“Women customers behave differently.” Is this assumption true?
An article that is no longer available online described a list of the behaviors that derail gender inclusion in organizations. But reading through it becomes evident that they are behaviors that derail effective work, period. Worse, they are behaviors that prevent an organization from serving its customers.
The list is fairly comprehensive. When we work in an organizations where people:
- Decide not to do an assessment, build a plan, set goals, or establish benchmarks
- Task a small group of committed, passionate people with designing and implementing a change initiative—and expect them to succeed without a clear mandate, significant resources, intelligent guidance, or visible support from above
- Start implementation without the support of key people
- Refuse to assign supervisors specific responsibilities
- Fail to reward those who follow through
- Keep quiet about the initiative, allowing it to be perceived as low-priority or to be ignored altogether
- Let negative talk or obstructive behaviors pass without comment or notice
- Assume that efforts that are well received in one part of the organization (a mentoring program, employee resource group, or set of educational workshops) will translate seamlessly to other parts of the organization
- Do the same things again and again, although they haven’t resulted in the hoped-for outcomes
Morale is low, engagement is poor, dysfunction is high. Which describes much of corporate life in the experience of many. This is the kind of environment where marketers decide women are one demographic, one big category to market to and service as if we all acted, thought, and bought in the same way. A double whammy.
Women are different from each other as people. Treating women differently as customers based upon gender biases — men and women are different — and stereotyping them as being all the same, continues to reinforce those biases, especially since marketing is about exciting people's emotional reflexes.
There is a thriving industry centered around marketing to women. In social media, there are women associations and groups like BlogHer and Mommy Bloggers. Yet not only are many of the women in those groups different from each other, I know many women who would not even fit into those categories, including me.
There are plenty of independent women — married or not — who choose not to have children, for example. Some of them choose to have a career, others don't fit particularly into the career thing, nor they're into having a big family.
With more voices joining the ranks of creators online, we're seeing diversity between individuals, not genders. Especially as we all embrace a cultural movement that has us reprioritize what we buy, we're all influenced by economical, functional, social, physical, and mental considerations.
Are women more emotional than men? I would not be able to make this generalization based upon my experience. Do women spend less time online? Again, another generalization hard for me to make given that my work and that of many friends and colleagues centers on social media.
If women buy differently as a group, it's likely because they end up buying for the whole family, often dressing children, spouses, and parents. Research shows that women are also responsible for the purchase of big ticket items like homes and cars. We're investors, and in that capacity do watch the brands we invest in — how do they behave?
Do women warrant a different treatment as customers? Based on mathematics, yes, we should take good care in not treating them as less valuable to a business or brands. From banks and financial institutions to retailers large and small to employers, it's a bad idea to create dis-incentives to do business together.
Preliminary brain research shows that men and women's brain are different, but we don't have conclusive evidence of how these differences impact our working selves. What we do know is that women remember and recall details more readily. Which is why at home I'm the one writing customer complain notes to zero into the missed business opportunity. It's a science and an art.
We also seem to have more connections and activity in the corpus callosum. This means we're good at cross-referencing. Many organizations undo on the recruiting end what they overspend on the marketing end, missing investments in the process — and are hardly aware of it. This is the kind of Big Data work that would help some brands understand why they do so poorly on the customer experience end.
But nobody is looking.