Women Don’t Just Buy Brands, They Join Them

Want women to be loyal to your brand? Consider these eight tips.

1. Connecting your female consumers to each other connects them to your brand.
When marketing to women, a brand must be differentiated, not in the way you present the brand, but in the way you bring women together around the brand.

Brands need to serve as connector-uppers for women seeking links with other women. Successful brands will “host” relationships among their female consumers, similar to the way brands sponsor chat rooms today.

2. If you’re marketing to one of her lives, you’re missing all the others.
Women lead multiple-lives, and marketers who concentrate on only one of them will miss out on all the others. Women have won the right to try out for any role they want, but the tasks just keep piling up. Women can’t abandon one role to assume another.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher writes in her book, The First Sex, “women tend to think in terms of interrelated factors, not straight lines.” She calls this manner of thought, “Web Thinking.”

For marketers the answer is to help women integrate their multiple- lives more seamlessly.

3. If she has to ask, it’s too late.
It’s easier to keep her than to win her back. In this world of prolific consumerism, if a product is disappointing, another more satisfying option is immediately available. If women have to go out of their way to track you down, and your attitude is “take-it-or-leave-it,” they’ll leave it.

4. Market to her peripheral vision and she will see you in a whole new light.
Women don’t bond with brands that market to them in an overly aggressive way. Women tune into multiple channels – scanning, hearing, and seeing the world on all levels. They pick up clues, weave together threads, intuit and infer the inner meaning. A brand needs to appear on the periphery, in the natural settings of her daily life, showing up unexpectedly, helpfully.

5. Walk, run, go to her, secure her loyalty forever.

The watchword is convenience. Sell to a woman at home, or wherever she may roam. Look not only at what your brand offers to her, but view it in terms of how, where and when it’s offered as well. Provide a service in going to her, not just a solicitation.

6. This generation of women consumers will lead you to the next.
As “mother” is the primary filter of all things in life, a woman’s buying habits are greatly influenced by what her mother bought. Develop a “brand-me-down” strategy and you will have an endless, rolling supply of already-loyal users – the children of current-generation users. Tide is five generations old and growing.

7. Co-parenting is the best way to raise a brand.
Women want to join a brand that they themselves help bring into the world. Marketers must invite their female consumers into the delivery room to be a co-parent at the birth of the brand, and encourage them to stay and help raise the brand to a healthy maturity. Co-parenting creates a deep emotional bond with the brand that is hard to break.

8. Everything matters – you can’t hide behind your logo.
Women do business with people they trust. Trust happens when you’re open about your actions and behave with a conscience.

Companies today need to add a fifth “P” to the marketing mix: Policy. Marketing to women isn’t just about value. It’s about values. There is enormous power in communicating your “ethical ingredients.” Watch Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone go down on their violation of this truth.

Faith Popcorn is founder of the marketing consultancy BrainReserve.