In Company Intermediate second edition

Speaker 1
I work as a financial consultant in Stockholm. And what I’ve found is that my female clients
bring me ten times more new business, more referrals, than my male clients. It took me a
while to notice this. But then it hit me. When women are happy with the services they get,
they tell all their friends and colleagues about it. Satisfied male clients, on the other hand,
either don’t think to tell anyone else or want to keep the information to themselves. Now, I
pretty much concentrate on targeting women as clients, because when you do a good job for
one client, you gain access to her whole network of contacts. It’s perfect word-of-mouth
marketing!
Speaker 2
The Chinese Confucian tradition puts men at the head of the household, chief decision-
makers, but, ah, I don’t think this reflects the current situation in China. Women now account
for about 47% of the workforce here, so we are an important market. But, ah, actually, in
China it is young women, maybe 16 to 30, who are the real future. Young Chinese are
enthusiastic adopters of all kinds of technology. And there are about 160 million young
women in China. That’s more than the entire population of Japan! Huge business opportunity.
Mao Zedong used to say ‘Women hold up half the sky’. I say women hold up most of the sky!
Speaker 3
There’s no question that women are the main purchasing decision-makers in most families. In
Spain, where I come from, especially, women rule the home! Of course, you have to
remember that there are more and more single people these days. This is another important
trend. The number of people living alone in northern Europe, where I work now, is
approaching 50%. So there are plenty of younger men around with no-one to make those
buying decisions for them! But in Spain, where people often live with their parents until they
are in their late 20s, this is not so much the case. And in the older age groups, yes, it is
definitely the women we need to target.
Speaker 4
Hm, well I think it depends on which school of thought you belong to – the men-and-women-
are-totally-different or the we’re-all-basically-the-same school of thought. Personally, I stand
somewhere in between those two ideas. I mean, it’s true that too many companies are run by
men who have no idea what their mostly female customers want. How can they? I think it
might be a good thing if more boards of directors actually looked like their customers! On the
other hand, I think you can take the gender thing too far. Several companies have tried to
create products specifically for women – cars, computers – and they’ve often failed. You end
up stereotyping: women will want this, need this, like this. My advice? If you’re going to target
female consumers, do masses of market research first. Don’t trust your intuitions. They can
be very wrong!

In Company Intermediate Mid-course Test, Class Audio CD1 track 26 1