It would be easy for Goodwill to keep doing the “same-old-same-old” during the current recession, focusing solely on lower-income families and selling items in the $7-10 range. But the organization realized (earlier than most of us) that now more than ever, the “belt-tightening” of professionals and their families offers up another retail opportunity.

The NY Times just published an excellent article on Goodwill and its latest effort to reach out to more shoppers through new “boutique” style sections of their stores (and sometimes, separate retail location), selling designer and high-end department store labels. Goodwill is also experimenting with spacious floor plans, neater displays, and even fashion shows.

We are making a particularly strong push right now to improve our image, our reputation and our brand, to promote Goodwill as a cool place to shop,” said Jim Gibbons, the chief executive for Goodwill Industries International in Rockville, Md.

“We have embraced a more traditional retail strategy,” said Mauricio Hernandez, a senior vice president for Goodwill of Greater of New York and Northern New Jersey.”

Current freestanding boutique locations include Milwaukee, WI; Palm Beach, FL; and Portland, OR.

Five years ago, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to Goodwill that they could seek out and cater to an entirely new market segment.  Is there a tweak you can be making to your business – one that doesn’t take too much adjustment, yet adds big profit potential?

Neighborhood #1:  The Regal Queen

Energy:  External

Time Horizon:  In the Moment

Relying on outside forces and friends for energy and with a “seize the day” mentality, the Regal Queen is the most Spontaneous of the four customer types.  She is on the lookout for trends and new things to try when it catches her mind’s eye.  She is the most flamboyant and outgoing of the four types, and likes to think of herself as being “unconventional.”  She’s going to be the customer who loves last-minute bargains, as well as in-store displays featuring “new and cool” items that have just arrived.  Her greatest fear?  Being bored.

How would you write copy for the Regal Queen?

Check out this example from a fictitious business I created.  I call it “On-the-Go Gourmet,” a mix-cook-no clean-up type of kitchen for busy women.   This copy could be used on a brochure, a website, and advertising.  I’ve highlighted keywords a Regal Queen would be drawn to, to give you a better idea of the “language” she speaks:

On-The-Go Gourmet is the exciting new way to try unique, delicious dishes from around the world. 

Choose your recipe beforehand, or pick one to try on a whim when you arrive. On-The-Go Gourmet always has everything you need for every dish in our recipe book. 

Stop losing sleep over what to feed the family – spend your time creating instead!”

In one short paragraph, you capture her interest through imaging and language that not only sounds familiar, but also piques her curiosity.  It sounds inviting (no planning necessary) and a bit exotic (recipes from around the world).  It’s persuasive language that speaks directly to the heart of the Regal Queen and encourages her to give it a try.  And once you match her actual experience with what you promised in the copy, she’ll return again and again, and tell all her friends about you.

For another example of an ad written for the Regal Queen, give a listen to this radio ad for Fairview Garden Center in Raleigh, NC.  After being on the air for just a few days, it attracted a whole new crowd to Fairview – people who had never before thought of themselves as gardeners but now wanted to give it a try.  And most of them were women.

Listen to Fairview Garden Center’s Ad “Not a Gardener”

Tomorrow, I’ll share yet another example of communicating with the Regal Queen customer type – one that was created by a student smack-dab in the middle of my most recent WonderBranding workshop at Wizard Academy in Austin, TX.

A new research study has been published in the electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science with evidence that male and female brains perceive “beauty” by utilizing different regions of the brain. Same final solution, but each gender uses a very different process for getting there.

While men concentrate on the spatial aspects of an object (right-brain dominant), women look at an object and link it to language (using both hemispheres of the brain at once).It’s something to keep in mind, especially given the way the eyes of a female customer are structured and the things she subconsciously registers when approaching your place of business.

It means she’s linking the visual aspects of your retail store or office with actual words.  In essence, she’s literally talking herself into – or out of – doing business with you.

Have you checked your store or office on the “beauty meter” lately?  What are her eyes – and her brain – telling her about you?  Are you the Mona Lisa or Elvis-On-Velvet?

Truth is an onion.

The real, core truth of a concept is concealed beneath layers that most people
ignore or neglect.

You can always go deeper. You can always peel away one more layer.

Maybe you’re afraid, because the very layer you caress between your fingers is the
one that everyone else believes to be the essential truth. It’s the layer that everyone else
focuses on – the layer upon which everyone else’s marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and mission statements are based.

But you’re not like everyone else, are you?

When it comes to capturing the heart of the female customer, the overriding mantra
being chanted by marketers today is:

Connect with her and all is well.

Connect with her and all is well.

Connect with her and all is well…

Too many marketing-to-women strategies and campaigns have failed on the concept of
“connecting” with the female consumer.

It’s not about connection. It’s about CONTROL.

Connection is a process. Control is ownership.

A business can’t create connection. It can only give its customer the information and experience she desires so that SHE can connect your brand with all that is good and right in the world.

Giving her control means:

1.  Information is not withheld. You provide all
of the answers to her questions, before she even has a chance to ask them.

2.  You strive for transparency. There’s no fine print, no shell game. Phone calls are returned, mistakes owned up to.

3.  You give her the peace of mind to know that you are taking care of everything that
can and should be done. Peace of mind means that when inevitable mistakes do occur on your part, it’s very easy
for her to forgive you.

4.  She feels like she’s having an honest dialogue with you. She has a voice in your relationship, and feels valued.

It’s up to you to give her the control she needs. Total control provides every possible opportunity to let the customer decide where you fit into her world of connection.

What do you want your customer to feel – out of control, or in control?

What are you doing to ensure that she feels in control? Do you have a system in place for information, transparency, and dialogue?

That system could be the key to the fanatical customer loyalty you dream of.

Go ahead. Peel down to control, then let her do the connecting.

She’ll love you for it.

It’s not going to dissolve into the ether like past eras of marketing buzz, where moving from target to target was the strategy du jour.

You really need to get this through your noggin. The power of the female customer will not only influence how you market this year and next; it will define your business and marketing strategies for at least the first few decades of the 21st century.

That is, if you want to have a business that not only survives, but thrives.

So smartass, you may say. Who endowed you with the crystal ball to predict the future?

No one.  You could come up with the answer as easily as I could, if you only looked closely enough at the patterns drawn by history – patterns that mark our paths and shape our society.

If you look back over the last century, there have been three historic milestones or “waves” for American women, based on the confluence of three critical elements:

1. The role of women in society at a given time
2. The banding together of women in a concerted effort to make their voices heard
3. The emergence of a new form of communication technology

In 1920, women gained the right to vote for the first time after declaring their intent to fight for equal rights.  It had taken 54 years of marching, protesting and imprisonment to finally triumph.  So what was the tipping point for this First Wave of feminism? Communication to the masses through the power of the press and by means of the newest invention in the home – the telephone.

In 1963 Betty Friedan sent tremors through society with The Feminine Mystique, a scathing analysis of the role of women in 1960s America.  Overnight, the country experienced a Second Wave of feminism.  The call demanding equal opportunity in education and jobs spread like wildfire, thanks to images of female protestors and bra burners that flickered on nightly television newscasts.

Jump ahead another forty years to current day.  A Third Wave rebellion is under way, and today’s female consumer is swinging her purchasing power around like David’s slingshot, aimed directly at the Goliath of traditional advertising and marketing.

Women are calling for recognition in the form of consumer parity.   They want to be acknowledged as an individual consumers with individual needs, rather than anonymous members of the female demographic.   “I know I’m a woman,” she’s saying.  “But I’m not like every other woman.  Would you please start speaking to me about what matters to me?”

What’s causing this Third Wave of feminism to spread at an epidemic rate?  The emergence of the newest form of communication technology - the Internet.

Women are devoting more and more of their highly valuable time to researching, reaching out, and shopping online.  It fits their multitasking lifestyle perfectly, with instant access to products, services, and each other – completing a full circle in the purchasing and influencing process.

Technology has made women the mainstream customer base of today and tomorrow.  And it’s not going away.

Get used to it.

The Third Wave is on the rise.  Will you watch it roll by, or will you seize the moment, hanging ten on the cutting edge of the future?

In our recent post on female energy, we took a look at how different kinds of “fuel” are required to keep a woman’s human operating system hitting on all cylinders.  Women draw on energy from different sources, both internal and external, which means that you need to deliver your message from two different perspectives at all times in order to make sure you’re tapping directly into the pipeline of her neurons and planting your brand directly into her brain.

But planting a brand is one thing; having the patience to let the seed bloom is another.

Here’s where the other critical factor of the female purchasing process kicks in – her time horizon.

Where she gets her energy, combined with her outlook on life, gives you the underlying framework you need in order to build an effective, profitable marketing strategy.  It will affect every part of your business, from planning to copywriting to customer service.

A woman’s time horizon is the linchpin of life; it’s the lens through which she looks in order to gauge the effectiveness of the decisions she makes.

One woman may lean toward living “in the moment,” making decisions that to some might seem impulsive but to her are based on a philosophy that the road of life is short.  Her mantra is “Carpe diem, baby!”

Another woman’s decision may be influenced by an outlook that this world of ours is bigger than we’ll ever comprehend.  For her, it’s important to plant seeds of love and hope that may never bloom in her lifetime.

So while our “In the Moment” gal believes that life is an adventure and should be traversed in a red convertible Mustang, our “Leave a Legacy” female desires to make a minute dent in the global warming crisis, so she drives a Prius.  Neither choice is right or wrong; it’s simply a preference that highlights another essential difference in the way female customers make purchasing decisions.

Time, like female energy, knows nothing of age, income or lifestyle demographics – but its function is critical when it comes to determining your brand’s importance in her life.

Start thinking about the women in your life and their own time horizons.  Is there a way you can fuel the different energy needs of your female customers and position your product or service in ways that match their varying time horizons?  Definitely.  But we’ll have to leave that for next time.

Stay tuned to WonderBranding.com for future posts on the four strategic profiles of female customers and ways to deliver your brand message for powerful profit.

The Female Customer’s Time Horizon from Michele Miller on Vimeo.

Because a woman has four times the number of connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain than a man, your female customer’s “human operating system” functions more like a web than a railroad track.

Her brain takes in millions of signals and continuously works to recognize patterns; it then builds networks of those patterns in order to make decisions, strengthen relationships, and devise solutions to everyday challenges.  Connection, both human-based and information-based, affects everything in her life, including her purchasing process.

An enormous amount of energy is required in order to keep your female customer’s operating system performing at an optimum level day-in and day-out.  Where does that energy come from?  The answer will differ depending on which woman you are talking to.  There is an important, essential difference in how women make purchasing decisions.

For a system to produce energy, it needs the right kind of fuel.  And different women are “fueled” from different sources.

One woman may draw on external sources of energy to feel connected; she relies on stimuli from the outside world (such as interacting with groups of people) to charge herself up and get what she needs to make it through the day.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ll find a woman who draws on internal sources (like inner thoughts and feelings) for the energy she needs.  She looks inward for guidance and generates energy through the time she spends thinking and mulling things over.

Therefore, a group of female customers may all come to the same decision to do business with you using completely different pathways.

Are you delivering your brand message and product information in ways that compel both types of energies to do business with you?

Here are just a couple of examples:

Surfing vs Dialing
Did you know that one of the biggest reasons you may be missing out on website revenue is that you don’t provide your phone number on the home page?

There’s a large segment of “external energy” customers who, when they have a question, want to pick up the phone and speak to someone.  They need that energy charge that comes from connecting with a human being, which cements the sale.  For example, take a look at the home pages for Home Shopping Network and QVC.  It’s no surprise that QVC has a much higher rate of converting website visitors to customers – their phone number is on the home page.

Discounting the Ruminator
Too often, in-store sales staff write off the customer who says she’s “just looking.”  It should actually be a clue that she may rely on internal energy to turn things over in her mind for awhile before deciding to make a purchase.

Are you letting her walk away?  Wouldn’t it be better to have a printed piece on your product or service that gives her a little more information and fills some of the gaps her brain will encounter when determining whether you’re the brand for her?

By delivering information to a female customer in the way she needs to see or hear it, you’ll be taking an excellent first step toward creating rock-solid brand loyalty.  Remember: she needs premium fuel to charge up enough energy to do business with you.  It’s up to you to make sure you’re putting the right kind of tiger in her tank!

Stay tuned to WonderBranding.com for future posts on the other essential difference in female consumers:  her time horizon.

Fuel of Female Energy from Michele Miller on Vimeo.

I recently received a package from my father stuffed with family mementos that go as far back as the late 1800s.  Amongst the memorabilia, tucked in between a sepia portrait of my great-grandfather posing with a pack animal in Colorado and a black-and-white candid of my father in 1950s Paris, were photographs of Madeline and Olive

Madeline was my grandmother and Olive was her older sister.  Born around the turn of the 20th century, Madeline and Olive lived near each other for much of their lives, often times in the same zip code.  As adults, their incomes were similar – sometimes, they had an adequate bank balance; other times, they were as poor as dirt.  They each owned their own homes, raised families, and drove large American cars.  But never were two sisters more different.

Madeline was quiet and introspective; a chronic illness since childhood had left her physically frail.  She married young and worked on the family farm, taking waitress jobs when her health would allow.  She adored her sons, never missed an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, and enjoyed long car rides in the country most Sunday afternoons after church.

“Moxie” should have been Olive’s middle name.  A single mother at the age of 16, Olive was hell-bent on providing for herself at a time when job opportunities for women were scarce.  She was a secretary, an organist in silent movie theaters, and a registered nurse.  She was married several times (that we know of), including one marriage in the 1920s to a Chicago gangster.  She swore like a sailor, sipped tea like a princess, and drove like a maniac.  Till the day she died at the age of 89, she was, as she liked to put it, “her own woman, damn it.”

Madeline and Olive were as close as two sisters could be, but polar opposites in personality. The everyday choices they made, so different from each other’s, were based not on where they lived, how much money they made, or which car they drove.  Yet advertisers expected Madeline and Olive to both respond exactly the same way to marketing messages based solely on their “demographics.”

When it comes to really understanding female customers, many businesses try to sail an ocean that’s vast and deep by relying on a rickety raft constructed from generalizations.  They believe that what I call the Rule of Resemblance – targeting women by age, income, lifestyle category, or zip code –is their mainsail, when more often than not, it’s the anchor that prevents them from getting where they need to go.  The Rule of Resemblance strategy usually results in weak response and low (if any) return on investment.

Here’s why the Rule of Resemblance fails:

1.  It says that given the same external factors, all women respond equally. Focusing solely on external circumstances like zip code, income, or age ignores a very important factor in the marketing equation – the internal value system of the individual.  The Rule of Resemblance creates an inflated sense of overlap between external characteristics, giving you the false assertion that if a woman lives in a targeted zip code, then she also makes a designated income, enjoys a particular lifestyle, and (even more dangerous) lives by a specific code of internal values.  Try placing twelve women from the same zip code (even the same city block) in a room and see if their personal values aren’t wildly different from each other’s. Values, or the chosen ideals a woman lives by everyday, are what brand decisions are based on – not address or income.

2.  It assumes that every woman has the same time horizon. As a business owner, your goal is to make money today – but that doesn’t mean a woman is ready to buy at the precise moment you’re ready to sell.  To her, time is more than a date on the calendar; it’s also the lens through which she views her outlook on life. That view may be short-term (“living in the moment”), long-term (“making a difference for the future”), or somewhere in between.  Each decision a woman makes is held up to her personal time horizon to see if it fits, and if so, where.  Time knows nothing about age, income, or lifestyle demographics, but its function is critical when it comes to determining your importance in her life.

If you’ve been relying on the Rule of Resemblance, don’t be too hard on yourself.  You worked hard with the information you were given.  The main reason the Rule of Resemblance doesn’t work is that it has never accounted for the most important part of a woman – what’s inside.

Attracting women, both as loyal customers and motivated employees, gets more difficult with each passing day.  It’s up to you to shed the rules of the past and embrace the truth of the future: that the sisterhood of female customers is based not on a world of similarity, but rather a universe of individuality.

What will it take?  For starters, exploration into the unknown regions of the female values system.  Understanding of how her time horizon affects every purchase she makes. Development of in-depth customer profiles.  And creation of various dialects in the language of marketing that will speak directly to the hearts of different female customers.

No one said this business of sisterhood was easy.  But stick with me, and we’ll make it more profitable than you can imagine.  Stay tuned to WonderBranding.com for future posts on female values, her time horizon, creation of customer profiles, and how to speak her language.

WonderCast: Sisterhood of Women from Michele Miller on Vimeo.

With a brain that’s structured for massive signal input and a pair of eyes that possess the peripheral vision of Wonder Woman, the female customer can’t help but absorb visual cues that affect how she feels about your business.

These optic bits are automatically catalogued in her brain, directly into a file folder with your name on it. They are the subliminal puzzle pieces that validate her decision about whether or not she wants to be your customer.

What do her eyes register when she encounters your place of business?  To name a few:

• Signage from the road
• Width of parking spaces
• Cracks in the sidewalk
• Landscaping
• Fingerprints on the glass entry door
• Stains on the carpet
• Color of the walls
• Lighting in the store and showcases
• Dusty furniture
• Signage in the departments
• Width of the aisles
• Arrangement of product displays
• Proximity of sales staff

Her eyes are working overtime, and all of those incoming signals can be pretty steep competition if you’re trying to get her attention.  By eliminating as many negative visual cues as you can up front, you will help her mind relax, focus on the task at hand, and be more open to developing an ongoing customer relationship with you.

Just being aware of a woman’s big-picture perspective will make you a more successful business owner.

What kind of visual cues does your business emit?  Go to the freebie section of WonderBranding.com and download the FREE “Quick Visual Checklist” to get a head start on rating how well you communicate with your female customers on a visual level.  A few improvements could mean a pocket full of profit!

It was a subtle rumbling of the earth, a shifting of perspective.

I think it could mean the death of marketing to women.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

In recent weeks, a number of my blogger and professional colleagues have been writing and dialoguing about marketing to women and what it really means.  Some feel that the term “marketing to women” is too broad a moniker for such a dynamic demographic; that it demeans an important arena in the marketing industry.  Others believe that businesses should focus solely on the female market, since that’s “where the money is.”  And still others claim that marketing according to gender is ridiculous; smart marketing is smart marketing and will have broad-based appeal no matter whether you’re a man or a woman.

When these folks talk I listen, because they are very smart, bold, and specialize in the topic at hand.

But just because I listen doesn’t mean I have to agree.

I’ve been chewing on these conversations for a while now, and my conclusions have compelled me to begin making some changes of my own:

1.  I believe that the female customer is the most important customer you’ll see in your lifetime. Does smart marketing attract both genders?  Yes.  But should there be differences in how you approach women?  You bet your sweet bippy.  Between gender differences in brain wiring, response time of the five senses, and brain-based communication style, there’s no doubt in my mind that your campaign strategy, message, and in-store experience has to be developed specifically with women in mind.

2.  I think the reason that “marketing to women” hasn’t been embraced on a wider scale (and why M2W books don’t sell all that well) isn’t because the term is too demographically broad, but because it’s too soft. It’s a feminine-based language style that takes a critically important business idea and softens the edges till they’re melting off the page.  There’s lack of definition, which is tough to tackle in a left-brain, gimme-lists-and-bullet-points world.  The best books, blogs, and articles on the topic have all been written by women from a right brain, “big picture” perspective that is just too amorphous for the general population.  (Yes, I’m one of them.)

I’m currently hard at work on my next book (for Bard Press) and have been conducting some experiments over the last few weeks with writing style, leaning a little more toward left brain, analytical writing (like here and here).  Between comments, emails, and syndication of the posts, it’s clear that information delivered in a more concrete, analytical style gets a huge response.  You have spoken loud and clear – while I may occasionally falter and fall back into oogly-googly-isn’t-the-universe-grand language, I promise to quickly snap out of it.

3.  It’s the female customer, stupid… not the women’s market. Again, I’m guilty as charged.  We need to peel some layers off of this behemoth and get down to where we need to be – the individual female customer.  Holly and I spent an entire book blowing up the myth of the Soccer Mom and detailing the how-to’s of understanding women from the inside out.  It’s time I started talking about the female customer as an individual rather than a member of a grandiose, impossible-to-understand demographic.

That said, I am in the midst of transitioning my old website to act as a combination blog and information site for readers, which you can find here.  I hesitate to send you over there just yet because the design isn’t quite finished, but screw it.  One of the first changes you’ll see is in the header:

If I do keep the term “marketing to women” on the site from time to time, it will only be for search engine purposes (it’s a very popular search term and I’m not that stupid as to reject it altogether!).  But know that my intentions are to focus on the female customer, with a little extra marketing news thrown in from time to time.

Rest in peace, marketing to women.  Long live the female customer.