Why She Buys (9 page)

Everybody gets a turn
.

And as you’ve no doubt witnessed on Monday mornings at the office, compliments are one of the most powerful ways that women connect with each other. Women use compliments as verbal shortcuts to make someone else feel good. “Did you get that new blouse this weekend? It’s gorgeous!”
Female friends have been known to pass hours in conversation complimenting, reassuring, and validating one another while downing coffee and listening to each other’s problems.

Why are women so prolific with their compliments? Society tells women that one of their biggest jobs is to look beautiful. This not-so-subtle message is borne out in magazines, advertisements, videos, movies, television shows, and virtually every other medium, visual or not. (How many times has the word
hot
been used in a song?) Appearance is one of the primary things that women are judged on, and so they appreciate hearing reassurances that they’re making the grade. All women intuitively understand this, and subsequently provide each other with reassurances in the form of compliments. Men are often oblivious to this pressure, because they’re judged on other criteria besides their looks and bodies. Have you ever heard of a bathing suit cover-up for men? No, of course not. Men aren’t taught to be ashamed if they don’t have a perfect body. Women are. Which explains why men are bewildered by women’s endless compliments, and why women seek them out.

Female friendships are a critical and somewhat overlooked aspect of women’s lives. An afternoon with the girls can make a stressed-out female feel like a new woman. This is because of oxytocin, that pleasure-enhancing chemical in the body that’s released any time women are under stress, as well as when they’re with the people they care about.
²⁰
Each positive interaction with friends becomes like a mini high. Women actually have a physiological reaction to being with good friends and hearing all the laughter, supportive words, and compliments, and this is heightened when touching and hugging are involved.

The best part about receiving compliments is that they work equally well whether given by your best friend or the stranger standing next to you in the grocery store. It’s all about affirmation and rationalizing each other’s decisions:
“Yes, Christie, that haircut really does work on you.”
And when it comes to buying products, especially big-ticket items, women look for help rationalizing everything from a haircut to a new car.

In female culture, affirmation and appreciation are closely related. Women are the queens of the thank-you gesture, and options for displaying their gratitude know no bounds. The world of thank-you notes, thank-you gifts, and thank-you bouquets is the domain of the female sex. Gratitude is given enthusiastically, with exclamation points, even for the smallest of acts: “Oh my God, thanks for picking me up this morning, you saved my life!” You can be sure that the gender that displays gratitude on such a large scale expects it in return when they give their business to a company. They often end up disappointed, which is why it can be such a competitive advantage if you put even the smallest effort into an appreciation program.

The Oprah Effect

I
T’S
hard to think of someone who connects with women more effectively than Oprah Winfrey. She relates to women of every demographic in three powerful ways: through affirmation, through self-disclosure, and through compliments. Oprah never invented anything; she has no factories; there are no trucks loaded with her inventory cruising down the highways. Her fortune and her influence have come from her
ability to connect with women. Like the late Princess Diana, Oprah publicly reveals her struggles, her vulnerabilities, her fears, and her deepest dreams for the future. She is constantly trying to improve. Women around the world think,
Wow, Oprah is just like me; she struggles with the same things I do
.

When you think about it, Oprah’s fan base of moms from middle America has very little in common with this brilliant media mogul, who is single, childless, and a billionaire to boot. It doesn’t matter that Oprah’s fans don’t have anything in common with her
on the surface
. Like most successful female-to-female relationships, it’s what’s below the surface that counts. Oprah works hard to minimize her status differences with her audience, which is the opposite of how male culture works. This is one of the things that make Oprah such a great salesperson—of herself, and of the values, people, and products she endorses. She simply makes women feel good about themselves, no matter what subject she’s discussing. Her message is,
You’re a great person
. Everything she does says,
We’re all the same
. She’s an extreme personification of female culture in the same way that Donald Trump is an extreme personification of male culture. Take a look at the cover headlines from an issue of
O, The Oprah Magazine
, which is all about empowerment, affirmation, and juicy storytelling, to see what I mean:

•
“You Are an Excellent Woman!” How to finally let that message seep into your bones

•
Makeover! Is your hair color working for you—or against you?

•
And THEN What Happened? Get swept away by 8 riveting, true stories—a wife and a knife; the shocking phone call; lost life, new life … and more

•
The Perfect Summer Dinner Party, Period
.

•
She’s 48 and Starting to Date—A post-divorce wardrobe plan

Can you imagine these empowering headlines on a men’s magazine?
“You Are an Excellent Man!”

No. This kind of affirmation is a woman’s game. Readers are supposed to feel better about themselves after reading Oprah’s magazine. It’s like having lunch with a good friend, without the lunch or the good friend. The motto of the magazine is “Live your best life.” It’s a
helpful
slogan that resonates, because women know they are supposed to be helpful, and they genuinely enjoy receiving help, too.

Many men are mystified by Oprah’s allure because they can’t imagine how the act of continually revealing one’s inner thoughts and vulnerabilities could be attractive to anyone. When men get together, it’s never just to sit around and talk. And it’s certainly never to sit around and talk about
feelings
. Men get together to
do
something, whether it’s to play a game, watch other people play a game, or go to a bar. And when they talk, personal problems are not on the agenda. Men just want to relax with each other; they don’t want to talk about their problems with other guys, because it would just make them feel worse.

A few years ago, my husband’s best friend, Bruce, was going through a divorce. I didn’t know Bruce’s wife very well, and I couldn’t get any information from my husband on exactly why the divorce was happening. It was driving me crazy. No matter how much time these two men spent together, the subject of Bruce’s divorce never seemed to come up. So when my husband and Bruce went to Las Vegas for a weekend during the NCAA Final Four tournament, in
which they were going to share a room at the Bellagio, I thought,
After they spend this weekend together, I’ll finally find out what’s going on between Bruce and his wife
.

When the trip was over, I picked up my husband at the airport and immediately asked him, “So what’s the real reason they’re getting divorced?” His mouth dropped open and he looked at me like I had antlers. He said, “We didn’t talk about that—it would have ruined the whole weekend!”

If it had been two women in the room that weekend and one of them was going through a painful divorce, you and I both know they wouldn’t have talked about anything else. They might not even have come up for air.

The differences between male and female communication styles are easy to see when you look for them. Check out the cover blurbs on the issue of
Men’s Journal
that hit my mailbox a short time after I picked up the issue of
O, The Oprah Magazine:

•
Lance: The Relentless Drive of America’s Alpha Bachelor

•
NASCAR Bad Boy Tony Stewart

•
Death to Sportswriters!

•
Inside the Quarterback Factory

•
Best Beers 2008

•
Great Fall Adventures

Words such as
alpha
,
bad boy
,
death
, and
beer
 … this is the language that sells men’s magazines.
Men’s Journal
is tame compared to the so-called lad magazines, such as
Maxim
or
Stuff
, which throw around words like
hottielicious
and have the wet-bikini images to back them up. Next time you’re at a bookstore, head over to the magazine aisle to compare male and female cultures in all their glory. It’s an exercise in
which everything we know intuitively becomes gleefully obvious. In male culture, the entire world is a stage in which men compete for women, success, and victory. In women’s culture, the entire world is a community, where people connect with one another to help others realize their potential inside and out, and to make life happier for everyone.

These gender differences have business implications for everything from sales training to client service, from call-center scripting to consumer research, and from advertising copy to public relations programming.

•
Empathy is an effective sales tool
.

Disclosing vulnerabilities can bond salespeople to their women customers. Saying something like “I remember the first time I installed this computer program—I found it confusing, too” can immediately make a woman feel comfortable. This is the reassuring style of communication that women use with each other in conversation. The technique is especially powerful when it comes to complex and expensive purchases such as insurance policies, new homes, cars, mortgages, consumer electronics, and financial services.

•
Validation and affirmation help women say yes
.

Being a shrewd buyer is a form of status for women. (“I
never
pay full price!”) And more than men, women need help justifying their purchases, especially when it comes to products they consider indulgences. Women tend to feel guiltier than men when spending money on themselves. Help women justify buying your product or service by actively validating their decision through words and images. LG Appliances has been running a clever
campaign that gives women permission to upgrade their appliances even when their old machines are working just fine. The ads show humorous fantasies of women bulldozing, sledgehammering, and otherwise destroying the unstylish old appliances in their homes. The message of the ad is,
We give you permission to get rid of that old hunk of junk, even though it’s still working!

•
Humanize your company by minimizing status differences and leveraging a sense of humor
.

Apple has successfully humanized technology products through intuitive design. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has humanized IT support through its people-powered business model and self-deprecating use of the word
geek
, not to mention its use of quirky Volkswagen Beetles as its fleet. MasterCard has humanized the faceless credit-card business through its “Priceless” marketing campaign, which is inherently self-deprecating, since it admits that there are some things that its credit card just can’t buy.

•
Demonstrating appreciation is one of the simplest ways to generate word-of-mouth publicity and repeat business from women
.

Show your appreciation to women customers and clients early and often. Women are the thank-you people of this world. You can bet they notice when a thank-you hasn’t been given to them. They prefer to give their business to the companies that demonstrate appreciation for it, and in return they are more likely to talk about you with their friends and colleagues.

GENDER DIFFERENCE #3