MARKETING TO WOMEN Vs. MARKETING TO MEN

The outdoor advertising campaign you’re contemplating? Your print advertisement? Your radio advertising — whether it’s just a solo radio commercial or a series of radio commercials? That new television campaign?

If it’s targeting women, there’s something you need to understand — an aspect of women’s outward view of which most men aren’t aware: the issue of safety.

As men move through the world, they’re not forced to think about what the people around them are thinking.But women are trained from a very early age to evaluate situations from a “potential threat” point of view.

Men can’t understand how much scarier the world is for women. But everything suggests that women evaluate risk completely differently than men do.

In experiments, women will look at the exact same scene on television with the exact same circumstances and see things as much more threatening than men will.

Understanding women’s needs for safety has led to several marketing success stories which you might not be aware of.

Have you ever walked into a hotel, seen a gigantic vaulted atrium and wondered, “What’s the deal with that? Why waste all that space?”

Well, it turns out these hotels are successful BECAUSE of the atrium lobby.

There was a very observant architect for the Hyatt team — John Portman. He was told that increasingly women were traveling on business and deciding which hotel to stay at.

He did some research and found that women face all aspects of business travel with considerable trepidation.Many women reacted fearfully to the tradition dark hotel corridors, especially at night, especially if no one else was around.

His solution was the atrium lobby: You’re always exposed.Whatever happens in the hallway can be seen and heard by others.

The same thing goes with glass elevators. When I was a kid, glass elevators were novelty. When you were a child, maybe there was ONE in your hometown.

But now they’re everywhere. Why?

Women are far more comfortable in glass elevators. No one can lurk unseen, and other people can see if something happens.

But most men have never even thought of elevators as a particularly scary place.Which is my point: Men think very differently about these circumstances.

So if you’re marketing to women, you need either to know about these things (e.g., because you’re a woman) or LEARN about them. Marketers who successfully target women need to ask themselves, “Are we speaking to women in a way that addresses their fears appropriately?”