MARKETING SPECIFICALLY TO WOMEN

That billboard campaign you’re contemplating? Your newspaper ad? Your radio advertising — whether it’s just a solo radio commercial or a series of radio commercials? Your new TV campaign?

If it’s targeting women, there’s something you need to understand — an aspect of women’s outward view of which most men aren’t aware: the issue of safety.

As men move through the world, they’re not forced to think about what the people around them are thinking. But from Day One women are trained to evaluate the various potential threats that could be coming at them.

Men can’t understand how much scarier the world is for women.That’s because men don’t evaluate risk the same way women do.

In experiments, women will look at the exact same scene on television with the exact same circumstances and see things as much more threatening than men will.

Understanding women’s needs for safety has led to several marketing success stories which you might not be aware of.

Have you ever walked into a hotel, seen a gigantic vaulted atrium and wondered, “What’s the deal with that? Why waste all that space?”

Well, it turns out these hotels are successful BECAUSE of the atrium lobby.

There was a very observant architect for the Hyatt team — John Portman. He learned that an increasing percentage of guests at business hotels were women.

He did some research and found that women face all aspects of business travel with considerable trepidation. Women talked about the traditional long and sometimes dark corridors in a typical hotel and how it scared them to be walking there at night when no one was around.

His solution was the atrium lobby: You’re always exposed.Whatever happens in the hallway can be seen and heard by others.

The same thing goes with glass elevators.When I was a kid, there were very few glass elevators. Perhaps you saw ONE.

But now they’re everywhere. Why?

Women are far more comfortable in glass elevators. There’s no dark corner where someone can lie in wait, and whatever happens can be seen by other people in the hotel.

But most men have never even thought of elevators as a particularly scary place.Which is my point: Men think very differently about these circumstances.

So if you’re marketing to women, you need either to know about these things (e.g., by being a woman who already has experienced them) or LEARN about them.People who successfully market to women do so by asking themselves, “How can I address their fears?”