Women are the biggest consumer market worldwide. I have composed a white-paper to discusses issues, which should be considered for the management of products and services in the internet.
Women are responsible for over 80% of all consumers spending: they buy almost all household goods and influence every major private investment substantially. Also they are often the main earners in a household (34% of all German households have female main earners).
Tom Peters thinks: “It is a ridiculously rare corporation that takes advantage of the women opportunity. What a costly mistake.” For some years now, companies have tried to better address women by changing their products or their presentation. Experience is positive even if companies with many regular male customers need to make sure they keep them.
I have grouped some of the most intriguing aspects I learned about the way women think in this post. They all are about information and the focus to her objectives and I think they should change many internet products and services.
Again Marti Barletta:
“How can you possibly grasp the big picture without a detailed knowledge of the specifics?”
Women look for detailed information, but not for all data at once, and they look for other details than men would. Read about this items in the following:
- the start of the search
- the perfect answer
- trust
… and see the white-paper “The female Internet” for references.
Today many women work and have a family – a “double day” – which makes time a very scarce resource. Even without children or a household, woman can experience time shortage because they are more impacted by lifetime milestones than men.
Michael J. Silverstein writes:
“Women find themselves caught in an almost inescapable lack of time”.
They have developed certain techniques to cope with this: women like to multitask, and they use implicit to-do lists. This impact product management shown in the white-paper “The female Internet”.
Women look for community – so give them one. This sounds like a pretty odd statement in the times of social media, but there are some aspects that made me think.
Marti Barletta has written in here classic “Marketing to Women” about the different importance of communities for men and women:
“Men think competition is fun. … It’s how they communicate. … Women make a distinction between the two core elements of competition: interaction is fun, conflict is not. Playing is fun, but losing isn’t – somebody’s feelings are going to get hurt.”
In fact community for men is often about competition. To collect as many friends as possible on social media or to make as many tweets as possible seems to be a pretty male way of using internet communities. There are other ones on the net as shown in the white-paper “The female Internet”:
Immobilieninteressenten sollten früher als heute beginnen, sich mit Fragen zur Finanzierung zu beschäftigen. Eine Umfrage von Immobilienscout 24 und Cridon zeigt, dass viele Immobilieninteressenten verstehen, dass nicht nur die Zinsen einer Finanzierung wichtig sind, sondern dass es sich lohnt Finanzierungskonzepte zu vergleichen. Allerdings legt die Umfrage auch den Schluss nahe, dass bei weitem nicht alle Immobilienkäufer dies auch tun.
Viel mehr Menschen suchen eine Immobilie, als tatsächlich kaufen. Vier bis fünf Monate – so lange suchen Immobilieninteressenten durchschnittlich. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit zum baldigen Abschluss eines Immobilienkaufs sinkt gemäß der Umfrage nach fünf Monaten deutlich.
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Unklarheit herrscht darüber, wie man den Erfolg von Innovationen am besten messen sollte. Ein allgemeines Rezept gibt es nicht, sondern das richtige Messen ist eng verzahnt mit der gewählten Innovationsstrategie. Der klassische Ansatz zu prüfen, welcher Ertrag ein Produkt in welcher Zeit mit sich bringt, greift deshalb zu kurz.
Viele Firmen sind unzufrieden mit dem wirtschaftlichen Erfolg Ihrer Innovationsbemühungen. Der Umsatz der betrachteten Firmen mit neuen Produkten oder Services ist in den letzten Jahren gesunken.
Der Erfolg von Innovationen muss gemessen werden. Kritisch ist jedoch die Auswahl der Messgrößen.
