“The Buying Power of the 80 Percent Minority,” on today's Talk of the Nation, discusses a central fact of contemporary marketing: women make most of the decisions to buy high-ticket items:
Women make the household purchases in 80 percent of homes. Now, more and more businesses realize that what women want are power tools, dishwashers, digital cameras, automobiles and houses. Guests discuss how retailers are catering to the way women shop, and changing marketing strategies to appeal to the major purchasing power of women.
This has been known for a long time, actually. A decade ago, when my VR company was preparing a living-room-sized 3D showroom for a regional hardware chain, the company's executives made sure we understood that women would be making most of the decisions -- no, if I recall, they said “all of the decisions” -- regarding interior design, including purchasing hard goods (like lighting and ventilation) as well as softer items (furniture and draperies).
One of the TOTN callers-in, a young retail electronics salesman, observed that even in dealing with “Engadget” types of buys, women were better informed, more inquisitive, and ultimately the people who made the buying decision. Males in couples often stood on the sidelines while their female partners did the bargaining -- hard. The show host speculated that men don't want to be one-upped by salespeople, which is how they feel if they have to ask for advice. The same is true, it might be observed, for couples on the road or traveling overseas: who wanders endlessly, and who asks the questions that gets the couple where they're going? You got it: the gal.
Brand managers lust after the 18-35 male target market . What if they're wrong? What if the 18-35 male cohort is highly visible merely because it watches media -- but it doesn't actually buy the goods advertised thereon? Who's pitching to the women? For that matter, who's pitching to the 35-plus women, especially the Boomer women, who control so much of the society's wealth? Most marketing professionals still talk about target markets in disturbingly vague terms that suggest they don't really know the outcomes of their investments.
All of this may be critical to marketers, but what does it say for experience designers? Three things:
• Experiences are almost certainly different for men and women, categorically, outweighing individual differences. Designed experiences must be tested for these differences.
• Any experience design for a mixed audience must be designed with the assumption that the women's experiences will be decisive, if the point of the experience is a subsequent action on the part of the “experiencers.”
• Teams of experience designers will benefit by including women who see things in a context that men may not share -- and by taking their advice.
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
