap of marketing, the webisodes were developed into a (short-lived)
network television show by American broadcaster ABC.
¹³

GLOBAL TREND #2

Delayed Marriage Means More Money Spent on “Me”

“I do” is starting to turn into “I will—someday.” All over the industrialized world, women are getting married later in life. Back in 1965, the age of first marriage for an American woman was just twenty. Forty years later, the age of first marriage has crept up to twenty-five.
¹⁴
In Western European countries such as France and the Netherlands, the average age is thirty, and cohabitation in lieu of marriage is common and socially acceptable. The situation is similar in Sweden, where the age of first marriage for a woman is an astonishing (from an American point of view) thirty-two years old.