Josie Brown on Feminine Power: Male dominated industries must pay attention to the She-conomy
By Campaign Brief’s LA-based contributor Josie Brown
I posed a deliberately provocative question on Quora the other day after I read that only 3 percent of creative directors are women: “Can men effectively communicate and advertise to female audiences?” Predictably, there was a handful of safe replies, and the prevailing answer was “a creative team doesn’t have to be the target audience, they just need to know the target audience.” But I couldn’t help question it.
There Should Be No Overestimating the Rise of Feminine Power Within the Consumer World
Women spend more than $5 trillion annually (over half of the U.S. GDP) [1] and account for 85 percent of all consumer purchases, including everything from new cars to electronics. But there is still a vast underestimation on the importance of female leadership within creative departments in agencies both here in the U.S. and abroad, which is directly reflected by the sheer imbalance of creative director positions held by women.
In no other time in our history have women wielded so much influence and energy within the world. In the family, community, government, business, celebrity and media, we see that women are taking responsibility for much more than just the household. It is a changing age. The endowed consumer is feminine and in charge of everything she has…and plenty of what he has. What we recognize in the market place is a symptom of a female metamorphosis within our society, and the previous sensibilities that appealed to the big-ticket holder of days gone by are being shed.
Male Dominated Industries Need to Pay Attention
Take for instance the automotive industry: Once considered a man’s domain, women now buy more than half of all new cars in the U.S. and influence up to 80 percent of all car purchases [2]. However, according to Forbes, 75 percent of women surveyed say they feel misunderstood by car marketers and continue to have poor experiences when trying to buy a car. Enter a brand like Truecar (a pricing and information website designed to even the playing field for buyers and dealers) and their aptly named ‘Women Empowered’ sponsorship of the world’s first all-female racing team. Pretty smart, considering 74 percent of male respondents and 62 percent of female respondents agreed “women racers bring fans out to the games” [3] and even smarter when 80 percent of women agreed that they would solidify their brand loyalty if they knew a brand supported female business [4].
What really gives Truecar pole position is the imagination and insight to bring to fruition a property that both men and women can rally behind and bond over. Jennifer Parke from dw+h is the creative director behind Truecar’s Women Empowered.
“Fact is, women are doing all of the buying in this economy,” she says. “It’s important to foster a community and build teams that go against the traditional Mad Men construct. That absolutely means supporting women in advertising but also mixing up the model completely. If you hire for sameness the output will be sameness.”
Changing the Playing Field
That’s just the thing modern day marketers should carefully consider: how to engage such a powerful group of consumers in a way that shifts the current perception of simply ‘knowing’ her, to ‘growing with’ her. This is a tough task for today’s agencies if 97 percent of creative direction is skewed to a male sensibility of ‘knowing’ the female consumer. Stacking your team with the right blend of technical skills, sensibilities and life experiences seems obvious. But empowering female creatives to rise to the top of the industry is something the current male dominated leadership needs to mentor and support — if only to keep their departments diverse and relevant in the changing face of consumerism.
And What Do the 3% Say?
Kat Gordon, the woman behind the 3% Conference, calls a spade a spade.
“In essence, I saw what goes wrong when marketers look nothing like the market,” she said in an interview with Forbes.
That thought seems to be shared and channeled, but perhaps articulated differently by Kate Stanners, executive creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi London, who in a recent “IPA: Women in Work” speech about her department said that “diversity is the answer,” and that the creative department should no longer be considered the last bastion of everything that is awful about advertising. No mincing of words from the 3 percent, and nor should there be — the creative department needs changing, and if Kat Gordon has anything to do with it, next year it will be the 4% Conference.
1. Nielsen/NetRatings
2. Women-Drivers.com, 2010
3. Lyn St James Foundation 2005
4. WBENC
JOSIE BROWN
Josie Brown has had more than a decade of marketing experience in the UK, US and Australasia. A freelance new-biz consultant, suit, strategist and writer – ex-Iris, McCann Erickson, Y&R Brown has turned her hand to every facet of agency life in some of the most exciting and creative agencies in the world. Brown is an avid fan of innovative design, start-ups, tech companies and new product development in every sector from health and beauty to telecommunications.A prolific blogger, pinner and twitter-er you can follow Josie at @josiedbrown or see more of her work and writing at antipodeanlady.co.uk.
8 Comments
I’d pay attention to anything she had to say.
yeah righto sweetheart
I can only agree that what she says needed to be said.
And the first two commenters kindly demonstrated why.
Nice one Josie.
The first two commenters have just proven why they’ll lose their job to a woman before long. Misogynistic dinosaurs, on their way out.
@lineupbehindkoshie you’re presuming that the first two commenters are men which, in itself, makes you as bad as them.
Having worked on automotive accounts most of my career, I can agree that it is needing to become even more female friendly. Some effort has been made, but more to go obviously.
I was nearly fired for buying a car that wasn’t the agency’s client’s brand and yet the car they expected me to buy with my own cash was so far from a fit for me it was ridiculous. Some brands are still a way off for me.
Lineupbehindkoshie never said anything about the commenters being men. You can be misogynistic and still be a woman. Duh.
Honestly, I’d wager that in many, if not most, ad agencies there are more women working than men. I work in an agency of 50 or so – it is absolutely split down the middle. Please remember that there are squillions of female suits, media buyers and digital strategists who are working alongside the (mostly admittedly male) creatives. Are you suggesting that these women working on whatever the project is have zero impact on the message put forward? Are us creatives really all that powerful?
True, men seem to clump in creative departments. I have worked with many brilliant female creatives who are just as good as any man. They’ve worked on ‘male oriented’ brands just as well as many guys. But the creative hothouse doesn’t seem to appeal to females as much as it does to guys. Many years ago I was going through the entries for award school and found that the applications was heavily skewed toward men. I couldn’t put a fixed number on it but I would say LITERALLY three times as many males APPLY to get into creative.
Unless we can start making women want to get into the creative department in equal amounts as men, there will be more men than women working in creative roles.