Marketing to women: Four tips for avoiding pitfalls 

Marketing to women: Four guiding principles to help you engage and represent women better

The legendary management scholar, Peter Drucker, famously said: “What the customer thinks he or she is buying, what he or she considers value is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. And a lot that makes absolute sense.

Today’s marketer has access to an unprecedented amount of data; from demographics to sales and purchase data, market trends to competitor insights, there’s a ton of information available for use to analyze and use. But while having data at our fingertips is great, I wonder if we might have so much of it that we’re at risk of becoming data-fixated and forgetting to prioritize the customer; more specifically: the customer’s problem that our product is trying to solve.

When marketing to women, getting back to the basics of understanding your customer, her needs, and how your product meets those needs is an excellent starting point. From there, you can see whether the data matches your hypothesis, or not. How do you go about doing this?

In my research and work on marketing to women, I’ve identified a set of critical questions or principles that you can use that will help you reach, engage, and market to female customers more representatively and more effectively. Here are four of those principles that you can use in your marketing efforts.

1. Get to know your customers: who influences, buys, and uses your products?

The first question to ask is how well you know your customers. Do you know what proportion of your customer base is women? How does this compare to your competitors’ customers or the population at large? It’s critical to have some sense of how gender shapes the group that you need to address. Look at your data for insights here, and to understand how the women in your customer group behave. Are they the primary decision-makers? Do they influence purchases, and if so, to what extent? Run the numbers to understand if they buy your product for themselves or others. This will help you pinpoint the gender dynamics at play, and how to best focus your marketing to women: as influencers, buyers, or users.

2. Know why she buys

Remember, even more than products, you are in the business of selling solutions to problems. So, ask yourself: do you genuinely understand what those problems are? And if you don’t know what problem you are resolving, what’s stopping you from finding out? Whether yours is a multinational or a startup, you need to prioritize getting in front of your customers and having the conversations – be that via focus groups, questionnaires, or digital surveys – to help you identify the real pain points (and not imagined or invented problems, per Doritos!) that your product addresses. In turn, you are better able to modulate your marketing and communications efforts to align with this.

3. Treat women as knowledge customers and incentivize brand advocates

Research shows that women are typically more knowledge-based and relationship-focused in our purchasing decisions; we tend to seek out the advice and opinions of other women, for instance, by reading or posting on social media. Ask yourself what you are doing in your marketing efforts to treat women as knowledge customers in this sense. And given that women are more active in knowledge sharing, ask yourself if you are doing enough as a brand to encourage and support influencing and brand advocacy. Are you effective in your use of platforms and technologies that encourage women to engage with your brand and with each other?

4. Avoid ‘gender-washing’ and embrace blurred boundaries

Women make up 50% of the population but we are not the same. There are as many differences between women as there are between men and women. This might strike you as obvious, but ask yourself: does your brand treat women as one homogenous demographic or do you proactively look for differences? As you reflect on this, think too about the different roles or hats that women wear in their lives, depending on context or time. A woman might simultaneously or at different times be a leader, a specialist in some area, an executive, a mother, a wife, a partner, a daughter, or a friend. How does your brand acknowledge multiple and oftentimes blurred roles and boundaries when you communicate with women?

Marketing to women is complex and can be confusing. As times and cultures change and evolve, the norms and ideas may also shift. Shrinking and pinking may not be reliable as a strategy (as Black and Decker discovered with their power drill), yet in 2023, the global phenomenon of the Barbie movie somehow made pink cool: wearing pink and embracing your femininity was suddenly synonymous with agency and power. Similarly, who would have guessed that Stanley, an industrial manufacturer of steel vacuum flasks, would come up with the Quencher, an outsized drinking vessel that has gone viral with women in the US in the last couple of years? But in a world where hugely popular artists like Taylor Swift assert the right to celebrate their femininity – and women’s rights are simultaneously being eroded in different parts of the globe, as the position of women in society is continuously shifting and changing – marketing to women can be enormously challenging.

Brands will continue to hit and miss the mark. But I believe that certain key principles can help navigate the minefield – principles that affirm the primary importance of knowing the customer and respecting her identity, individuality, and dignity, whoever she is.

Jenny Darroch will chair a debate on ‘Did Drucker get it right about knowledge work?’ at this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum on 14 November in Vienna. This year’s theme is ‘The Next Knowledge Work. Managing For New Levels of Value Creation and Innovation.’