Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

Thinking Pink, How Important is it Really? Unless you are Oprah Perhaps not Very

There’s been a lot of talk and several books written the last few years on segmenting by gender and targeting the most important consumer “women”. When I was consulting at Starwood a few years ago they even had the author of “Think Pink” come in and present to all their employees. I’m starting to wonder how much gender really matters in segmentation.

In a study I presented at the ESOMAR Automotive conference in Switzerland two years ago I had looked at segmenting by ethnicity VS gender among youth. I found ethnicity was far more important variable than gender. I began to wonder if “thinking pink”, at least in terms of messaging and products is over rated.

Then last night, during an after work walk with my wife she happened to bring up the topic of feminism. I told her I thought feminism was dead in the US, at least the versions taught to us in college. I argued that if it wasn’t, Hillary Clinton would be doing much better.

She said, “well it’s Hillary” and suggested that “Oprah would probably do much better”. From there on the conversation turned less serious, yet more interesting. Well, thanks to the internet, random theories can quickly be tested.

The below are not the most “scientific polls”, but they do give us some directional insights, and in business after all, speedy insights are often more valuable than long, expensive and boring academic studies. Below are the results of three separate polls conducted among n=100 women (+/-9.8%) each on Facebook.com last night.
Would you consider yourself a feminist?

Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, it looks like I was correct and it doesn’t seem in vogue to consider yourself a feminist, even during an election year when women have the first opportunity to put a woman in the most important position in politics. If the roles were reversed, and men had this opportunity I’m guessing that these numbers might be different?
Who do you think would make a better president?

Perhaps a less interesting finding? Obama is on top, this is Facebook after all (a younger audience). Perhaps helping to prove that age and ethnicity are more important than gender?

Who do you think would make a better US President?

And the most interesting question of all… Apparently my wife may be right, and Oprah should run for President. Too bad Hillary couldn’t get her endorsement. Good news is, at least she’s not running against Oprah herself!

Joking aside, and not to get too political, I think this year there are three candidates all of which are better than what we currently have in office. The polls above were interesting to me mainly because they seemed to prove my hunch that the ‘gender’ card is not so powerful in US marketing/politics as some might lead us to believe.

Also, though facebook polls may not be the most accurate type of research out there, it’s pretty damn cool to be able to get statistical support for your theories in minutes online these days.

Anyway, what do you think about targeting women. Other than for the obvious products like clothing, perhaps thinking Pink is a mistake? It seems that Cadillac is targeting both genders in their new ads with the same message more or less. Judging by who seems to be driving most tough masculine SUV’s including the Hummer I’m not sure how important gender is relative to all the other variables we have available (income, ethnicity, age…).