Women usually decide what to buy in families. But the men on the marketing floors rarely find the right tone to properly address this target group.
Pink drills, cars with make-up mirrors, advertising campaigns in squeaky colors and with lots of glitter – this should appeal to women. Companies have long recognized that these are an important target group. In many cases, the woman decides which house, which car or which sofa to buy. So women are courted hard, but unfortunately often in the wrong way.
“More than 90 percent of women do not feel addressed by the advertising,” says the Munich marketing expert Gabi Lck. “It’s too loud, not subtle enough. Women don’t want demarcation,” says Lck. And most importantly, they didn’t want to be reduced to an object of desire, as is often the case in lingerie advertisements. “This is advertising for men,” says the managing director of the advertising and marketing agency Thinknewgroup, which specializes in the female target group.
According to marketing professor Marion Halfmann, products that cliché respond to women’s needs and advertisements that show women in stereotypical roles are still widespread. “That is an expression of helplessness,” says the economist from the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences in Mnchengladbach.
Stevie Schmiedel of the women’s rights group Pinkstinks has another explanation: women consume more when they are told that they are not good enough and that a certain product can make them more appealing. “Especially when, in addition to the product to be consumed, they are shown unattainable ideals of beauty with which they want to identify.” The question is whether women still want to be portrayed as decorative, passive beings. “Or are they just used to being addressed in this way through advertising and the media?” Schmiedel points out.
It is called gender marketing when companies want to target women or men specifically. “But the management floors are still mainly men,” says Marketing Professor Halfmann. These then decide what a product supposedly tailored to women and what the advertising campaign should look like, but often do not know their needs. “There is some catching up to do on the market research side,” says Halfmann.
As an example, she gives car preferences. There is a prejudice that women prefer small, agile, colorful cars, says Halfmann. However, a study has shown that businesswomen who earned a lot of money have similar preferences as similarly well-off men. “The decisive factor is not gender, but the economic situation and living conditions,” explains the expert.
In addition, the target group women does not even exist, as the Austrian business trainer Ulrike Aichhorn says. It teaches companies to acquire customers. “The group is very diverse. Women dance at several weddings in parallel,” she emphasizes. Companies there would have to pick up women instead of addressing them in just one of their roles, i.e. only as mother, wife or employed person.
In Aichhorn’s opinion, this can only be achieved if companies start with their own corporate culture. “Otherwise it is not credible. Consumers notice that there is nothing behind it,” says Aichhorn.
She uses an example to illustrate what this means in practice: A car repair shop sends a customer an SMS if the pick-up date for their repaired car is delayed by half an hour, so that they can quickly do their shopping or have an important phone call in the meantime can. “Women pass it on. This word of mouth is priceless,” says Aichhorn.
–
