Get the little stuff right, and the big stuff will take care of
itself. Women develop a collage of impressions about a business
from a hundred small factors. Everything from its cleanliness to
the design of the shopping bag gets a woman's attention. While
men tend to make judgments based on first impressions and key
interactions, women never stop gathering information. Smart
business owners turn this to their advantage by investing in small
amenities women can appreciate.
Nancy Poisson, area director for 333 Curves franchises in
northern New England, always looks for ways to draw new customers
to the fitness centers. While each new franchise advertises locally
when it first opens and offers free trials, customers renew
memberships based on experiences at the training centers. Poisson
has new franchisees plant free membership bags in waiting rooms of
businesses ranging from pediatricians' offices to quick-lube
shops. That gets potential members to come by the clubs for a
week's worth of free sessions.
Then it's up to franchisees to keep the excitement going.
New Curves owner Tammy Latvis of Hanover, New Hampshire, got 500
leads when she opened her second location in spring 2003. She
ensures that workout leaders never flag in their encouragement of
women clients who are self-conscious about how they look in workout
clothes. Women turn into the centers' best missionaries when
they invite friends to join them for free sessions. Latvis is
always cooking up rewards for women who recruit new members.
"It's like the 'free with purchase'
mentality," she says. "It works!"
The Right Choices
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Women have so many work and family responsibilities, they
don't have time to research and ponder every buying decision.
Offering carefully selected choices will win business over an
overwhelming A-to-Z plethora. "One way to get women excited is
to have fewer but better choices," says Carrie McCament,
managing director of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, consultancy
Frank
About Women. This is a strategy adopted by designer Eileen
Fisher, who offers simple clothes in a limited palette; and some
furniture stores, such as Storehouse Furniture in Atlanta, that
have pared their selections to an "everything goes with
everything else" array.
That's the core of Gretchen Schauffler's strategy to
build a new brand of house paint. In the past three years, she has
taken Devine
Color Inc.'s paint from a nonentity to a boutique brand
available on the Web, in West Coast stores and through more than
300 dealers nationwide. Schauffler saw an opportunity to reinvent
wall paint and the way it's sold in the mid-90s when she and
her friends were decorating their houses and getting frustrated
with the paint available. Because traditional paint companies offer
thousands of shades on tiny strips, there were too many choices.
Schauffler, 42, and her friends would make choices according to the
chips and end up with walls that looked nothing like they
expected.
She created a palette of just over 100 colors, and collaborating
with a regional paint manufacturer, she came up with a new way to
merchandise the paint: daubs of paint on palette-shaped boards in
coordinated groups. "Women would understand [if] color was
organized in a way that they could recognize the subtleties. They
do it with makeup and fabric all the time," she says. It's
working. Devine Color Inc. is growing at 30 percent per year,
bringing in 2003 revenues of $8 million.
Peggy McCloud, 49, owner of Jill's Paint, a home decorating
boutique in Los Angeles, sees women customers walk into her store
and gravitate to the Devine display. "They love the palettes
of complementary colors and that you can go home and
experiment," she says. Customers can buy pouches of each paint
color for about $3, take them home and paint their walls to get a
read on whether it's right for their rooms.
Seeing Green
Plenty of marketers think they know how to appeal to
18-to-24-year-old women, but there are surprising crosscurrents
among college-age women. In August 2003, Frank About Women, a
marketing consulting firm in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
released a survey of women's attitudes about shopping.
Enthusiasm for shopping peaks when a woman is in her 20s and when
she's 55 and older, says Frank About Women marketing director
Carrie McCament. "Younger shoppers' discretionary income
is all theirs," she says. "They want to be the
best-dressed person in their groups." Shopping and socializing
are entwined for young women, she adds. Not only do friends'
opinions count on everything, but young women also conduct buying
excursions with friends.
So what's the surprise? Their moms count as friends. The
generation gap doesn't exist anymore, say marketing consultants
and executives at companies that target women. Having seen their
moms manage careers and households, young women consider them a
resource for smart consumer choices.
The key is to avoid assuming that today's young women are
just like boomers were at the same age, warns Mary Lou Quinlan, CEO
of Just Ask
a Woman, a New York City consulting firm. Many young women have
traveled widely and are accomplished and picky consumers. At the
same time, a high proportion of them live at home. Though many
carry student loan debt, they also have a lot of disposable income
because they have no household expenses.
"They're not like [the characters in] Sex and the
City," says Quinlan. "They're more conservative.
They are optimists, but not activists." One thing they have in
common: They expect purchasing and customer relations to be
thoroughly supported by technology. This is one group, says
Quinlan, that expects businesses to relate to them through e-mail
and online ordering.
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