If your marketing plan for 2011 looks like last year’s model, you may want to step back and take a bigger look at where your business needs to go in the coming years. We all get myopic especially when we haven’t seen a business climate or consumer marketplace like this – ever! Here are four game-changing trends followed by five plan-changing ideas:
Demographics Are Gross Lumping people together according to their age, household income, or education level was fine in the heyday of mass marketing. But demographics aren’t a fine-enough filter in our multi-channel media-saturated world. It’s not enough to know, in the broadest of terms, who your target audience is. Now you need to know how they are and, most importantly, why they buy. And if you don’t know, you may be watching your competitors eat your market share for lunch.
Technology Converged Personal computer plus Internet plus social networks plus mobile phones equals a convergence of technologies into one massive, uncontrolled, 24/7, global communications platform. At least two things happened: it empowered consumers to talk (or talk back) to brands. And it created new inter-connected means for brands and consumers to connect. Five years ago, we didn’t have to consider how our big branding ad was going to play out as a streamed Internet video linking to a geo-targeted 2-fer coupon accessible via smart phone! The accelerating number of possibilities is enough to keep any savvy marketer awake nights.
Mad Men Meet Joe YouTube You gotta love Don Draper. After a night of drinking, smoking and fooling around, he can show up for a major campaign presentation, pull a single concept out of his fedora, and have the client eating out of his hand. From the 60s to the 90s, big splashy ad campaigns reigned. Did they work? Sure, many did, especially when advertisers threw a ton of money behind them. Especially the funny ones. But then along came YouTube. Now any bloke with a slightly warped sense of humor, a flip camera and a log-in can generate as much buzz as a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad. That can give marketers heartburn as they re-think how to allocate their budgets.
Consumers Rule Marketing used to be easier. You created a product, you advertised, it you sold it. Back then, it didn’t matter much who bought it as long as enough bought it. It didn’t matter how it was made as long as it didn’t break before it got home. It didn’t matter if the means to the end were sustainable as long as the bottom line was. But in today’s world, consumers’ peer-to-peer influence on your top line is unprecedented. What they don’t like, they don’t buy and they don’t hesitate to yelp their reasons why. And, by the way, most of those consumers controlling the cash are women. Well, three-quarters of it anyway, even when spending is down.
What Now?
The future is now and you can’t afford to wait. Visionary companies are searching for new ways to step up their marketing and engage new consumers using new technology. Here are five things you should consider:
Consumer Centricity Make your business revolve around the consumer not the other way around. Your product is not the centerpiece of your brand. Your customer using your product is.
Know Your Consumer Inside and Out To build your marketing around your consumers, you need reliable, actionable intel. Research tools like Roberts Worldview Assessment, for example, provide psychological insights into various consumers’ values and behaviors and direction on how to engage them.
Total Consumer Engagement Every consumer touch point becomes part of the brand. From the product itself to the ways the consumer can learn about it and interact with it to the retail or retail service experience. Your internal and external support teams need to understand that entire experience and make sure every part of it delivers your brand effectively.
Brand Response Before the Internet, tracking results was a bit sketchy. But with online analytics, the guessing is over. That’s why all advertising roads need to lead to the Internet. We call it Brand Response, the blend of brand ads to get attention, direct response to drive the action and online interactivity to make the sale. Great advertising and accountability ARE possible.
Change the House Rules Look at your corporate culture. Are there any fresh marketing ideas being generated? If not, a more holistic process and a less silo’d organization can help. Sharing best practices to engage consumers should be a full team effort.
At Red Kite, our team and partners can design a psychometric research study to identify your best markets and develop the blueprints and implementation plans to help you grow your brands and bottom line.
A billion or so people around the world are glued to their TVs as each of the 33 trapped Chilean miners is hoisted to safety. Normally a story like this wouldn’t find its way into a blog about business and gender marketing. But this story is a metaphor for our times.
Think about it: the recession is our mine shaft. Here we are, waiting in our own uncertainty and watching these men to see how one navigates extreme adversity. Do you fold or do you find a way? If you’ve watched any of them emerge from the Phoenix Capsule, as it’s been dubbed, you get a pretty good idea of which choice they made half a mile underground.
As one miner said, “I met god. I met the devil. God won.” Religious preferences aside, that pretty much sums up the astonishing optimism and resilience humans are capable of. It’s flat-out inspiring!
So what’s the lesson to be learned? The human spirit is irrepressible if we push beyond our fears. And how do we apply that to our lives as entrepreneurs, executives, and marketers? We can choose to be fearful or we can choose to be fearless. We can look at our businesses and hunker down or we can look at the possibilities and risks realistically and choose to innovate, adapt, launch, market, grow and thrive.
At Red Kite, we put our trust in sound research, innovative thinking and actionable planning. If we can inspire our colleagues to make clear-eyed, forward-looking decisions — whether they’re trying to get a new business or product off the ground or capitalize on bigger opportunities– we have learned the lesson and passed it on.
So what’s a plastic bag got to do with our usual blog topics like women as key consumers and entrepreneurs, how men and women differ when it comes to greenifying their worlds, fabulous market research toolsand advertising’s role in the evolving American Saga? Actually, there’s a thread of logic here. Follow me now.
Red Kite is about marketing. Bottom line, marketing is about helping businesses brand their products and entice people to buy them. At its noblest, marketing is about helping people make informed decisions about the products and services they buy. Sometimes, somewhere between those two objectives, marketers and consumers both fall into bad habits that have nothing to do with the sellers’ products or the buyers’ needs – hence, the over-rated, over-used, unnecessary, not-really-all that-convenient, single-use plastic shopping bag. Did you know that, worldwide, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion of these things are consumed yearly? And by consumed I mean that we use them for a few minutes (between checkout and kitchen counter) and then toss them – done. Fini. Bye-bye. The bag has no vital role in marketing or consumerism, and everything to do with over-consumerism. So since we’re all re-evaluating what’s important in our personal and professional lives, in re-defining our businesses and where they fit in the growing worldwide concern over sustainability and environmental and human health, we offer our 2.0 list of the things you, as an individual or as a business, can do to reduce, reuse or recycle the plastic bag:
10. Return that bulging balled up mess of bags to your grocer’s plastic bag recycle bin – a no brainer!
9. Visit www.ReUseIt.com and get the factual low-down and links to other useful sites. Don’t forget to visit their store and buy reusable substitute products. If you’ve got an ironic streak, you can buy one of their “Plastic Bags Blow” bumper stickers.
8. Are you a business owner looking for smart ways to brand your business? Try your logo on reusable bags. Give them as gifts to employees, clients, and vendors. Have employees bring their bulging balled up masses of bags to work and do a mega recycling project — makes a great PR story. The ideas are endless here for the imaginative boss.
7. For the politically minded, you could try taking that bulging balled up mess of bags and mailing it to your local and state representatives and ask them to “ban the bags” or recycle them for you. The good news is the bags are weightless, so postage won’t break your budget.
6. Take your bag stash to your local farmers market, second-hand store or library and give to the vendors to bag-up their customers’ purchases.
5. Donate them to Upcycle Exchange in your area where “artists transform post-consumer stuff into decorative and functional items for sale.” As a thank you, you’ll get a discount coupon good toward the items crafted by local artists. http://www.upxchange.com/
4. Make them into gift bows. Find out how: http://bit.ly/creaturecomforts For the super-crafty among you, make them into way-more amazing things like purses, bracelets and pop-art-ish raincoats. Check out how: http://bit.ly/bagcrafts
3. Pawn them off on your kid’s teacher – they always need stuff.
2. When the grocery clerk pops that first item into the open jaws of a complicit plastic bag, JUST SAY “NO” and snatch it back out of the bag before they strip the bag from its metal frame and proceed to drop your second item into the next bag.
1. Watch this cool video, then share it with your flesh-and-blood friends, your Facebook friends, your LinkedIn colleagues. Narrated by Jeremy Irons, it’s the most imaginative little film for anyone of any point of view about the unnecessary lifespan of a lowly plastic bag.
This is one “bird” I’m happy to see become extinct.
When it comes to greening up the household, there’s a bit of a green gender gap in America. According to our consumer research colleagues at Earthsense, more women (81%) than men (76%) believe that an individual can make a difference when it comes to the environment. But more men (36%) than women (29%) think they personally are doing enough. So when you take those few bits of data and put them into one living environment, what do you get? A recent piece by our video insights friends at Snippies in New York may help bring it to light.
An entry in the Snippies-sponsored “Families Struggling to Go Green” video contest shows a typical American family (mom, dad, two kids) and what they’re doing to reuse, recycle, renew, conserve and consciously consume. What it reveals is a difference in attitude and behavior between husband and wife. Both recognize the enormity of the problem. But he is less convinced that their family’s efforts will make much difference in the overall scheme of things and tends to do less. She, on the other hand, tends to do more. Three things keep her motivated: 1) a desire to make a difference, 2) a desire to instill sustainable behaviors in their children, and 3) good old-fashioned guilt. She, for example, is loathe to let gallons of water run down the drain while waiting for the shower to warm up, while he “turns on the shower, walks away and goes and does who knows what.”
Let’s look at this from another angle. Last post, I talked about the unique psychometric research being done by John Marshall Roberts at Worldview Learning. In that blog, I talked about John’s research indicating that business women in the sustainability arena may well be the most effective change agents going forward. Of equal note, Roberts’ preliminary consumer research, segmented by gender, also supports the notion that mainstream women may be the more effective change agents in buying green.
So, what’s the take-away from these findings for all of you kind enough to read Red Kite’s blog? Whether you’re a manufacturer or marketer with sustainable consumer products to sell or an ad agency advising your clients, you need to:
1) Recognize the potential of women consumers to boost your products’ market share.
2) Convert her environmental emotions into buying action. She who recycles is more likely to be she who buys green.
3) Provide honest, accurate, meaningful and accessible product information. It’s a deal-breaker if you don’t.
4) Understand and eliminate the barriers to purchase that stand in her way.
5) Give her authentic reasons to trust your brand. If she feels you are disingenuous or negligent about the safety, health and well-being of her family, she will go elsewhere.
6) Hire more women! You won’t find a better gauge of female receptivity to your product development, labeling, merchandising, marketing and advertising.
I’ll just bet if you do your research and dig down into the minds of your customers, you’ll find a green gender gap and a storehouse of environmental emotions you can tap. And if you can’t find them, I’ll also bet Red Kite can.
Leave a comment and share who wears the green pants in your family. What are you currently doing to be green? What do you think you should be doing to be greener? Or why do you think being green is for frogs?
Men and women see the world differently. That’s not meant as a psychobabbley, Myers-Briggsy kind of statement. Yeah, yeah, Mars/Venus and all that. That idea a decade ago did help dispel the notion that beer and pool after work was for everybody. And it released wives and girlfriends around the country from worshipping at the altar of Sunday afternoon football (not that that’s a bad thing). Unfortunately, it spawned a bunch of lame reality-show stereotypes — Jersey girl meet jack-ass boy.
What I’m referring to is new psychology-based research that sheds light on the way we humans see the world, what we value, how we communicate, and how open we are to the future and all its promises (or fears). It also validates some of the assumptions that thought leaders in marketing to women and economic development have been saying all along.
According to John Marshall Roberts, applied research psychologist and CEO of Worldview Learning, Inc., mainstream American women’s core values tend to be more humanistic and holistic than their male counterparts. Men’s core values tend to be more individualistic, pragmatic and absolutistic than women’s. So what does that mean?
Women, in general, put a higher value on human relatedness. They tend to listen more to the emotional subtext of a communication rather than the “what’s-in-it-for-me” facts. Men tend to focus on the facts, not the intentions behind them.
Women are also more socially optimistic than men, open to new ideas, messages, people or situations. As their social optimism increases, they become more holistic, even spiritual, in their worldview (Oprah?). The majority of American men tend to be more cynical and less socially optimistic (O’Reilly?) All of this serves to validate what we already “think we know about women and men.”
Where it gets really interesting is in the evolution of worldviews. Yep, people’s values and outlooks change and, by Roberts assessment, in a predictable way. Over the millennia, a dominant worldview gives way to an emerging one which becomes dominant until a new worldview emerges – and so on.
Take the emergent systemic worldview which combines a creative, non-conformist approach with an analytical thinking style. Among innovative leaders and practitioners in the sustainability movement, this worldview is more common than in the general population. Makes sense. Companies like Nissan with its first-to-market electric car – the Leaf – come to mind.
But if you divide the sustainability community along gender lines, who would you guess is most likely to hold this analytical/expressive problem-solving worldview? Surprisingly, it’s the women! According to Roberts, they’ll be the ones to imagine a better world, inspire the people, and assemble the teams and tools to build it.
At Red Kite, that all makes perfect sense to us. We’ve studied women’s behavior for several years and advised clients about the wisdom of growing market share by connecting with women. Now, with insightful psychometric research, we can explain not only WHAT women want, but WHY they buy and HOW to win their hearts, minds and loyalties.
Most advertising shows us the world seen through a masculine lens. That’s because most ads have been, for more than 10 decades, dreamed up by guys. Sure, there are the Peggys who’ve made their way into the creative bullpen, understudying the Don Drapers of our business (If you haven’t checked out Mad Men on AMC, do so). But even today, 97% of advertising creative directors are guys, so it all adds up. But does it make sense? I don’t think so.
What if advertising showed us the world seen through a female lens? What would that look like? And why would we want to do that in the first place? Let me answer that question first.
Women dominate consumer spending, to the tune of trillions of dollars. So, yes, even advertising that doesn’t reflect her world produces results. But, with women, the power isn’t in the one-time buy. It’s in her brand loyalty and repeat purchases, and in her influence over the purchasing behaviors of her family, friends, colleagues and, now, total strangers on the Internet. And at the heart of her loyalty is her belief that the brand understands her and her world.
What this means is that advertising creatives are going to have to step through the looking glass, and study up. Agencies will need to hire more Peggys. And brands will need to invite more female decision-makers into the board room – if they want to get this right; because, honestly, a little misstep is magnified in the world on the other side of the glass.
So does this mean that boy-humor in beer ads has to go? Not really. But since women do most of the household grocery shopping, wouldn’t it make sense to tap her wallet for that extra percent or two of market share? Cars, electronics, appliances, computers, mobile phones, it doesn’t matter the category. There’s market share to be gained by the savvy marketer who pushes beyond trite stereotypes and leaps forward into the world as women see it. She will appreciate and reward the effort.
After my last post, I wondered what would happen if micro-loans were made available to America’s many micro-businesses, often owned by women. You know, the Mrs. Fields-in-the-making, the beauty shop owner, the food-cart operator, the mobile IT tech, the plumber or landscaper. What would these entrepreneurs do if they had access to even the smallest amount of capital needed to launch their businesses?
Then I stumbled across an article posted yesterday by Newsweektalking about Grameen America—the new US subsidiary of the bank that invented micro-lending. The fact is they are now participating in micro-lending right here on our turf! According to the article, “nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population has no access to credit, and 18 percent has very little. This is the population Grameen aims to serve fueled by loans from institutions like Wells Fargo and Capital One.”
According to Red Kite’s favorite micro-lender, Kiva.org, many small businesses in the U.S. “lack access to traditional bank credit because their loan request is too small, their length of time in business is too short, or they operate in an industry that banks typically do not consider, such as home-based sales.”
The truth is a little bit CAN go a long way. Jumpstarting the littlest of businesses can change a woman, a family, a neighborhood, a community. “I did it, so can you!” she says challenging her friends and neighbors to empower themselves. Even at this level, micro-businesses have a bigger economic role to play in job creation and fueling the economy through increased business and consumer purchasing. For example, the average Kiva-sponsored loan in the US contributes to the creation or retention of 2.4 jobs!
From our experience working with women-owned businesses, most women want to do what they love and truly believe in. When that happens, positive results follow. That’s why Red Kite is committed to helping women entrepreneurs. You can too.
Join Red Kite’s Kiva Team and help us reach our 2010 goal of raising $10,000! Our next loan will be to a woman entrepreneur right here in the U.S. If you join our team, you’ll get regular updates on your borrower’s progress. And you’ll see how quickly the loan is repaid and how quickly you can get that money back in circulation to another borrower. Best of all, it starts with just $25.
“Double dip” – that sounds like a summery confection at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream. But, of course, it isn’t. With worries over the economy taking a second dip into the recession pool, Congress is fueling up the debate over a second economic stimulus. On one side, you’ve got economists and policy-makers who read the history books and look into the crystal ball and think spending is the way forward. On the other side, economists and policy-makers reject that path as morally and fiscally misguided. And, somewhere in the middle are those who think businesses can jumpstart the economy. But the one area of agreement is the urgency to create jobs. No one thinks that losing approximately eight million of them since December 2007 is a good thing.
Two blogs ago, I cited a statement from an Ernst & Young report and it sticks in my head: “If women entrepreneurs in the U.S. started with the same capital as men, they would add a whopping 6 million jobs to the economy in five years – 2 million of those jobs in the first year alone.”
So how’s this for an idea: create an economic stimulus initiative for WBEs (women business enterprises) focused on access to capital. Provide the means, which even established WBEs have lacked, to accelerate growth, build capacity and hire workers. Provide the investment necessary for innovators to bring their Next Big Thing to the marketplace and then build capacity and hire workers.
Is it risky? I’m not talking bailout here or handout. I’m talking low-cost loans, incentives and tax credits – all the usual stuff. On that basis, taxpayers and workers would benefit on both levels. As far as repayment is concerned: I haven’t yet found the stats on American business women’s track record for loan repayment (anyone who knows the answer, please let me know). But maybe we can gain some insight from Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, known worldwide for its microlending programs to the poorest of the poor. Ninety-seven percent of their borrowers are women. And 97% of their loans are repaid. My guess is that American women would be a good risk too.
Tell me that wouldn’t go a long way toward putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Love that phrase! Wish I’d coined it. Hit me like a rocket when I saw it. Now that I sit and stare at it, I’m trying to figure out why.
I think it’s because it sums up where we are in the economic evolution of women over the last half century. What began as a feminine mystique grew into a women’s movement fueled by many things, not the least of which was economic necessity. Women entered the workforce en masse. By the ‘80s, women were circling the board room in their navy blue suits, yellow bow ties and chunky heels, working twice as hard to fit into a workplace that didn’t fit their biology or psychology in the hopes that being female wouldn’t matter. It did. Adaptation wasn’t reciprocal. The workplace didn’t change. It was still a foreign country in which these women were still first generation immigrants.
By the turn of the millennium, the second generation of Gen X Execs was ready to say “I can’t do it all” and stepped off the fast track onto the mommy track, at least for awhile.
Meanwhile, back at the think tanks, offices and cubicles, academics, policy-makers, and an increasing number of break-out female thought leaders were busy with the tedious work of redefining the workplace. Tinkering with new rules, new systems, new language, new “what ifs.” Envisioning a new whole system that wouldn’t favor women so much as favor living, breathing beings set in a common context linked together by innovation, technology, capital and other resources in order to thrive. Voila! An ecosystem. We have arrived at the true threshold when we can think and speak of what we are doing in such whole and sustaining terms!
* Sourced from Roadmap to 2020 – Fueling the Growth of Women’s Enterprise Development, a strategic plan sponsored by IBM, developed by Quantum Leaps, NAWBO and WBENC, and introduced at the recent WBENC women’s business conference. More information here.
It’s rare (ok, actually never) that I quote a sports figure, let alone a hockey player. But Wayne Gretsky got it right. You can’t get to the goal messing around in the wrong end of the rink. Joel Arthur Barker, in his book Future Edge, put it another way: “Too often, the future of our business, of our industry, of our nation, exists just outside the boundaries of the prevailing paradigm, impossible to see.”
Consider this: the organizers of the recent WBENC (Women’s Business Enterprise National Council) Annual Conference hoped to have the same level of attendance as in previous years. Pretty optimistic, given that more tumbleweed than attendees blow through most hotel ballrooms during these dog days of recession. Not only did WBENC get the 2,500 they were praying for, they got more than 3,000 attendees. And they announced that certified women-owned businesses had reached the 10,000 mark – a 43% increase in just 2-1/2 years. So what’s up with that? Dare I say “paradigm shift.”
Food for thought
Women are on a roll. Whether we’re talking about women earning the majority of undergraduate, post-graduate medical and law school degrees, women holding down more professional and managerial positions, or women consumers controlling more than ¾ of the $10 trillion in US consumer spending, the paradigm of business and consumerism is shifting fast. And the businesses and marketers who persist in skating where the puck has been will be at greatest risk. In other words, the businesses that don’t see the future coming will be relegated to the past.
Speaking of the future, a major new IBM-sponsored initiative was introduced at the WBENC Conference. Called The Roadmap to 2020, this strategic plan is designed to develop the ecosystem for women’s enterprise development at the global level. The plan calls for a comprehensive effort to accelerate the pace of women in business through job creation, innovation and technology, and access to markets and capital.
If you’re skeptical about the relevance and urgency of such an endeavor, consider a recent statement by Ernst & Young: “If women entrepreneurs in the US started with the same capital as men, they would add a whopping 6 million jobs to the economy in five years – 2 million of those jobs in the first year alone.”
So where’s the puck going to be?
Tip #1: It will be where women already are — in the board rooms and research centers, the Apple Stores and shopping malls. Successful businesses and marketers will recognize the necessity of bringing women, at all levels, into parity of opportunity and responsibility. And they’ll recognize the unique gender differences and adjust their organizations and marketing strategies accordingly.
Tip #2: According to an exciting new research study presented at the Sustainable Brands Conference by our good friend and strategic partner, John Marshall Roberts, CEO of Worldview Learning: “Women displayed a significantly higher level of systemic thinking in relation to leadership and communication preferences…If present trends continue, expect a new generation of highly innovative and effective women business leaders to dramatically shape the face of the sustainability movement in the coming years. Who knows? When all is said and done, they may even get proper credit.” For more on John’s study, check out his research article.
"Red Kite Business Advisors consults with women business enterprises and corporations on market development through insightful new research and strategic blueprints designed to generate preferred consumer behavior and stimulate growth."
