Lady Geeks – Women as Consumers of Technologies - Building Gender Balanced Business

BY BELINDA PARMA

The world of technology is rapidly being inhabited by today’s woman. More women in the 18-35 years age bracket play console games than men. The average woman spends three times as much on technology – from MP3 and HDTV to mobile phones and laptops – than she does on cosmetics or pampering. This amounts to a market worth £15bn in the UK.

And yet, while the big brand cosmetics companies typically spend over £100m on marketing per year in the UK, the technology sector is woefully remiss in its attention to what it sees as an unequivocally second-rate “girl” revenue stream. This missed financial opportunity is calculated by Lady Geek and Jupiter at half a billion pounds. As Hillary Chura writes in Advertising Age:

“Like nervous teenage boys at a junior high school dance, marketers haven’t figured out how to talk to women”.

Our proprietary and extensive study of both quantitative and qualitative data makes for some illuminating reading. At best, women feel indifferent about tech brands, the way they are marketed to, and the retail experience itself. At worst, they feel patronised, ghettoised and alienated in a man’s world of RAM, GBs, Ghz and Mpix and SLR.

And when marketers do turn their attention to women, they fall back on the same old prejudices and assumptions that other sectors have long since abandoned. The consumer electronics industry is at the same place where the automotive industry was 20 years ago in the way it speaks to women.

It is true that women and men have different tastes and requirements. But when the female consumer is overtly targeted, the best the marketing industry can manage is to dumb down and “pink” up with the same deft touch employed by the toys industry in the run-up to Christmas.