A recent blog post on Wired.com reminded me that industries can be cutting-edge without having any clue about how to market to women — women of any age.
The author of What Real Women Want in Their Gadgets was offended when she got a promotional email from ChicBuds, which specializes in “fashion-forward” electronics for women. Here is an image of the product that drove Wired’s blogger crazy:
Can you tell why women are supposed to want these earphones? That’s right: the bling! They’re bejeweled, and women (of course) would rather spend money on a tech gadget that shines than on one that offers specific features and benefits.
The blogger, Priya Ganapati, was right to identify one of the cardinal sins in marketing to women: to assume that making a device pink (or its equivalent) is what women are really looking for in any product category, much less consumer electronics. Tech marketers are among the worst offenders.
As marketers have known for quite a while (and as many comments on the blog confirmed) women want products that look good, but they want a lot of other things first – crazy things like functionality – in their consumer electronics.
Unfortunately, it’s not news that outdated stereotypes keep women from getting the consumer electronic gadgets they really want. And it’s not news that an additional set of stereotypes assume that Vibrant Boomer women don’t want the same gadgets their daughters and younger colleagues want.
We have shown before that the Boomer women we gather at VibrantNation.com are earlier adopters of new tech gadgets than most marketers understand.
The only gadget many tech marketers think a women over 50 wants is a device to monitor her failing health, or one that accommodates her diminishing faculties.
There are great reasons why the devices Boomer women are buying are the same ones that appeal to younger women, and to men: devices like Flip cameras, Kindles, and iPods (Wired.com blogger Ganapati also mentions Jawbone and Apple as innovators who make products that appeal to women and men equally, and market them accordingly).
At the same time, there’s no good reason why so many other companies continue to think that the way to sell gadgets to women is to make them sparkle.
thank you so much Lisa, that helps a lot. I know he tried to blame me for so much stuff, but like I told all of his family and mine none of that added up to a divorce. I do realize it's his needs, it just hurts so bad to think how many years he's
How funny....i only very recently (within last week) read the coconut oil articles on the web. (100 uses, 80 uses etc.) so i bouht some and ordered some from amazon. (Im a stockpiler.)
Have started trying some of the uses. I tried using it a
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