Her Experience
Introduction
The stereotype around women’s spending habits is distorted — formed by male dominance in many countries. One of the most popular and most incorrect stereotypes is that women are completely unwise when it comes to financial literacy and saving, and there’s no shortage of jokes about them on this subject. But I assert that, if not for my mother — her wisdom and care — my siblings and I wouldn’t have been able to attend good universities. From this platform, I say: thank you, Mom. Most claims made about women are unproven hypotheses, never tested in a systematic scientific way. They are essentially myths that cannot be generalized.
Through the same superficial lens, women are viewed in many other areas, and on that basis many services or products are designed — products that don’t last long because they failed to value women and trust their intelligence and judgment. In this article I want to address women and their experience as customers (as females, in parentheses). I hope my arguments can shift, even slightly, the distorted picture around women’s gender and their right to receive a great experience designed specifically for them.
The Purchase Decision
Women entering the workforce has changed the equation significantly. Although they already played a major role in decision-making, that role has grown with their increased independence. I don’t want to get into the religious view of the matter, but there’s no doubt that the concept of qiwāmah [guardianship/financial responsibility] — which many men have also exploited in the wrong ways — has been shaken in many homes where women have become the primary or sole earners. Doesn’t this deserve special focus? Shouldn’t their needs and expectations be considered differently than before?
Emotional Needs
A woman (mother, sister, or wife) buys many services or products to meet emotional needs, and what she buys on many occasions is not for herself but for her son, husband, brother, or father. The wisdom for business owners is to understand more deeply the nature of this bond between a woman and her loved ones, and the emotional needs she wants to satisfy — so they can satisfy those needs through what they offer or through the advertising messages they broadcast across their channels.
Rational Needs
The shopping experience can be insane with children — to the point that my wife and I alternate trips for household items, one shopping while the other babysits the kids. But a company like IKEA has figured out how to handle this well, building a dedicated kids’ play area inside its stores so that parents can shop calmly, confident their children are in good hands. You need to understand that women’s rational needs can be outside the product or service itself — and that, of course, doesn’t diminish the importance of the functional aspects of services or products that meet their needs.
The Workforce
Offering products specifically for women requires a gender balance in the workforce. Some authorities recommend increasing the proportion of female employees (“feminization”) at companies looking to serve women better. McKinsey research [source] indicates that companies with gender diversity in hiring are 15% more likely to deliver better financial outcomes than their peers — because their presence influences decision-making inside the company. This also applies to customer-facing teams; a woman is more comfortable being served by another woman. The opposite drains companies in matters related to customer harassment, especially in companies that serve both genders but only have male employees. And if you can’t hire female employees, at the very least you can include women in workshops to design your products/services or in marketing research to understand them better.
In her book, one author argues that the concept of “feminization” should extend to the external parties a company works with — advertising agencies, web and mobile app design firms — so that they deliver a product suited to women.
Training Male Employees to Engage With Women
I recall a story that happened to one of my female relatives, when a sales associate at a clothing outlet (a famous global brand) took her mobile number under the pretext of registering her in a loyalty program — only for her to be surprised that night by a man with a weak character messaging her on WhatsApp asking to “get to know” her. Lord, give us patience.
Train your employees well and make clear the boundaries they may not cross. You may even need to spell out the simplest details: for example (and not limited to), if a female customer smiles at you, that absolutely does not mean she’s interested in you. To repeat: if you can’t hire women at your company, at least make sure men deal with female customers with full neutrality. Ask male employees to think before they speak (would they say the same words if the customer were male?). The best option is to provide female employees and to put a no-harassment policy in place — if your country’s laws don’t already cover this where your company operates.
Consumption Habits
Consumption behavior differs between genders. It’s not enough to ask your wife, sister, or mother and treat their inputs as facts on which to base your decisions. Marketing research in this area is critical.
Understanding women’s consumption habits requires qualitative and quantitative research to understand this segment across all age groups in greater depth. We recently conducted 14 focus groups at my workplace with female customers of different ages, in different cities, and from different social levels, to understand this segment in painstaking detail. We arrived at many discoveries and insights that may help us evolve our products to better suit women, or to design new products specifically for them. Doing this is not at all simple. Example: picking pink as the cover color of your product isn’t enough to attract women — you must understand the picture from every angle, understand how female customers perceive your product, understand their expectations, and whether it meets their needs.
If you have a good social-listening tool, try to extract reports on women’s media consumption habits on social networks, and draw lessons for planning your future campaigns.
If your services and products are specifically for women and not for men, you must understand this gender’s habits and preferences in detail and design everything accordingly — and don’t forget the feminization topic mentioned earlier.
Entering New Markets
When entering new countries, understanding the culture deeply is essential and well known to businesspeople. But what I want to highlight is that some countries are more feminine than masculine — among them Sweden, Thailand, and Costa Rica. As a result, the culture in such countries tends to focus on quality of life and personal relationships. The point: the feminine touch is unmistakable at both the company and country level. For more on country culture, visit:
https://hi.hofstede-insights.com/
Loyalty Programs and a Focus on Women
If you have an existing loyalty program and want to attract more female customers, use the program by enabling point redemption with brands that specifically serve women — fashion, personal care, makeup, and so on. Providing and advertising this can attract a specific segment of women for whom loyalty programs are a primary or secondary motivator in choosing a service provider.
Vodafone Egypt designed a package specifically for women under a dedicated brand. This package includes exclusive services for women, including a monthly visit to one of the well-known beauty salons in Egypt, and 250 EGP vouchers every three months for use at select women’s clothing brands.
Bank Audi in Egypt also issued a credit card specifically for women. The bank’s marketing campaigns for this card focused on women’s empowerment and on highlighting the most influential women in the world (perhaps to add an emotional dimension to the product). The card’s rewards program emphasized point redemption with entities serving women in the first place. Even the card packaging was designed in a way that targets women in design and color.
Portraying Women as a Commodity
A note to marketers: presenting women in a sensual way in your ads insults women and portrays them — or, more accurately, their bodies — as a commodity. This isn’t limited to the Arab world. It’s also important to flag the blind following of social media influencers without any assessment of the influencer in question, and whether her values align with the company’s values or those of the community you’ll be advertising to.
In Closing
There are many gender-neutral industries — they offer their services to both genders. Still, these companies must start paying more attention to female customers, because the experience economy has driven many investors to launch companies focused on one gender to deliver services or products designed especially for them — even offering the option of customization. If gender-neutral companies don’t act, they won’t be able to recover the market share that will slip away to those companies focused on a specific gender.
Before closing, I’d like to thank both @Omnia Negm & @Abdullah Elbadawi for their valuable input on this article.
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