Published on: January 21, 2010
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Hi, I’m Kevin Coupe and this is MorningNewsBeat Radio, available on iTunes and brought to you this week by Webstop, experts in the art of retail website design.
There was a story in the Wall Street Journal the other day that caught my eye: “Ten Mistakes Male Executives Make With Female Customers.” According to the story, “Women buy goods and services differently from men. They have more experience as shoppers, feel more passion about what they buy and bear the lion's share of responsibility for purchasing household items.”
Okay, no big surprise there.
The story went on to say that because most businesses are managed by men, there are some common mistakes that they make. For example:
They don’t do enough research into why and how women shop, ignoring the importance of an emotional appeal.
“They don't have personal experience of the time pressures that women, especially working mothers who have a full-time job at work and a full-time job at home, face.”
Because men are more comfortable working with men, they collaborate with other men to develop brands and products that will be marketed to women.
They fail to differentiate, and are generally clumsy about communicating.
And, when all else fails, they make the product pink.
Now, all I could think of when reading this piece is, don’t these guys have wives and daughters and sisters? Didn’t they have mothers? Haven’t they been paying attention?
I don’t know about the other guys who are part of the MNB community, but when I go off the reservation and make a sexist comment - either as a joke or inadvertently - I hear about it. Instantly. And it often is my 15-year-old daughter who is the fastest and most insistent about setting me straight.
I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that if men want to market to women, what they have to do first is open their eyes and ears, and pay just a little bit of attention to what is going on around them...especially to what their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are saying and doing.
it isn’t that tough. Of course, maybe it could be argued that we’re just playing out in the workplace the same attitudes that get us in trouble in our personal lives - not listening, not being good at communicating, preferring the company of other guys, and thinking that when we’re in trouble, we just give the woman with whom we are having difficulties something pink, and that’ll make it all better.
In other words, sometimes we’re morons.
For MNB Radio, I’m Kevin Coupe.
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