Unmet Needs or Making Women Smile

Some people are just naturals when it comes to understanding and marketing to women.  Take this guy Bill, a natural.  And you can tell by his 28 ways to make a girl smile.

So is Jory des Jardins at Pause.  She writes about the recent Marketing to Women conference

Those whose livelihoods depend on marketing to women are fairly screwed; imagine resting your career on an ever-shifting market. The opening presentation, given by Frank About Women, asserted that demo targeting is a no-no when marketing to women. Afterall, who is, say, the typical mother of a small child? Today, she's in her teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or older if she's the primary caretaker of a grandchild. She's got a husband, or no husband, or maybe a wife. She spends her husband's money, or she spends her money on her husband. She floats between monikers of stay-at-home Mom, career woman, desperate housewife, DIY home renovator. Whoever she is, she prefers that you provide her with a solution, not a lifestyle option--she's already made her choices there, thank you.

I was comforted to know that Superwoman has been killed off; products will do well that don't promise to help women do it all. Good marketing must acknowledge the parts of her life that CAN be salvaged. Calgon sort of did that eons ago, but today there's less of a Sylvia Plath-like response to the competing pressures of career and domestic responsibility. Nor do women relate to themselves by job title. Over lunch I met the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company. She introduced herself as an entrepreneur.

I know, understanding women is a tall order, but I want to help. I'll start by telling you what I want, or what I think I want, as the sad story for women like me is we often know more about what we don't want. Here are some of my "touchpoints," mundane opportunities that marketers can exploit to make me a customer for life. Do with them what you will:

To read her touchpoints, go here. 

Don't miss her takedown of the Bank of America and their terrible practice of charging small businesses to deposit checks via ATM in Banks: a notoriously inhospitable industry.  Now Jory is a prominent woman blogger who writes engagingly on "working without a net" which is what she calls self-employment. 

She also is one of the organizers of the Blogher conference for woman bloggers on July 30.  Her story has and will travel widely in the blogosphere, among people who connect to each other to share stories and help each other live better lives.  How many people won't set up accounts at Bank of America because of Jory's story and the discussion in her comments.  If banks will pay $300-$500 for a new account, how much have they lost because of Jory's post.

Does anyone at Bank of America keep track of what bloggers are saying about them on the world wide web? If they did, they would be making changes more quickly then they are.    When the richest source of new accounts is new businesses by middle-aged men and women, why do banks make it so hard for the self-employed?  Why aren't they reaching out to the self-employed, figuring out what they need, and creating local support networks to attract new customers?

Shoshanna Zuboff writes in "The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism" (Shoshana Zuboff, James Maxmin) that economic value is distributed in the unmet needs of individuals. She also writes that history teaches us that those enterprises that move decisively to reconnect with an alienated population get rich first. 

What about it Bank of America? Why don't you make your self-employed women smile?