I came across an article on Parenting.com about “what research really says about gender and babies,” by Anita Sethi, Ph.D. The author provides a summary of many different studies on how boys and girls differ in behavior early in life, demonstrating that gender stereotypes are mostly valid. Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls.

For me, the article supports my position that you can’t deny that women have fundamentally different needs in the sales experience. Trust me when I say that as obvious as it is that women and men are different, I frequently have to defend myself to those sales and marketing executives who think selling is the same regardless of gender.

The behaviors that little girls exhibit earlier than boys are many of the behaviors that I train sales people to pay attention to. Girls talk sooner and their language skills and vocabulary develop sooner, so let her tell you her story before you rush in with your sales pitch.

They like face time, and early on they demonstrate more skill at reading emotion in your expressions, so make sure you give her lots of eye contact when you talk to her.

Little girls are also shown to be better listeners. They seem to prefer the sound of human voices to other sounds, so you can expect that your women customers are listening to all you have to say very intently. But that doesn’t mean you should do all the talking. Remember that they like to talk too, so you have to know when to let her do so. I talked a while back about giving her four seconds to pause before you jump back in, and that is where I think that balance is.

Only a couple weeks ago I discussed how you can copy a woman’s movements and gestures (in moderation), and the early childhood research that Sethi reviewed showed that girls zoom ahead of boys in imitating behaviors.

Of course she has plenty to say about little boys too, and you might consider their differences when selling as well. Boys like motion and activity, so maybe you should keep them moving, around the showroom for example. Boys would rather look at a mobile than a single face, so maybe instead of seeking eye contact with him, you should have some moving object handy to keep him pacified while you talk to him. Maybe this explains why men enjoy doing business on the golf course.

Delia Passi, Founder of WomenCertified® and author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women is a regular columnist on eBrandMarketing. Want my take? Email me and visit my sites www.medelia.com, www.womencertified.com

Catrina McAuliffe, brand planner, talks the importance of really knowing your target customer, plus she shares insight on what goes into excellent consumer insight; and how companies can leverage that information to elevate awareness, drive trial and recommendation of their products and services.

CVS recently announced that it would test a high-end beauty shop, called “Beauty 360,” next to some of its drugstores. The stores are set to carry luxury skin care, cosmetic and fragrance brands, and are even considering offering mini beauty treatments like manicures and hand massages. Based on the renderings and information featured in WWD, Beauty 360 stores look like they could be poised to compete with Sephora – especially if CVS leverages its thousands of existing stores and customers’ trust in the brand.

And CVS is choosing to start this shift in an economic climate that is, by almost all accounts, not ripe for retail expansion.

Mary Lou Gardner, CVS’s senior category manager for beauty, had this to say about the new stores: “If you create the right environment, you can sell any brand.”

As websites and online marketers, the environments we create consist of the text, images and layouts on a screen. Creating a unique web environment where browsers and shoppers want to spend time can be even more challenging than building a bricks-and-mortar store – there’s less diversity at your disposal, and a much smaller space with which to draw people in.

But perhaps we can take a clue from Gardner’s team, and from Mickey Drexler, retail CEO extraordinaire and J. Crew’s current head. Drexler, too, wants to create inviting spaces where shoppers want to hang out. And he’s injecting more luxury into his brands, too, sourcing fabric from higher-quality European mills and concentrating on tiny details like buttonholes.

Just because consumers are reigning in spending, doesn’t mean they want to be makeup-free or outfitted in burlap.

Creating a beautiful browsing experience and pointing customers towards luxurious-yet-affordable products are strategies that we can easily shift to the Web. Let’s just I can convey all that to our new site’s designers.

Whether you are a Gen X, businessman, parent of two grade school kids or a single, female, dog-loving Boomer, you’ve likely come across an ad that was targeted directly at you but completely missed the mark. How does that happen?

Marketers will always fail when they work from a blanket-style hope that “all men/women/children everywhere” will respond to a given pitch. Instead, a brand can only get beyond a homogeneous diluted campaign by dialing in to the complex beings it strives to serve.

Complex is, after all, who we are as people and as consumers. This is perhaps even more the case for the future if what John Zogby writes in his new book, The Way We’ll Be, is true. Just what might that increasing consumer complexity mean for forward-thinking marketers? The New York Time’s Janet Maslin quoted Zogby on this topic in her recent book review:

Traditionally, marketers have been focused on segments like: “women,” “men,” “Boomers,” and “homeowners” etc. But, each of those is so broadly inclusive that any more significant commonalities among members gets lost. While gender, for instance, may indeed be a helpful segmentation tool, what more might we learn about a consumer at the granular level? Is he/she a green-living, socially conscious, dog-loving, parent of grade school kids who loves to ski and garden? Micro-precinct style exploration would seem to offer more clues about how a brand can become relevant to the complex consumer (and help him/her think “that’s me” when they see the brand’s ads).

Interestingly, if marketing to women is your task, you have likely long been using this sort of granular process to tap the minds and buying habits of your female customers. In fact, “marketing to women” is not what any of you actually do. Rather, marketing to a very specific micro-precinct of people who may tend to be female is.

Any brand that has been using the micro-precinct approach (even without knowing Zogby’s term) has already been putting itself at the center of passionate conversations about the issues/problems its products might be a part of solving. Such brands have realized that when they do what they do, and well, their very unique and interconnected, action-oriented customers will do the rest.

It makes sense that the longer a person lives, the more granular their views, interests, passions and understanding of themselves (and reflection thereof) become. This certainly influences the ways a consumer thinks and buys over the years. The interesting thing to note for the Millennial generation, however, is that they may already be operating at this “granular” level, even though they haven’t yet lived that long life. That generation’s completely digital world experience has had much to do with speeding them to their more complex inspirations and motivations.

On this group (which he calls First Globals as per Maslin’s article), Zogby sees it this way:

He believes that First Globals see what the other groups do not, and that their lives are public and interconnected in ways that were not possible in pre-Internet times. To hear him tell it, this group will usher in a new era of sanity, substance and citizenship.

It used to be that older consumers “grandfathered” their ways of living/buying into the minds of the younger generations. But, today it seems that the reverse is more likely. Younger consumers, with their “First Globals” perspective, are “grandchilding” their ways of living/buying on up to their parents.

A fascinating and challenging development for marketers, indeed. The opportunities for a brand to interconnect with consumers, on all their granular levels, are immeasurable.

     For those of you who are moms—and for those of you marketing to moms—it’s that special time of year where our summer schedules are ripped to shreds and we gear up for the BIG CHANGE. School. While some moms celebrate, like the fellow football mom on the sidelines last night who told me she was happy because back-to-school was when her summer starts, others like me see it a bit differently. How in the world will I get all of these schedules aligned, kids picked up, school clothes and supplies purchased, sports uniforms signed for, teacher forms completed, and still have some semblance of a work life? Fortunately, my work team is understanding, and my husband relatively helpful. 

     But we all know who makes the purchases (me/moms) with an average spend of $590 per household on back-to-school items, who sets the house schedule (me/moms), and who holds the stress (me/moms).

     So the last thing I need—with higher prices on all things I buy and less time than ever—is condescending advertising served up to me in my moments of high stress. (I can handle it better when it’s not times of big change, just a note to the boys/men who comprise 85 percent of the big ad agency creative departments nationwide.)   

     Wal-Mart, who follows only amazon.com as the retail beneficiary of the most back-to-school spending nationally, stepped into my stress with a particularly troubling spot featuring a mom standing weirdly in the hallway of a high school talking about all of the things she can’t do (What? She does everything, remember?) for her teenage daughter. As we watch, the daughter finds the right friends because she has the right yellow shirt. The shirt also appears in a poignant moment as the girl stares into the bathroom mirror and feels confident because she is wearing it.

     A second spot shows the mom of a boy sitting in his class again talking about all the things she can’t do for him, but he excels in class and gets applause for his presentation because he is smart and has a laptop. The mom ends by saying: “I love my job.” Her job, I guess, being to not do anything except spend money to buy said computer. Clearly, she isn’t working as she is lurking in her son’s classroom all day. 

     Hmm. The more I see these ads, the more their gender stereotyping bothers me. My three boys care just as much about their clothes as my daughter, who also has a laptop because she’s smart. 

     Isn’t it time to get past messages about clothes making the girl popular? Huge advertisers with huge budgets can get creative, tap into today and bring me and my daughter empowering and inspiring back-to-school messages. I would welcome those. But I’m finished with being talked down to, and so is the next generation of purchasers: my daughter and her generation.  Because, all they’ll “have to do, is be themselves”. And that’s not about what they wear.

By the way, according to my friends at Brand Keys, following amazon.com and Wal-Mart as beneficiaries of the consumer’s $590 average spend are: J. Crew, Foot locker, Target, Stride Rite, Staples, Nike, L.L. Bean and Radio Shack. So now you know.

Kaira Sturdivant Rouda is the creator of Real Living, the first national women-focused real-estate brand. She has more than 20 years of experience marketing to women and is the author of Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs. To learn more, visit www.RealYouIncorporated.com and join the community. 

This is one subject I’d like to knock out of the park. If I take the ball and run with it, I can sink a three pointer and cross the finish line.

Men, I know that sports are often a great metaphor for life and that many sports analogies work really well in so many situations, but please can you keep it to a minimum when selling to women? It’s not that women don’t appreciate sports; it’s just that so many sports analogies fall flat with women. Plenty of women know all about the rules of all the major sports, but when faced with the compulsion to drop a sports analogy, I’d like to suggest that you might drop back ten yards and punt. (more…)

Where are all the women at?

This question has been asked for centuries by men. Now it’s being asked more and more by advertisers.The answer? The Internet.The Internet is proving to be the next great medium for advertisers trying to reach women. Websites targeting women are hot commodities, as are blogs and other social media properties. A recent New York Times article - Woman to Woman, Online - discusses the interest in tapping into women’s love affair with the Internet. (more…)

Today’s interview of Lisa Johnson, CEO of Reach Group Consulting, who just released a study she conducted in conjunction with Lisa Finn and Meredith Corp. It’s called “The Gamma Factor: Women and The New Social Currency.” The study highlights five segments within a group of women called “Gammas.” There are 55 million of these women in the U.S. and they are the opposite of Alphas in their internal and external view of the world.

The report said that the fastest-growing online retail sectors are clothes, shoes and accessories.

So shoppers in the UK, like everyone else, are buying stuff online. We’ve all heard the stories of Europeans snatching up Manhattan condos and seen them stocking up on designer clothes in boutiques we usually just browse. Now that we know pound-wielding (even stronger than the Euro, of course) shoppers are buying online, take advantage of the weak dollar to market your product to them. Convincing Europeans to pay a heftier shipping charge should be a lot easier than convincing them to clear their calendars, hop on a plane and come to New York to tour your newest properties.

It might be worth checking into whether you have a foothold in the UK to determine whether an overseas marketing campaign would be a good idea. At SheFinds.com, 5.3 percent of our users come from the United Kingdom. Not an insignificant number, especially if those shoppers spend a lot more than their U.S.-based counterparts.

The main challenge here will be creating content for both groups simultaneously. Even though the shoppers in the uSwitch report have “less spending money than ever,” it may not seem worth it to ship a scarf that costs eight pounds across the Atlantic. To attract foreign shoppers, focus on what’s unique about your wares or the products you feature – like these three small designers from Oregon who create eco-conscious clothes. At 45 pounds, your savvy British shopper might want to buy one of those soy halter dresses for herself, plus one for her niece and one for her boyfriend’s sister. Because at 45 pounds, why not?

Online shopping expert, Michelle Madhok, is the CEO of White Cat Media Inc. publisher of blogs SheFinds.com and MomFinds.com, sites that help busy women shop online.