Why She Buys (8 page)

This notion of hierarchy exists throughout the male kingdom (even in animals, hence the term
alpha male
). Whether they’re sanitation workers or chief executive officers, men are innately conscious of being in a “one-up” or “one-down” position in any given situation.
¹⁶
This fuels a competitive drive to hide vulnerabilities that could lessen their status in the eyes of others. Rising above vulnerability in all aspects of life is a fundamental principle of male culture, which is reinforced by movie and TV characters all the time. Women, on the other hand, proactively seek help and input from others. Sometimes they even ask for help when they don’t need it, just to make someone else feel good.

In a nutshell, if men measure self-worth by achieving status and doing so independently, women measure self-worth by the quality of relationships they’ve established in their lives, starting with their own families.

For Men, Help Is a Four-Letter Word

T
HESE
kinds of gender differences impact how people shop. I saw this in action recently at an old-fashioned hardware store. A young woman was shopping with her husband in the plumbing section. One of the old guys who worked there came shuffling down the aisle. The woman stopped him, motioned to her husband, and asked the employee where they could find size D batteries.

The man in the apron pushed up his thick glasses, ignored the woman, looked directly at her husband, and said, “You’re looking for batteries? Do you know you’re in the plumbing aisle?”

The husband shot a look of disgust at his wife, said curtly, “We don’t need any help, we’re fine,” and waved the man off.

Then he turned to his wife. “You made me look like an idiot in front of that guy!”

She looked startled. “But we already looked for the D batteries and couldn’t find them—what’s the big deal? That’s what the guy is here for!”

Her husband shot back, “I can’t believe you humiliated me like that,” and strode off without a backward glance, leaving her standing in the middle of the aisle.

Without realizing it, she had emasculated her husband. In his mind, she made him look stupid in front of another man. The fact that this happened with a perfect stranger who was theoretically a subordinate (an employee hired to serve customers) made no difference. The husband looked like he didn’t know what he was doing in a bastion of manliness—a traditional hardware store—and that was cause for humiliation. Asking for help would have been a last
resort for him, not a point of entry. He was happy to search for the product on his own, even if it took longer to do so.

And that’s why the notion of a man making it all the way to the top, as his own man beholden to no one—think Clint Eastwood—is the ultimate idea of success in masculine culture. You’ll start noticing that men’s magazines and mass-market advertisements (particularly automotive and consumer electronic ads, and those big lighted ads you see at airports) bear this out. In parallel, you have the phenomenon of stores cutting back on employees to save money but not realizing this may be driving away their women customers, who want human help. Like the young woman in the hardware store, women view asking for help as an efficient way to get something done. This kind of gender difference drives our preferences in where and how we want to be sold things.

Women are more likely to seek human interaction in almost any type of transaction. In a recent Wharton/Verde Group study, researchers found that women react more strongly than men to personal interaction with sales associates. The study reveals that for women, “lack of help when needed” is the top problem (29 percent). Funny enough, men react more strongly to the utilitarian aspects of the shopping process, ranking “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s entrance” as the number one problem (also 29 percent).
¹⁷

At its simplest, business is all about motivating people to buy something from you instead of from someone else, or instead of nothing at all. Clearly, understanding what motivates women is critical if they are your target audience. For example, women generally don’t enjoying wading through highly technical instruction manuals, which is one of the
reasons the Geek Squad from Best Buy has become so popular. For a lot of men, reading the manual and figuring out a product is part of the fun. From the time they’re young, boys enjoy taking things apart, putting them back together again, and figuring out how things work. This is not as common for women. When they buy something, they usually just want the thing to do what it’s supposed to do, right away.

American Airlines has a wonderful feature on its website that demonstrates a great grasp of this concept. When you go online to book a reservation (remember, women make most of the travel decisions), a little window pops up with a picture of a woman wearing a telephone headset, accompanied by the words “Need help? We’ll call you back right now.” If you need some live assistance from the airline, you can simply type in your phone number and an agent calls you back in about thirty seconds. It’s the perfect execution of personal help in an online environment—the living embodiment of high-tech and high-touch.

The business implications for these gender differences can be summed up as:

• Think twice before using “masculine” competitive messages in your marketing
.

Women’s definition of achievement is internal and doesn’t necessarily involve beating or destroying anyone else. It’s surprising how often this competitive messaging turns up, even when it has nothing to do with the product or service in question. Recently I saw a large business-to-business ad at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, featuring a giant sumo wrestler facing off with a man in a business suit who was poised for a fight. It was an ad for a company that sells translation services and other types of
staffing support for companies entering global markets. Why would anyone feature two men locked in a battle pose for a company that’s supposed to be helpful with multicultural issues? It’s a non sequitur. The lesson is, don’t see aggression where it doesn’t exist.

•
No matter what your business, strive to make service a major differentiator
.

The cliché that good help is hard to find is still true, and great service can provide a serious competitive advantage when it comes to serving women. Women want assurance up front that your company won’t leave them high and dry if something goes wrong. They have a highly developed sense of fairness and expect the companies they deal with to have it, too.

•
Leverage the word-of-mouth power that women customers have on any business
.

Women want to be considered indispensable, and that means being the source of valuable information to the people they care about. If women are happy with your business, they are delighted to tell people they know—especially if you provide an incentive for them to do so. From loyalty programs to referral programs, if you’re not leveraging your base of women customers to bring in their contacts, you’re leaving money on the table. To ingratiate women to your company, let them feel like insiders when it comes to news and information about your business. Women like to be in the know, because they enjoy being the source of good information in their social and business circles.

• Invest in human help
.

Women believe that asking for help is an efficient way to get something done, and they won’t hesitate to ask for something if you make help available to them. It’s impossible to know how many women have walked out the door or abandoned a website simply because they couldn’t find the help they needed in an easy or a timely fashion. Too much is better than too little.

GENDER DIFFERENCE #2

Women connect with each other by talking about their feelings and revealing their vulnerabilities. Men connect with each other by engaging in activities and hiding their vulnerabilities
.

At the root of women’s relationships is the ritual of sharing feelings, fears, and vulnerabilities, or what’s called
self-disclosure
. (Men sometimes call this
yakking
.) This is why women talk on the phone for so long or have lunch for three hours on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve noticed that my husband starts giving me the eye after I’ve spent just twenty minutes on the phone with one of my sisters or girlfriends. In his mind, twenty minutes is about nineteen longer than necessary. When I start to feel bad that I’m not paying attention to him, I begin the slow process of hanging up. What he doesn’t realize is that, given the chance, I could easily go on for much longer. There is simply not enough time in the day to chat with our girlfriends about all the subjects that need to be covered.

So what do women talk about? Everything. There is no subject too small, no observation too minute. But mainly we talk about how we feel about things. Conversations about emotions are the stuff that binds women together throughout their entire lives. Women actively seek out the counsel of friends and family members for help with their problems and as a way of connecting with one another. The strange thing is that women feel powerful when they can give advice and help people with their problems—not just when they can boss them around. (For reference, see any episode of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
.)

Biologically, women have high levels of oxytocin, which is a “bonding” hormone that’s triggered by intimacy. Sharing secrets and connecting in an intimate way actually activates the pleasure centers in a woman’s brain. Physiologically, it feels great to bond with other women—that’s one reason the phone calls are so long!
¹⁸
Most men don’t have tolerance for the level of detail involved in women’s conversations.

Women also have a habit of getting personal fast. On a flight from Austin to Dallas I sat next to a woman who was a perfect stranger. By the time the short flight was over, I knew all about her struggle with infertility and her decision not to adopt a child from China. An extreme example of self-disclosure? Sure. Was I surprised? Not really. Women, and American women in particular, are known for talking about their feelings quite openly. And they enjoy the opportunity to connect with someone else, no matter how briefly. The woman on my flight was an extreme case, but she was clearly looking for validation from me—a stranger—that she had made the right decision about her fertility options. Somehow these conversations never happen to me when I sit next to a man, especially in business class.

From the time they are little girls, talking about feelings is the linchpin of women’s relationships. Prick up your ears at the office and listen to what you hear. If a woman is having a bad hair day or feels like she’s put on five pounds, she will tell all her female colleagues before they even have a chance to notice.

In female culture, a woman reveals a weakness knowing full well that the woman she’s talking to will make her feel better by telling her that no, her hair really looks great today, and those pants truly do look loose. Women depend on these responses and are stricken when they make these remarks in front of men who either agree with them (not the answer they are looking for) or stay silent because they don’t understand how the female conversational ritual is played out.
¹⁹
Here’s how it works:

I put myself down
.

You pull me back up
.

You put yourself down
.

I pull you back up
.

That’s the cadence of female communication.

My turn to make you feel good
.

Your turn to make me feel good
.