the PrettyLittleHead background story
About eight years ago we had a terrible meeting. The (eventual) results of this terrible meeting are a book (Inside Her Pretty Little Head), and a company (our company, that specializes in marketing to women).
The subject under discussion was some pretty involved and very dry business-to-business product, and the problem we were trying to solve was how to present this product in a way that would enhance its appeal to women.
Anyway, you can imagine the scene. A bunch of people struggling to imagine themselves into the mind of the female customer. There were plenty of fixed smiles and fake nods of agreement. There were a few rather nervy jokes about women not being very good at understanding technology and lots of ‘Yes, let’s capture that’ encouragement from the moderator as he wrote down the latest dubious idea.
After about an hour of this stuff, the creative director - who’d of course been sitting darkly in the corner up to that point - announced, Archimedes style, that he’d cracked it. “What we need to do” he pronounced as he picked up a mailer for the product under discussion “ is to take all their print material and re-do it in pink”
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Thus began our interest in how little people who develop female brands actually understand what makes women tick. As time rolled on we thought more about the subject. We worked on more campaigns and projects, we noticed more and more examples of poor understanding, as well as a few notable examples of brands where the owners were obviously getting it right. Noting the villains and the heroes of female marketing became a bit of a hobby. At the same time, something else was also happening. Women were becoming the most important target audience on earth. In the US women now account for over 80% of all purchase decisions, and the female economy - worth $5 trillion - now makes up more than half the US GDP . Internationally, women contribute over 40% of the developed world’s GDP.
It struck us particularly odd that while women were an increasingly important audience for marketers, advertising – a supposedly innovative industry was still a man’s game. 85% of the people who write advertising are men, and young men at that. No surprise then that at the Cannes advertising awards – the awards that the industry judges as the best quality work in the world - only one grand prix winner in the last six years was an ad that targets women and only 9 out of a potential 134 gold awards was awarded to advertising that targets women. So, the advertising industry admits it is not developing sufficiently interesting and creative work when targeting women to merit even the awards it gives itself.
The more we thought, and the more we learnt, the more important and yet badly served the female audience seemed to be, and the more useful we felt it would be to produce a proper examination of male and female differences, and the implication of those differences on marketing.
In the last year we have written a book about marketing to women called Inside Her Pretty Little Head, using the most up to date scientific understanding about gender difference.
PrettyLittleHead allows us to put our theories into practice. We have found that trying to solve marketing puzzles through a uniquely female lens brings new insights, creates breakthroughs in thinking, and makes sure the marketer delivers what women really want, not just what they think women want.
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