Marketing to Women

Mainstream marketers continue to miss the mark when attempting to develop and market their products to women. While I’m all for companies spending more time creating and promoting products that serve the particular needs and desires of women, most products and/or marketing campaigns that aim to attract women leave me unsatisfied at best and more often offended. The marketing departments at Dell and Mars, for instance, have demonstrated with their recent marketing campaigns that they are extremely out of touch with women.

Dell created a separate section of their website for women’s PCs and named the section Della. The major point of differentiation from Dell’s other PCs is the smaller size and weight (cause all women love small things!) and more color and design options to choose from. Dell provides superficial advice that demeans the very market they target, which includes things to do on your Dell like shop for clothing and track calories. These “features” have nothing to do with Dell computer capabilities, but rather are activities that anyone with Internet access can engage in. C’mon Dell, don’t patronize me! Mars, a company that sells chocolate candy of all sorts, has developed a new candy bar for women called “Fling” which uses sex and pink wrapping to convince women to buy chocolate.

When will marketers realize that using pink wrapping, and selling sex will never be as effective as developing products and marketing campaigns that treat women as intelligent, multi-layered, multi-tasking, with diverse backgrounds and interests? Marketers need to understand that women are not a niche market that need a separate section on a website, but are instead part of the human family, with needs and desires that should inform and enrich products, websites, etc that have been previously molded primarily according to men’s expectations and desires.