US: Marketers must address gender to win customers

Faith Popcorn’s latest book predicts that campaigns based on gender will become commonplace as women’s influence on the market is recognised.

Faith Popcorn is the Mystic Meg of American marketing. Born Faith Plotkin, she gained the moniker “Popcorn” when her Italian boss could not pronounce her surname correctly. He called her Popcorn instead of Plotkin and she decided to change her surname and adopt his memorable alternative.

She first became interested in social and cultural trends in her job as a junior copywriter at a small New York ad agency. In 1974, she decided to focus on setting up her New York-based trends consultancy BrainReserve, to provide her version of a crystal ball for consumer trends.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was ahead of her time with her “trend-spotting” ideas and it took a while for it to take off. Now, however, with clients including American Express, IBM, Kimberley-Clark and Polaroid on her impressive Fortune 500 roster, Popcorn’s office on Manhattan’s 66th Street is buzzing – not least because all 27 employees are female. Not that she wouldn’t consider employing a man – she just hasn’t met the right one yet.

The top-notch clients she has attracted as one of the world’s leading “futurists”, must be due partly to her claimed 95 per cent accuracy rate in predicting trends. She predicted the failure of “New Coke” and the popularity of sport’s utility vehicles well before they happened and, back in the Eighties, was advising clients to get into home-delivery. Her latest prediction is that by 2010, 90 per cent of consumer products will be delivered to customers’ doors and retail will be about “giving you back your Saturday”.

Popcorn’s methodology for her trend-spotting includes a “TalentBank” of 5,000 people globally. They are experts in their chosen field and their ideas and observations are part of what keeps the BrainReserve full of new ideas. She doesn’t hold focus groups; she holds “trend salons” and hypnosis sessions.

In fact, Popcorn has issues with many of the ingrained marketing techniques used by big companies. She believes that responding to consumers’ current rather than future needs, is like marketing by “looking in the rear-view mirror”. She also believes that too much of today’s brand management is about the brand manager rather than the brand as there is too much movement within companies.

The first trend that BrainReserve predicted was the “staying in is the new going out” concept, or “cocooning” as it became known. Popcorn advised clients that their products must be able to reach people in their “armoured cocoons”. She argues that this is because many people have what she terms “atmosfear”: concerns about polluted air, contaminated water and food are giving rise to huge consumer doubts and uncertainty.

In her latest book, “EVEolution the eight truths of marketing to women”, Popcorn argues that men and women are different “shop-ologically” as well as biologically. This may seem to be stating the obvious to most of us who have seen the faces of bored men being dragged around shop after shop on a crowded Saturday afternoon. She says that markets have neglected the female market: “On the one hand I watched as the stories and statistics that tracked the economic power and women kept going through the roof. On the other, I would sit in meeting after meeting where women were described as a ‘niche market’ or a ‘specialist interest groups’.”

If men and women are from different planets, why do marketers insist on treating them in the same way? Do they not realise that women are responsible for 80 per cent of consumer purchases, influence 80 per cent of healthcare decisions, make 51 per cent of electronic purchases and buy 60 per cent of vehicles? Why is no one marketing specifically to those female-owned companies that produce $2.3 trn (£1.6 trn) worth of goods and services a year?

Popcorn’s latest prediction is that companies that do the best job of marketing their products and services to women will dominate every significant market in the future.

Popcorn does more than just predict growing markets; she points out that “sometimes we see business trends that reflect death throes rather than growth”. Her case in point is the US grocery industry, which she believes is getting creative in its declining years, with some installing gyms and crèches and others running singles nights.

Despite all this she is convinced that grocery stores will simply cease to exist – and takes to task Unilever chairman Niall Fitzgerald’s prediction that within the next ten years, 15 per cent of groceries will be purchased online. She insists that Fitzgerald has missed the mark and stands by her own prediction that the figure will be 75 per cent.

Naturally, one of the benefits of trying to predict the future is that you can spot gaps in the market and exploit them for yourself. One of Popcorn’s ventures outside her BrainReserve consultancy is her foray into the world of home office furniture – a market that grew from $800m (£550m) in 1996 to $1.2bn (£827m) in the two years to 1998.

It was a case of Popcorn putting her money where her mouth is. One of her predicted trends is “cashing-out”, meaning “workers questioning their career goals and opting for a simpler life outside corporations and cities”. The number of home-workers has grown by 100 per cent in the past five years and Popcorn expects the number of home offices to grow another 100 per cent each year from now until 2004. From then on she thinks the market will explode, as today’s teenagers who use their computers for everything anyway, start setting up their own businesses.

While Popcorn’s statistics and theories on the buying behaviour of women relate to the US market, she is convinced that “gender is the main glue” and that if women in Europe don’t have the buying power of their US counterparts just yet, they are getting there. She sees the stiff upper lip of the UK softening – especially with the Royal Family becoming less stuffy. Popcorn also points out that in many ways we are ahead of the US in our “EVEolution”, as we have had a female political leader – something she predicts will happen in the US within 12 years.

If anyone is in any doubt as to why Popcorn felt it necessary to spell out in a book that real women differ from the image of many marketers, consider her tale of the comments of the “number two person” at a very large food company who said to her: “I agree with you about home delivery, but don’t women need to get out of the house once in a while? And don’t they enjoy meeting each other at the supermarket?” Pass me the crystal ball.

Polly Devaney is a former Unilever executive now working as a freelance writer in New York

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