Womentum

No Age Limit

For those of you who read this and think to yourself, "I bet all this stuff is really just happening with younger women," I offer this anecdotal evidence that it's not.

My mom bought a new car yesterday. She's 63. Here's how it happened. She told dad several months ago that it was time for her to get a new car. Now she's not that particular about what kind of car she drives - she just wants some comfortable, basic transportation that's safe and gets good mileage – so she did a little bit of research into what was out there. She researched what was a fair trade-in price for her old car. She talked with me about the car buying experience - I bought one last year, she last bought one in 1990.

So, off she went to the local Chevrolet dealer, talked with Bob the sales advisor, and decided on her car. She called Dad, who came to meet her, and she showed him what she wanted. They signed the papers, and bam, she drove her new car home.

Still think it's a young woman's world? It's a woman's world, alright, but there's no age limit.

I Am The Greatest (Girl)

As promised, here's my snap of Muhammed Ali from my sighting at O'Hare Airport last week.

This got me to thinking about Title IX (well, the article in the Wall Street Journal last week might have helped, too).

Title IX is the law that outlaws sex discrimination in schools that receive public money. It's been used mostly in the realm of high school sports - creating new teams for girls and giving them funding at similar levels as the boys' teams. Today, more than 3 million girls have participated in school teams and female college athletes number around 160,000.

Since the law was passed 33 years ago, women have benefitted from the law in ways other than softball. Back in the 1970s, many universities and graduate schools restricted admission for women to something like 10 percent of the entire class. Yikes. Today, roughly 60 percent of undergrads are women and half of all law and medical grad students.

This access to higher education, to competitive situations, to team building, has contributed to the success of women in the workplace. Now most of the time, competitiveness is labeled as a male attribute, but take a look at Mia Hamm and tell me that women aren't competitive. It's just that we work differently from men to achieve similar goals.

Picture Perfect

As some of you may know, I had to take an unexpected trip last week to Phoenix. So there I am, stuck at O’Hare Airport for an hour and a half, and I notice one of those zippy little carts that whizzes people around the terminals. Only this one isn’t moving. And it’s surrounded by all these people. And they’re taking pictures. Turns out the passenger in the zippy little cart is Muhammed Ali.

Now I’m not a fan of boxing, but hey, this was a serious celebrity sighting and I know my uncle is a big Ali fan. So I dug out my digital camera and grabbed a pic. (Sorry I can’t post it today – it’s not downloaded yet – maybe tomorrow.)

That’s a long way around to start talking about digital cameras. See, women spent about $55 billion on electronics gear in 2003 (men spent about $41 billion) and are involved in almost 90 percent of all electronics purchase decisions. Nearly 30 percent of all households owned a digital camera in 2003, and guess who’s snapping the pictures? Women.

In last week’s Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com), in a front page story titled “Kodak Sharpens Digital Focus On It’s Best Customers: Women,” we got a look inside how Kodak has turned the tide on its freefall by turning it’s attention where it makes the most sense. When filmed ruled the world, women took about two-thirds of all pictures and ordered the most prints. But with the advent of digital photography, men emerged as primary users – and many images ended up like my Ali picture, stuck on a computer.

But women want prints that we can send to our friends. Prints that we can post on the fridge. Prints that we’re wiling to run into a burning house to retrieve. Kodak (www.kodak.com) has long understood the emotional power of pictures – remember the Kodak moments campaign? – and took a smart tack. Women, the company discovered, have the skills to download and print photos from their computers, but didn’t want to mess with all the wires. So Kodak developed a docking station the prints lab-quality photos straight from the camera.

And guess what happened? Kodak’s now the leading provider of digital images. They’re selling cameras. They’re selling stand-alone printers. They’re online, in drugstores and of course, right there at home with the printers. To borrow a phrase from another popular advertising campaign, Kodak is everywhere women want to be. Smart.

Kodak’s CEO, Daniel Carp nailed it when he said, “Throughout history, women have been the keepers of family memories.”

Now that’s a great consumer insight to base your strategy and creative executions on. What would happen if you turned your attention to providing superior products and services to your best customers? Do you know who they are? Do you know what they want?

Now that would be an interesting picture to develop.

PS: I'll try to post the Ali photo tomorrow...

Where am I? What time is it?

Monday, July 11

Today's thought: jet lag sucks.

OOTO

I'll be out of town Thursday and Friday for a family funeral.

Look for a fresh post on Monday and thanks for reading.

Karen

Farmer Jane

It’s July and the homegrown tomatoes are starting to come in. There’s nothing that says summer more to me than a fresh tomato sandwich with lots of mayo (try it with a little just-picked basil chopped in) and just a little bit of salt.

So all these fresh summer vegetable dreams got me to thinking about organic food. The New York Times (www.nytimes.com) recently reported on the increasing number of organic farms run by women. In 1978, the number of women-run farms was just 5 percent – now it’s nearly 15 percent or approximately 250,000 American farms, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Nancy MacNamara, an organic berry farmer from Bovina, New York, (www.honeylocustfarmhouse.com), has a theory. “People – especially mothers – started to want to know where their food is coming from,” she said. Chefs are also paying top dollar for her berries. “My father thought I was crazy to produce so few berries…but he never could have imagined how much chefs would pay for them.”

Cheryl Rogowski (www.rogowskifarm.com) wants everyone to know she can run a forklift and shovel manure with the best of ‘em. But she also suggests that today’s farmers can benefit from a more feminine perspective. “Farming has changed and farmers now have to do things they are traditionally bad at: marketing, educating consumers, collective action, communication.” Sounds like a job for women!

It's Hammer Time!

I was a daddy’s girl. Okay, I still am. It was me, not my brother, who used to hang out with Dad in the garage with the power tools. I took shop class in 8th grade – took Home Ec in 7th grade – and I have to tell you that shop class was so much cooler than learning the proper way to crack an egg.

With women initiating more than 80 percent of all home improvement projects, including serious projects like plumbing and building decks, they’re using and purchasing more power tools than ever. More than 17 million single women own their own homes – making them their own handywomen around the house. And 67 percent of women now consider themselves DIYers.

And that’s where Barbara Kavovit comes in. She’s the founder of Barbara K! Enterprises, the makers of tools designed especially for women (www.barbarak.com). Check out her screwdrivers with built-in thumb rests and the springloaded handles on her pliers. Barbara K understands how women think. “Women don’t shop in terms of “I’ve got to go buy a hammer.” They think in terms of “I’ve got to get that picture hung. I’ve got to fix that leaky faucet. I want to hang those shelves.” And that’s why she packages her tools in kits. There’s a picture hanging kit, for example, called the Hang It Up kit that includes a hammer, level, tape measure and hanging hardware.

There’s also Tomboy Tools, (www.tomboytools.com) who sells power tools and kits for women through in-home parties. At these girl gatherings, a Tomboy Tools consultant teaches other women things like tool usage, drywall and plaster repair, painting techniques, leaky faucet and toilet repair, and woodworking.

Then there’s Be Jane, an online home improvement resource and community for women (www.be-jane.com). Visit their How To library, learn from their Tips & Tricks section, check out the home buying guide, and place your order for your very own pink toolbelt. Geez, can’t they come in another color?

How can you take advantage of the opportunities that the new women’s market represents?

He said WHAT?

I might be turning into a Danica Patrick fan (www.danicaracing.com). I’ve never seen her race in an Indy Racing League event, but after her run-in with Formula One head Bernie Ecclestone last week, I might have to tune in.

Ecclestone called her to congratulate her on her impressive drive at the Indy 500, but in the same conversation, he reportedly told her “Women should be all dressed in white like all other domestic appliances.”

Not surprisingly, Patrick said was she caught off-guard and upset by Ecclestone’s insanely insulting comments. “I can’t believe he would say it to me over the phone, not to my face, but directly to me,” Patrick said. “I was a bit confused…so I don’t really know what to think about it.”

It’s mindsets like Ecclestone’s that must be changed in the marketplace. Women are not only a legitimate target, but now THE primary target. We’re not appliances, but we buy plenty of them. We’re not all dressed in white like a nurse, instead we’re graduating from medical school in record numbers. We’re not only driving cars in the world of professional racing, we’re also influencing more than 60 percent of new car purchases.

Are you listening, Bernie?

The Fable of Monolithic Women

We’ve written a couple of posts lately about wine and women, and here’s a worthwhile commentary from Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/lifestyles_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_4537_3855279,00.html

Yes, it’s a little tongue in cheek and I particularly liked this part:

Woman-as-target always strikes me as a bit, as it were, broad. “Women’s” skis don’t bash my bumps better, jeans cut for “a woman’s curves” don’t hug mine, and what’s up with genders for perfume and deodorant? Since when do women sweat sugar and spice?

Which leads me to an entirely different thought. I was just thinking about other products that are segmented by gender and I immediately thought of all the talk around the razor battle. Venus vs. Quattro. Do women really need a razor specifically for them? Feel free to weigh in on the debate by posting your opinion by clicking on the Comments link below.

Then I remembered that we just bought shaving cream this weekend. I buy the cheap stuff, Barbasol, and was interested in the new addition to their label. It featured an Olympic athlete – a real man, they called him – and also a sentence or two about how the company donates 10 percent of its profits to charities supporting children.

A nod to feminine values on a package “for real men?” Interesting. Very interesting.

Who's Making This Deal?

You know how you can’t help but overhear things sometimes, even when you’re trying not to? That’s what happened to me this weekend. I was with Lin Batten, a friend who’s a realtor at Smith Mountain Lake (www.lakeretreat.com), and he was showing this couple a house. Lin’s wife, Marie, came too.

So Marie and the female client were talking while Lin and her husband were standing several feet away talking about something else. So the wife says to Marie, “Wait, I have to hear what they’re talking about. See, I have to let him think he’s making this deal.”

According to the numbers, women influence more than 90 percent of all home purchases.

Guess this client was one of them.