When I sat down to listen to Y&R’s chairman Russel  Howcroft  present  a new campaign concept  for the photographic industry last week, I had expected leading edge insights that  would have accelerated consumer interest in photography. I was disappointed.

It appears that Y&R had not conducted any gender intelligent research into the subject and, that the creative mind behind the slogan: Shoot. Save. Share, was male. 

“So what?” you say, “the majority of creative directors in Australia are male.”

True, yet considering that Howcroft (who has a regular stint on the Guren Transfer ) was pitching to the photographic industry to invest up to a million dollars in the campaign, it was reasonable to expect that Y&R would have researched the primary buyers of digital cameras and photographic prints: women.

It would also have been a wise move to include a woman consultant in the final creative.

 Howcroft also lost me when he presented some insights into the impact of social media compared with traditional media. Citing a Victorian political campaign as an example, he gave statistics that demonstrated that Twitter was ineffectual as a media tool.

“Tell that to the Eygptian revolutionaries who overthrew the government using Twitter as their primary communication channel,” you add.  I hear you.

Unfortunately, Howcroft  gave no example (and there are plenty around) of the powerful use of Facebook by women, particularly boomer women who spend hours uploading personal, family and business images to share with their hundreds of friends online.

To be fair to Howcroft, he may have assumed that, because around 55 of the sixty marketing and sales executives in the room were male, he was talking to a mono-cultural audience. One that really only wanted a generic campaign without any gender insights, delivering the same thing to the same audience.

That may have been true once, but now I don’t think so.

When I caught up with some of those executives before the presentation, the story was the same: sales are terrible and they need a lot of help to not just sell, but survive.

The board of The Photo Imaging Council of Australia (PICA) is on the right track in its efforts to create an overarching campaign for the industry. This is important for manufacturers and retailers to grow and prosper, now and beyond.

PICA just needs to make sure that, before it invests any hard earned dollars, that those ‘creatives’ behind the campaign really understand that the global financial muscle of women is greater than the economies of India and China combined.

A market that business overlooks at its peril, and who would want that to happen on their watch?

I spent a morning this week with a senior marketing executive who manages a product used daily by women.  The conversation seemed to become circular when we started talking about the direction from the senior executives in Australia and the global head office, and it was painful.

In a recessed retail market this executive and the sales team is being pressured to produce more sales. Despite this, the marketing budget has been reduced drastically and the executive has been threatened that if sales results don’t improve, it will get cut even further.

Because these cuts started well over twelve months ago, the pro-active marketing to women campaign that was put in place in early 2010 has been eroded. 

Sound familiar? If you are nodding your head, it’s because this is probably happening to you right now, whether you are male or female.

Reasons for optimism: The big dogs

But, according to US expert Marti Barletta   who blazed a trail in bringing these gender intelligent understandings to US businesses, there is hope for progress in marketing-to-women over the next two years, for an interesting reason: the big dogs are paying attention.

Who are those big dogs? One pack includes giant consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and Booz Allen, which Barletta says have been commissioning studies and issuing white papers on opportunities in the Boomer women.

Beyond consulting firms, those big dogs including global governmental and non-governmental organizations from the UN to Habitat for Humanity, which have shown over and over that empowering girls and women benefits entire communities and countries, often faster than any other tool.

Part of this shift, Barletta says, is the growing recognition that women generally wield their power from unconventional areas of influence (areas that big dogs haven’t previously studied): the businesses they start with micro-loans, and the purchase decisions they guide from the home.

Barletta says, “The fact that the big dogs are in the hunt makes me glad because it brings attention and credibility to the topic. Most of the practitioners of marketing to women to date have been women, and what women bring to bear on this topic has been diminished because people think it’s kind of self-serving.”

If you don’t want to be even further back when the economy starts to pick up, it is critical to remember that you need to remain the most attractive option to the people who buy the most products – which is women.

“Marketing to women is not about trying to get women to buy more products – it’s about getting women to choose your brand of car or television over another,” Barletta advises.

CE executives who have woken up to the news that they will have to account to the Federal Government for their actions in putting women into senior management positions can start today by creating a Women’s Markets Manager role.

But they will need to dig deep to find the ‘ticker’ to override the derision of the male managers who either think that having female competition is a joke or somehow feel angry that this should even exist. But, if directors in Australia or in global head offices continue to let the male monoculture in the CE industry dominate, they will not only damage their bottom lines, they will be publicly “outed” when the Government releases the names of companies who do not comply.

Are you willing to have your corporate reputation and your company’s irreparably damaged by not standing up to the blokes in the business who are intent on holding it back?

But, if you are ready to change, take your business forward and increase your profitability, then you can start with these five simple steps:

1.     Create a new role and title it ‘Women’s Market Manager’

2.     Find a female team member or (if you have none) recruit a female to the role.

3.     Make it responsible for connecting with all the female staff in the business and all female customers.

4.     Make it accountable to the CEO and make sure that the whole company knows that it has your endorsement.

5.     Create a social media platform around this role which will promote your Women’s Market activities to the world.

Of course this is just a basic plan to get you moving in the right direction and to begin to shift the power base within your business onto a more gender equitable basis.

If you would like to find out how to take this concept further, let me know at Claire@connectedwomen.net.au.

But right now I’m off to the Chief Executive Women and Westpac Leadership Forum  at the Sofitel  Hotel in Sydney to meet some leaders who are taking gender equality in their businesses.

Whenever I speak to groups of male business executives and mention that around 1 million women in Australasia own their own businesses, it’s a blank look I usually receive as they try to compute this well kept secret.

A million women is a powerful force and I imagine that they are seeing this group powering down upon them in black suits and stilettos. But usually it’s the answer to this question that they are searching for: “How do you reach them?”

It’s a good question (if you really want to know the answer, you will have to listen to my presentation “Connecting To Women: 7 Steps to Bring Her Into Your Life.”) and one that is timely just days before we begin to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of International Women Day on March 8.

Today, it’s even more important that executives start to take the women’s market seriously because the ranks of women owning their own businesses are on the rise. More and more women fed up with having their talents ignored are throwing in their corporate jobs and starting up their own businesses.

Deena Shiff, the group managing director of Telstra Business, went to the heart of the matter when she addressed a lunch organised by Executive Women Australia on the topic: ”Will Gender Balance Boost the Bottom Line?” Shiff said women already ran a third of the nation’s small to medium enterprises, and the proportion rose to half when home-based businesses were included.

What is more remarkable, according to Shiff,  is that these are not pin-money businesses. “Some are phenomenal and they are less burdened by debt and more likely to turn a profit more quickly,” she added.

A survey released by Executive Women Australia  showed more than half the 1,500 members surveyed aspired to a senior executive role but a quarter thought it would never happen.

In addition, 44% thought it would take Australian business more than a decade to reverse the recent decline in women holding senior executive positions.

Tara Cheesman, the head of Executive Women Australia, said the survey results made it clear women wanted to see women in executive roles become the norm rather than the exception.

So, if you are still scratching your head and trying to visualise over a million women with powerful purses whom your marketing is probably alienating because it is ignoring them, don’t wait too long to change as our numbers are growing, quickly.