Why She Buys Read Online Free Page A

retailer, which stubbornly refuses to update its stores, and has seen its stock price and market share diminish as a result. Women may notice things about your products, marketing campaigns, or sales environment that they dislike, and these are the very things that can escape the attention of management entirely or be viewed as too inconsequential to invest in. Is it common sense to take women’s responses seriously? You would think so. But when men and women look at the world, they often see different things.
    If women consumers are important to your business, the path to increased revenues is to listen to them long enough to hear what they have to say. Some men have told me this isn’t always easy.
    “When I’m around groups of women, I genuinely find it hard to listen to them for very long,” confesses a male CEO,speaking on condition of anonymity. “I try, but I’m just not interested in talking about other people, or discussing who’s having marital issues, or hearing about someone’s emotional problems. I either leave the room or tune them out, which is something I learned to do when I was about twelve years old, growing up with sisters. My refuge was to head to the garage and build go-carts. Now I keep a pool table downstairs instead. At work, I find it hard to listen to research about women consumers for the same reason. You have to wade through so much stuff to get to the root of things. All I want to know is, ‘What’s the issue?’ Then I can address it with a solution, get the results, and move on. But it’s not easy to discover what women want, and sometimes I think we take shortcuts.”
    In interviews, I heard this same opinion expressed, in slightly different ways, from all kinds of businessmen. Men tend to think that women talk about nothing , when the reality is they talk about everything . I feel compelled at this juncture to acknowledge that women are often just as uninterested in, or confounded by, some of the topics of men’s conversations—fantasy football, anyone?—but since it’s women who dominate consumer spending, and women who determine the fortunes of so many companies, then it is women who must be understood.
    It doesn’t require a leap of imagination to think that if some men find it difficult to tune in to the conversations of the women they know and love, they will have the same issue at work when it comes to hearing the drives and emotional aspirations of their female customers. The innate desire of most men to avoid discussions about messy, emotional female “stuff” is what leads to shortcuts in business strategies targeting women (such as painting products pinkwith the presumption that it’s female catnip) and the continued use of stereotypes in advertising, because it’s simply easier to go those routes than to wade deeply into the female mind.
    Here’s the headline: if you think women’s conversations are trivial, it’s time to get over it, especially if you want your business to survive through a tough economy. Within the rich details of women’s conversations are the road maps to what they need and want—and, ultimately, to increased profitability for your business. Women will tell you—indeed, probably have already told you—everything you need to know about how to run a business that appeals to them, but too often executives are tuned out or only listening for what they want to hear.
    Take the story of two guys we’ll call Trey and Steve. They’re a couple of twenty-something agency creatives whose company recently won a piece of canned-food business. Trey and Steve have been assigned to come up with a new campaign targeting mothers of young children. Their strategy is to shake up the category by positioning their client’s product as the hippest thing to hit canned food in years. They believe the product can be transformed by their creative powers into something aspirational. And while they would never admit it to their client, part of their strategy is