How Advertisers Psychologically Mug Women

As a journalist who writes about issues of interest to women, I receive a steady stream of pitches from public relations and marketing agencies:

Secrets of discreet feminine hygiene. Products that will eliminate pounds and years. An "age-defying lift" brassiere. Another bra that makes you look like you have cosmetic breast implants (who knew that was desirable?).

For Mother's Day, there was the Love Doctor dispensing romance advice for single moms. For Valentine's Day, there was the condom paper weight and a PR rep offering an interview with America's Love Doctor.

The problem with pitches like this, many of which trade on women's anxieties, is that they seem to assume women are mainly in the business of buying trifles. And that extends to the general marketplace.

"While marketers may be aware that women are major spenders on the so-called small stuff -- groceries, apparel, kids -- they are not fully aware that women are the majority of buyers of new cars, consumer electronics and home improvement," says Marti Barletta, CEO of the marketing consultancy TrendSight Group, who was a keynote speaker at last week's annual M2W marketing conference in Chicago, which debated how marketers could improve their appeals to women.

Women's Purchasing Power is Green, Not Pink

Marketers, Barletta says, "are worried that marketing to women means making it pink and that would horrify men. ... They don't know what marketing to women is."

While marketing campaigns often seem to assume men are more technologically oriented than women, Barletta, a veteran marketing and advertising executive, says that when Best Buy analyzed its patrons, it found the majority of those cruising the aisles were men, but at the cash register, the majority of buyers were women.

Even though women make 85 percent of all consumer purchases, Barletta says the pay gap, which leaves women earning 76 cents for every dollar earned by men, creates the impression that women don't have or control much money. In fact, "Women bring in more than half of household income," Barletta says. "In a partnered household, a woman spends not only her own paycheck but most of her spouse's or partner's as well."

Much has been said and lamented over the years -- including by me in columns in this space -- of marketing that gets women to open up their wallets through a sort of psychological mugging. Ads target us with the self-improvement message. One example that comes to mind is Nutrisystem's touting of going from an already modest dress size to an even smaller one ("I went from a size 10 to a size 4!"). The relentlessly repeated premise is that we're inadequate. Unattractive. Unworthy.

Reality Check

Then there's the reality. Barletta describes women now between 50 and 75 -- a group virtually ignored by marketers -- as "the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated, active and influential generation of women in history."

If marketing reflected this -- instead of picking away at our fears about our complexions, our weight and the elasticity of our skin -- it might go a long way toward countering ageism and boosting the confidence of young women who look to older women for role models. Who knows, it might even help close the incredible gender gap in the U.S. Congress and corporate board rooms.

But Barletta says even sophisticated marketers are half a step behind where women are right now. "They'll say, 'We're offering these tools to empower women to take control of their lives, to give them more freedom and flexibility.' That's language from the 1980s and 1990s. I keep telling them women are empowered and they need to be thinking about serving women."

Barletta singled out the already highly-praised "Dove Campaign for Real Beauty" as the best women's marketing campaign of 2007. The campaign's ads for Dove soap featured "real" women -- in other words not fashion models -- of various ages, shapes and sizes, and was intended to widen the definition and discussion of beauty. (A May 12 New Yorker article about a photo retoucher quoted him as saying the Dove models had in fact been a bit retouched but he has since clarified that he "was directed only to remove dust and do color correction -- both the integrity of the photographs and the women's natural beauty were maintained.") Dove says women's response to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive; nearly 2.5 million visitors have visited the site at Campaignforrealbeauty.com. Parent company Unilever's first-quarter revenues exceeded its forecast for the first time in six years, in part because of increased sales of Dove products.