Truly Twisted Marketing

I am raising my hand up right now to swear I'm not on a feminist kick.

But…

I came across some startling information and it's my duty as a responsible blogger (which is the same thing as a blog addict, I think) to share what I found.

As a marketer, I do a lot of research on who I am marketing to. In fact, creating very specific personalities and personas for the person or people I am marketing too has proven extremely useful in creating marketing and pr campaigns. It's called persuasion architecture and you can find a lot of detailed information on it at the Marketing to Women Online blog.

Here's a rundown on the stats I found:

• Women head approximately 40 percent of the households with assets of more than $600,000 and have quietly become the majority asset holders in the United States controlling 51 percent of private wealth in this country.
• The ranks of affluent women will only increase and it is estimated by 2010 that two-thirds of all private wealth will reside in their hands. 
• Women account for roughly 80 percent of all consumer buying. The Center for Women's Business Research indicates that businesswomen (working women and female entrepreneurs) are the primary decision makers in households making 95 percent of the purchasing decisions.

Now, I love seeing that information passed around and talked about. The problem I ran into is that not everyone felt the same way.

(You can see all the stats I listed above and more in the book Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy or visit Andrea Learned's blog.)

Armed with my newfound super cool knowledge about women I decided to do one of the things we women do best, share. I shared it first with a male colleague. 

I was truly surprised. He was not impressed.

In fact, he didn't believe me - thought I made it all up or had misinterpreted the information. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. So, I moved on to the next person. I made sure it was a man, just to see what sort of reaction I'd get. 

Same thing.

I decided to do a very unofficial poll. I asked every man I came into contact with over a two-day period what they thought of the information I'd found on women and their purchasing power. Here's what I found out:

• None of them was nearly as excited as I was about the whole concept
• Statistic or not, they all questioned where I got the information (had to be some crazy terrorist man-hating blog)
• Almost all asked if the income these women enjoyed had come from dead husbands (ie. she be a gold digga?)
• 100 percent of the men I asked went from relaxed to panicked when they realized the topic of conversation
• Worst of all, only one saw it as a positive thing. And even he admitted it made him feel a little strange.

What a bummer. Here I thought we'd made real progress…you know, equality for all people regardless of gender or race.

Women, as a whole, it seems, are a pretty viable market with exponential growth in their purchasing power. Who wouldn't want to capitalize on that? But, how do you overcome the big monkey-wrench of men-vs-women? Even bigger, maybe, is how do men, who still hold the majority of positions as business owners and CEO's, market to these women with any kind of integrity or sincerity?