Kernels of Truth About Marketing to Women: Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?

articleid=234)

Kernels of Truth About Marketing to Women

Published : August 30, 2000 in Knowledge@Wharton

In EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women, trend maven Faith Popcorn discusses what women wantfrom on-site tailoring service at womens clothing stores (yes!) to being asked for their opinion by the companies they deal with. "Women and men are as different shop-ologically as they are biologically," says Popcorn. And given the importance of women in the marketplace - Popcorn claims they "control or influence 80% of all consumer spending" surely, this is a worthy topic for a book. But for our money ($26.70 including tax), wed like a worthier book than this one.

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The problem is that Popcorn (whose narrative has been set down in first-person format by colleague and co-author Lys Marigold) is a lot better at pronouncing her "Marketing Truths" than providing evidence for them. For example, Popcorn describes how Jiffy Lube, a client of her BrainReserve consulting firm, has taken her advice on connecting with female car owners. "Guns and Ammo is not preferred reading in the waiting room," Popcorn notes. She reports that, today, when a woman drives in to a Jiffy Lube, an employee introduces himself to her. And, if the woman wants to stay in her car while its being serviced (say, because her child is sleeping in the back seat), thats fine. Sounds like sensible marketing. But dont you want to know whether following this advice has increased the number of Jiffy Lubes female customers? Improved its bottom line? Improved the morale of employees? Anything? Popcorn doesnt say. In another chapter, Popcorn describes how Nabisco came to her firm for help after sales of its Snackwells brand of cookies slid from $270 million to $200 million in just two years. Why had the cookie crumbled? As Popcorn explains it, women who are not as skinny as Ally McBeal were dismissing fat-free cookies as the answer to their "body issues." What was needed, she advised, was an effort to "nourish womens self esteem." And because moms are associated with cookies (as well as apple pie), the best way to do this was for Snackwells to sponsor mother-daughter workshops on self-esteem. These were successful, she says, without quantifying exactly how successful. As it happens, Promo magazine hailed these workshops, as executed in 27 markets by WatersMolitor of Minneapolis, as one of the 10 best promotions of 1999. Snackwells sales, which had slipped 25% in 1998, rose by 3% in 1999. But articles elsewhere last year reported that Snackwells sales had declined because consumers didnt like the taste. Cookie buyers finally balked at sacrificing good taste to get fat-free, especially since Snackwells still had lots of calories. Nabisco responded by adding back some grams of fat (even if not as much as in Oreos) to restore taste. Shouldnt that have been mentioned? A book about marketing should point out that what Nabisco really did was to tie a savvy promotion with a reformulation of the product. Such an explanation would only be recognizing that (to use the title of one of EVEolutions chapters) Everything Matters. In a book on how women are "different" from men, it matters that many of its examples are in areas in which men and women do not differ at all. To cite just one: Popcorn drops the statistic that less than 10% of women-owned businesses with fewer than 25 employees offer disability insurance as a benefit. You might conclude from this that insurance companies are ignoring the potential of women business owners. But just one call to the Health Insurance Association of America reveals that the statistic is true for all
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Kernels of Truth About Marketing to Women: Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=234)

firms with fewer than 25 employees. Really now. Possibly, if you are a Faith Popcorn fan (and her two previous books, The Popcorn Report and Clicking were best-sellers, after all) you will consider the comments above to be minor quibbles. You may not mind that, in serving up her latest message, Popcorn includes a pitch for a line of home office furniture she helped develop, drops in a plug for a company her co-author owns on the side, offers kudos to her clients, lavishly praises her own company, and uses one cutesy catch phrase after the other. There are so many Popcornisms in EVEolution (like blamestorming, brand-me-down, nanospan, and TrendProbe), that the book even starts out with a five-page glossary. This seems like overdoing it, but theres no denying that Popcorns fascination with word play (starting with changing her last name from the much less catchy Plotkin in 1969) has served her well. American Demographics magazine may claim to have been first (in 1985) in noticing that baby-boomers were turning into homebodies, but even the magazine admits it was Popcorn (in The Popcorn Report) who gave the trend its identifying name: Cocooning. What Popcorn does best in EVEolution is to brainstorm ideas. In every chapter, she offers a bunch of ideas she thinks would win over women, each targeted to a type of company or even a specific company. She does this in that best-of-brainstorming tradition that says nothing is too way out or too silly to suggest because you never know where a good idea will come from. She doesnt get into cost-benefit ratios or other dull stuff. She just lets loose. Department stores, says Popcorn, should offer shuttle buses from the far reaches of their parking lots or free valet parking, baby sitting services run by trained professionals, child psychologists in the toy department, e-mail access in the dressing rooms. Office Depot, she suggests, could become Life Depot, "offering a selection of last-minute items for the hard-pressed female small-business owner. Besides the ream of fax paper send me a case of Coke and a chili dinner for four. But first, and fast, a computer repair person." Fugazy Limousine Service, opines Popcorn, could make use of "dead time" that falls between taking an executive to and from a meeting, to ferry its employees children home from school or to a friends house, thereby pleasing female employees. In the best chapter in the book, Popcorn addresses herself directly to corporate titan Ron Perelman, owner of Revlon, among other companies. Perelman, Popcorn points out, has taken "one of the great global brands" and moved it just this side of oblivion. Popcorn pops many kernels of ideas on what Revlon could do to regain its old glamour. "Why cant Revlon sponsor a new kind of beauty pageant focusing on beauty from within," she asks. "Why cant Revlon become the facilitator of womens support groups?" Why not sell Revlon products from a cart that is wheeled right into offices? Why not put Revlon advertising on the side of a tampon? If only because of its notion that Revlon needs to do something, Ron Perelman should buy this book. For others, were not so sure.
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