Plugging into gender

Demographics are essential for consumer products. They are also interesting for business to business marketing. Gender is one of the more clear distinctions that you can make between people. It does affect your marketing mix decisions, and therefore a good question to ask is whether your service or product is going to a market that is dominated by women, men or is it gender neutral.

Websites collect data on who uses them. This is widely available for well used websites.

For instance Facebook is used more extensively by females than males.


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Youtube is gender neutral

PinkFloyd.com is white males aged 35-49. Interestingly they have a broader profile than David Bowie - who pulls in a more caucasion audience.

Pink Floyd are the first group to get a Royal Mail stamp - fantastic marketing!

In a business to business market personal sales are important. If you look back through your list of clients that you have got would you be able to type them by character or gender? My suspicion is that you would. If your company stayed the same, but you changed the sales and marketing process and either feminised it or made it more masculine, would you get different customers? Again my suspicion is that you would.

Gender in itself is not the "answer" to a particular question, but it is an influence as a part of the character sales approach that most small businesses have. What can you do?

Ceteris Paribus is the economic principle of holding everything else constant. Whilst this is quite difficult in a practical situation, it is a starting point. Try the following:

Change one or two small things on your website and notice if you get a different pattern of visitors.
Reflect on things your stock phrases, change one or two, and then look for differences in responses from people.
Change colour on marketing materials (or even how you dress) and consider whether you get a different response by taking careful note of reactions.

The above 3 things are relatively a quick fix. All of the customer facing activities have an influence on sales and gender therefore influences everything.

This idea of testing and measuring abstract things does require personal focus. For more information - contact us