Brands must get real if they are to crack marketing to women

Can Sex And The City or the US marines remove advertising to women from hackneyed appeals to vanity and cynical exploitation of insecurity?

Back in the Fifties, marketing in the US was a simple, unsophisticated affair. There were three major national television networks alongside clearly defined regional newspapers and local radio stations. In that world it was relatively easy for marketers to reach the female audience given that most of the women they would have been trying to reach would have been stay-at-home mums – though it wasn’t called “staying at home” back then, since that’s what a large percentage of women did as the norm.

Today, the world’s a very different place and US women, including a large percentage of mothers, are active and important participants in the formal workplace.

Not only is it a very different place but also a complicated and somewhat unpredictable environment which marketers have to negotiate smartly but carefully if they are to win over the savvy female consumer.

The issue of how modern marketers strive to reach women in the 21st century is dealt with in a new book by Andrea Gardner called The 30-Second Seduction: How Advertisers Lure Women Through Flattery, Flirtation and Manipulation.

“Over the last 50 years, everything has scattered. Women are creating new identities for themselves and aren’t limited by their age, job or family structure,” writes Gardner.

“The company’s marketing and/or advertisements must still grasp the consumer’s attention, charm her and convince her to buy. In today’s hectic world, perhaps the most difficult of those tasks is commanding her attention.”

Gardner explains the challenge in reaching modern women by assigning nine different relationship tags between the marketer and the female consumer. So each chapter has titles like The Scholar, The Best Friend or The Show-Off. The other feature of the Gardner’s approach is anecdotal with lots of interviews with everyday women as well as marketing and advertising experts backed up with a wide array of data.

Gardner says Fortune 500 companies and marketing firms have finally woken up to the fact that women make about 80% of household buying decisions, which has led to a rush by marketers to learn as much as they can about women.

“They realise that female consumers aren’t just buying Tupperware, laundry detergent and groceries. While men still make more money than women, the lady of the house will most often decide what to do with the household’s money, regardless of whether it comes from her own salary or her partner’s,” writes Gardner.

Yet the fact that US women are key financial decision-makers in the home, from the domestic small ticket items through to the large “masculine” items like cars, hasn’t meant marketers are any less exploitative of some of the old-fashioned views of women, in particular how women view themselves. Marketers still exploit female insecurity about self-image and beauty through a variety of techniques to sell everything from luxury beauty items to boxes of cereal, says Gardner.

Skinny models
One example is the regular use of young skinny models and Hollywood actresses to star in advertisements. The marketer is hoping that women everywhere will want to buy their products because if it’s good enough for the “unattainably perfect girl” it’s good enough for everyone else.

Appeals to vanity are the single most successful marketing technique ever conceived, writes Gardner quoting an interviewee. “Like it or not there are certain tried-and-true techniques that work with women. One is to tell them they will look younger if they use a product, and to show a physically perfect woman in the ad.”

One campaign that famously tried, and is still trying, to counter this unrealistic quest for perfection, is the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, which celebrated women of all shapes and sizes by using “real women” rather than skinny models.

The Dove campaign was devised by brand-owner Unilever and its agency Ogilvy after its research found more than 80% of US women surveyed said the media and the advertising industry set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can never achieve. And only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful.

But while Dove’s campaign is to be praised for going against the grain – raising awareness and thereby positive publicity for the brand – Gardner says its success with its target audience wasn’t quite that cut and dry.

“As a female, while I do like the Dove campaign, I still tend to be drawn more towards the ads that feature traditional models,” says one of the book’s young female interviewees. “While I am intelligent enough to realise that this level of perfection is not attainable by simply purchasing the feature product, I am also conditioned to see these types of models in ads.”

The changing image of women in the media that advertising supports, such as TV shows and movies, is another reason that marketing to women has had to evolve.

HBO’s seminal show Sex And The City played an important role in this changing image over its 94-episode run from 1998 to 2004. The show still re-runs on most nights on several TV networks.

The image of four strong independent glamorous New York women name-dropping luxury brand names from Manolo Blahnik to Jimmy Choo was exactly the kind of opportunity that excited luxury marketers nearly as much as the show’s fans. This is why the New York Times says advertisers have been waiting impatiently for a starring role in this summer’s Sex And The City movie.

The film maker, New Line Cinema, has signed deals with several main partner brands who will feature prominently in the movie, including Skyy vodka, Bag Borrow or Steal – which rents handbags and jewellery online – Coty fragrances, Coca-Cola’s Glaceau Vitaminwater, Mercedes-Benz USA and jeweller H Stern.

Screen appearances
According to the New York Times, the brands have been woven into the script to include mentions in lines of dialogue to numerous on-screen appearances. In exchange, the brand owners will help publicise the film with commercials, posters, in-store events and even products with labels inspired by Sex And The City.

But it’s not always all about glamour. When appealing to the modern woman sometimes it’s a sense of duty and patriotism. This is the approach the US Marines Corps is taking in trying to recruit more young women in a new campaign due later this month, according to reports.

With the tagline “There are no female marines. Only marines”, the campaign is being run in health-conscious women’s print titles as well as mainstream TV shows such as American Idol, as the Marines attempt to broaden their appeal.