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.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 12:17 pm 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.