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.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 11:02 am and is filed under My Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.