Chapter 2: Now You See her - The Visible Approach to Marketing to Women

Overview

The two main methods for reaching consumers of either gender we call the "visible" and "transparent" approaches to marketing ”plus a third or "hybrid" approach that combines the two. Each of these options can be highly effective in reaching women in particular. The success of one approach or another depends on the product or service, the profiles of your core women customers, and the ways in which they want to be reached.

In some cases, it makes a lot of sense to adopt the visible approach, distinguishing your product from the many others on the shelf by directly calling out "for women." In other cases, the best way to resonate with women requires marketing to them transparently ”by delivering the product or service in a way that works with women's information gathering and purchasing processes, but that doesn't single them out as a special group .

Finally, the third marketing option connects with your female customers in a hybrid way through a combination of the two approaches, which usually means calling out "for women" or creating a special women's initiative for a particular product or service within an existing brand.

You just can't avoid wrestling with the decision about how to best reach the women in your market. There's much to consider, as we show throughout this book's exploration of a woman 's buying mind and what influences it. What we do know is that your brand must do all it can to align itself with its female consumers' existing perspective of your product or service. Only by meeting women where they are, can you gain their trust and then be able to give them a new view of your wares.

In this chapter, we explore the visible approach, in particular; and we also touch on how you can include more visible elements when marketing to women within a traditional marketing campaign, resulting in a hybrid approach. Though we suspect that in coming years there will be fewer occasions to effectively utilize the visible option, it's certainly worth touching upon. Your marketing brain should be aware of all the choices, so you can make the best decisions for connecting with your women customers.