Have you ever watched groups of women enjoying lunch together, meeting for coffee or just standing chatting at the school gates, supermarket or car park?
 
Once this would have described as “gossiping,” but now we know better. Women are sharing their experiences, listening to others and usually making plans for their day and their lives.

 This behaviour often seems a mystery to many men and when it comes to harnessing its power in the workplace, more restrictions seem to be being built  to shut it down rather than nurture it.

 Over the past year I have been talking and presenting to male executives within the Australian consumer electronics industry on this very subject: connecting to women. In all of these discussions I am yet to discover any internal mechanism that has been established to garner information from women, to nurture it and then to put it to work for the good of the country and hopefully, our  society.

Even more startling, I continue to hear that men are developing products for women, and when it comes to selling them to this gender, they ask male retailers for their opinions.  It’s little wonder that at a time when women are flocking to the internet to buy anything from shoes to travel, bricks and mortar retailers are closing down.

 But it is even more baffling to see multi-national companies, particularly with products that women enjoy using such as mobile phones, cooking products and personal care refusing to come on board with social media. Again this week,  a  senior  retail executive selling products to women, explained to me that his company doesn’t have any access to social media.

 This is because it is the company’s policy to block it. Yet this retailer  has stores in every shopping mall in Australia.

 For example, if this retailer really wanted to know  the reaction to the female dominated Sydney Good Food & Wine Show and how to capitalize on this trend, he could have read the 549 social media mentions which were made about the Show. He could then have discussed this with his team and immediately tweeked his offer and messages to be in line with how market was responding.

 But because he can’t access social media to listen to what his female customers are saying in real time, he can’t.

Have you ever thought of touching your mother-in-law’s heart by giving her an oven? Well this is how one man connected with a woman and is reaping the benefits.

Murray Richardson is a 40 something senior sales manager with the Korean company LG Electronics and he knows his kitchen appliances. But when he’s not travelling the world finding new products for LG to sell to Australian retailers and consumers, he’s married with kids. And he has a mother-in-law.

We got around to talking about this important relationship when I met him on the LG stand at Sydney’s Good Food and Wine Show, last Friday morning. It was early and I had been part of the media pack watching chef Darren Simpson demonstrate LG’s new fridges, ovens and cooktops.

It was then that he was given the insight that was to change his life so dramatically. He decided to offer the free oven to his mother-in-law, a woman who actually needed one.

What did Murray do that was so transformative to the relationship after 18 years?

According to John Gray in his multi-million dollar best seller ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus‘, “The most frequently expressed complaint women have about men is that they don’t listen.”

Murray ‘heard’ that his mother-in-law need a new oven, and being in a position to act, he went one better by giving her what she needed. In return Murray can expect:

• Blue-ribbon authentic product endorsement directly to at least 15 of her female friends, who will most likely tell another 15 women each about this marvellous experience which happened to one of their tribe. In total, Murray’s action will potentially reach 225 women associated with his mother-in-law by word of mouth
• For every woman (such as myself) who hears this tale from Murray, similar word-of-mouth reach through our tribes
• Additional reach of hundreds of thousands as I write about this and it becomes live through the social media
• Free meals at his parents-in-law’s home indefinitely
•  A warm feeling from his mother-in-law for the next little while

The takeout from this is simple: if you have the time, listen carefully to every woman you meet with the understanding that women are primarily driven by relationships and the desire to help.

So if you can listen to her, then she will help you: in ways you could never imagine.

In the post, I had expressed my dismay at the sight of footballers wearing bright pink shorts and jerseys and stated firmly that the use of the color pink to market anything to women was certainly style over substance. In fact, it now has its own marketing term ‘pinkwash’.

Some of the posts below express the concern that I was maligning the color pink (which Marcus did acknowledge is the color preferred for female babies and little girls) and its role as a marketing tool to raise funds for worthy causes, in particular the Breast Cancer Foundation.

To expand on this, the NRL’s One Community initiative is working with the McGrath Foundation on the goal to make 10,000 people Breast Aware in season 2010. The women and men of the NRL behind this goal are to be acknowledged.

As a woman who has been personally touched by breast cancer, I fully support any initiative which raises funds to battle this insidious disease. But I also feel that this subject is a sensitive and personal one and that any marketing initiatives around it need to be treated tastefully.

I am also a baby boomer female managing a global media business and like many women with such responsibilities, I know that I have left my ‘little girl’ days behind me a long time ago. So realistically, I just do not connect with the color pink in a mature context and in fact, truly do feel offended (and left out) by seeing beefy blokes from a sporting code that does not have a deep history of supporting women, using it in such a global manner to connect with women.

I would call on the NRL to work to include women such as myself in their marketing initiatives. We have wide reaching and powerful networks that could enhance your fundraising efforts. All we ask is that you tone down the pink.

I didn’t know what I was watching when I saw that team of footballers last week flying across the field in their hot pink suits. As pink is the accepted hue for the global gay community, I took a double take.

Then it sank in. This was the football code’s annual tribute to women: wearing pink costumes!

If they were trying to connect with me, they failed miserably. And they have possibly alienated many more women than they hoped to connect with by viewing them through this very limited, single gender perspective.

Unfortunately, as the majority of executives making the marketing decisions within large corporations and institutions such as the AFL, consumer electronics and the auto industry are male, they are challenged in deeply understanding what it is women want from a brand unless they have made a deep commitment to do so. (The report by www.bcg.com badged ‘What women want’) is a great begining.

But due to entrenched organisational cultures which remarkedly leads male executives to actually believe they know what women want and then convince CEOs to invest millions of dollars into campaigns which are way off  track, we are seeing high levels of pinkwash: such as the AFL’s pink costumes.

In her insightful book ‘The Gender Intelligent Retailer’ Canadian based Joanne Thomas Yaccato describes pinkwashing as “strategies that invariably lack depth, substance, variety or authenticity.”

Today, if you are tempted to sign off on a promotion or campaign that even smells of ‘pinkwashing’ here are some questions you can ask before making what could be a dubious investment:

1.   How do we create an experience that is an accurate reflection of women’s lives in our approach to advertising, products, services and store design?

2. Are we providing women with solutions rather than selling products?

3. What can we do throughout the entire customer experience to make women’s lives simpler?

4. How do we articulate what we sell through a wider-level lens?