Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World's Largest, Fastest-Growing Market

By Michael J. Silverstein, Kate Sayre and John Butman

In Women Want More, Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, two of the world’s leading authorities on the retail business, argue that women are the key to fixing the economy. Based on a groundbreaking study and offering tremendous insight into the purchasing habits and power of women, Women Want More doesn’t just offer a glimpse into consumer behavior; it reveals what consumer behavior says about human psychology and desire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061905407

Michael J. Silverstein

Michael J. Silverstein is a senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group. He is the coauthor of the bestsellers Trading Up and Treasure Hunt. He is an authority on consumer buying behavior, retail and packaged goods innovation, and market development.

Book preview

Preface

Women want more.

More what? Above all, more time. More understanding would be good, too, especially of the complexities that come with playing multiple roles. More value and satisfaction from the products and services they buy. More love, of course. (We could all use a little more of that.) More money? Not really. For most women, money is not the point.

From whom do women want more?

You. The businesspeople who develop products, run companies, shepherd brands, manage retail operations, and provide services. You, the husbands and partners who may actually earn less than the women in your lives and who also do less work around the house. You, the policy makers who don’t do enough to help women with the particular challenges that come with being working mothers and heads of families.

It’s not difficult to find out what more women want. Just ask them. As we did.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville journeyed from France, his home country, to travel through the United States. His observations of everyday life here, his talks with citizens, his collections of data, and his analysis served as the basis for his landmark book, Democracy in America, a classic work of social commentary. We do not claim to be modern-day Tocquevilles, but we have approached our subject—women and the consumer economy—in a similar fashion. We have devoted more than two years to research, discussion, and study in search of answers to a deceptively simple question: what do women want?

Very early on, a more relevant question emerged: what more do women want?

What more do they want from the revolution in earning power, commercial influence, and political clout they are already so successfully waging?

What more do they want for themselves and for their friends and families?

And (of most interest to us, as management consultants) what more do women want from the products and services they buy and from the companies that provide them?

We asked a final question—what more do women want for their societies and the world at large?—because, as we’ll see, that want plays a large role in the other questions.

The summary answer to all these questions is that, even with the remarkable increases in market power and social position women have accomplished and enjoyed in the last century in the United States and elsewhere, they still find themselves undervalued in the marketplace, underestimated in the workplace, and underappreciated in the social arena. Today, women are as well educated as men. They control half the wealth in this country. The majority of women work. The majority of those women play multiple roles, as spouse, mother, caregiver, and household manager. Women are sophisticated buyers and consumers and make or influence the majority of consumer purchases.

Yet it’s still tough for women to find a pair of pants that fits, buy a family meal that’s both healthy and delicious, make the time to keep fit, or work with a financial services adviser who isn’t patronizing.

Something’s got to give. And that’s what this book is about: how companies can develop and market their products and services—and how they can make their companies better places for women to work—to serve the wants and needs of the world’s demanding consumers.

Over the next decade, the rewards for those companies that serve women well will be enormous. We believe that the 1 billion working women across the globe will continue to gain economically, will drive fundamental changes in markets, and, worldwide, will spend an incremental $5 trillion or more on goods and services of all kinds.

To arrive at these conclusions, we have pursued many avenues of research. In 2008, we fielded a large and comprehensive study of women, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Global Inquiry into Women and Consumerism. It was administered both across a network of thousands of friends and through a variety of purchased samples to ensure that it provided a rigorous statistical sample as well as richness of response. More than 12,000 women, in more than forty geographic areas and from every income level and many walks of life, responded.

The survey consists of 120 questions—both multiple-choice and open-ended—that enable women to deliver their opinions and respond with great candor (and often disarming intimacy) about many aspects of their lives, including their education, incomes and finances, homes and possessions, jobs and careers, activities and interests, career goals, relationships with family and friends, shopping behaviors, hopes and dreams for the future, fears, and anxieties, as well as spending patterns in some three dozen categories of goods and services. (You can learn more about the survey, the questions, our methodology, the respondents, and their responses, and take a short version of the survey, at our Web site, www.womenspeakworldwide.com.)

We also conducted interviews with hundreds of women—some of them well-known and influential, but many of them with no special claim to fame—in ten countries. We tell many of their stories in this book as a way for the reader to better understand what more women do want.

During the course of our research, we studied fifty organizations, in thirteen different fields of endeavor, to better understand how they serve women. And we drew on our forty collective years spent working with companies and organizations in every category of goods and services to help us synthesize and analyze the findings of our research. These companies provide models and practices for others to follow and to adapt for their own product categories, markets, and customers.

This book is not intended to provide The Answer to the question of what a company must do in order to produce goods and services that women want. It does provide, however, a framework that can be used to arrive at an answer for a specific company, industry, and set of female consumers.

As we write this, the number of working women in the United States exceeds the number of working men. In the current economic cycle, three-quarters of the rise in unemployment has involved men. Education, ambition, and career choices have helped, in part, to insulate women from the crisis—although lower average wages for women and more part-time female employees have also been factors. When this downturn abates, we believe that women will not only represent one of the largest market opportunities in our lifetime but will also be an important force in creating recovery and new prosperity.

Introduction

A Revolutionary Opportunity

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A quiet economic and social revolution is taking place. Worldwide, 1 billion women work. More than half of university students worldwide are women. Women control half the wealth in the United States. The female economy will have a global economic impact greater than the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). This economy represents the most important commercial opportunity in our lifetime.

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A quiet economic and social revolution is taking place as we write this book.

There may not be violence in the streets, but there is upheaval in the workplace, turmoil in the home, radical change in the marketplace, and a struggle for influence in government and society as a whole. It is a revolution of, by, and for women—driven by a desire for more: for ongoing education, better ways to nurture themselves and their families, increased success as executives and entrepreneurs, higher earnings, and better ways to manage and leverage their accumulated wealth.

It is a revolution of dissatisfaction in which women are using their checkbooks to vote no on large sectors of the economy, including financial services, consumer electronics, consumer durables, and healthcare. They are saying: You don’t understand me, There are too many demands on my time, I have an overwhelming share of household chores and a full-time job, Help me or I’ll find another provider.

Some observers say that the most important economic and social changes of the early twenty-first century are taking place in China and India. We believe that the emergence of a whole new social and economic order, which can accurately be labeled a female economy—in every country and every arena—is an even more significant upheaval. The data we have gathered during the course of research for this book are clear and startling:

Worldwide, 1 billion women participate in the workforce.

The number of working women in the United States has increased by 50 percent in the past twenty years, to 75 million.

Working women in the United States generate $4.3 trillion in earned income annually.

Women account for 57 percent of the students of higher education in this country and 47 percent worldwide.

Women worldwide make or influence at least 64 percent of all purchases in a wide variety of categories, and a much higher percentage in many of them.

On the basis of our quantitative research and our interviews with women around the world, we believe that these indicators will continue to move upward. And, as we’ve said, over the next several years, women will drive an incremental increase of up to $5 trillion in global earnings—bigger than any bailout package.

WITH GAINS COME DISSATISFACTIONS

However, the women we have come to know during our research for this book tell us that the revolution is far from over. As encouraging as the data may be, the stories these women tell us reveal that ascendancy has come at a price.

In the responses we gathered in our survey and in the interviews we conducted, women told us that the gains they have achieved have not brought them the happiness and satisfaction one might have expected. Even very successful women still experience significant stress, tension, and dissatisfaction. Very few women say they have enough time, money, help, or love in their lives. And almost all women experience simple, chronic frustration with particular products and services (as well as some whole categories of goods), which seem to have been created and marketed by companies that have little to no understanding of who women today are and what they want.

Ironically, much of women’s dissatisfaction comes about as a direct result of their achievements.

Women find themselves caught in an upward spiral. If they and their families are to continue to achieve higher levels of prosperity, health, education, and accumulated wealth, they have virtually no choice but to work full-time. Particularly in the developed world, a cycle has been created in which families—in order to increase their income—have become dependent on each new generation of women to improve their education and to progress higher in the workforce. In the United States, women contributed nearly 100 percent of the change in family income in the past decade.

To work or not to work is no longer a question for the majority of adult women.

And, although the status of women has changed, much of the world seems not to have noticed or adjusted to the new reality. For example, the great majority of women participate in the workforce, but these women still do most of the household chores—the cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, bill-paying, and childcare—that women have always done. As a result, working women feel there are too many demands on their time. Married women with children experience the most pressure of all.

What’s more, although women control the spending in most categories of consumer goods—including food, clothing, personal care, household goods and services, travel, healthcare, financial services, and education—too many companies continue to make poorly conceived products, offer services that take up way too much of women’s precious time, and serve up outdated marketing narratives that portray women as stereotypes.

WOMEN’S MULTIPLE AND CONFLICTING ROLES CREATE A NEED FOR LEVERAGE

Our research confirms that women continue to play many roles in their lives and that, because these roles often overlap and conflict with each other, women want and expect the things they buy to provide multiple solutions as well. Women are the major consumer spenders in the economy and also the primary savers, so they seek value. They are usually the nurturer of the family but also seek independence and personal fulfillment, so they want goods that help the family and also give the woman herself a lift or a touch of pleasure. They are hardheaded household purchasing agents but also tenderhearted dreamers, so they want quality and effectiveness as well as attention to design and a marketing narrative.

Above all, women want agents of leverage—ways to find time, save time, free up time. They want to do business with companies that care, listen, and respond to their needs and desires. They want to associate with brands that respect and honor a privileged relationship with the female consumer; they want to align with companies that act as enablers, enhancers, protectors. And when women find a product or service that truly meets these needs, they can become apostles for that brand. They will compliment brands that deliver and will complain about brands that don’t. They will share their opinions within their social networks, which can be far-reaching.

They can help a company increase its profits quickly and help a brand take root in the society.

THE OPPORTUNITY WITHIN THE REVOLUTION: A CALL TO ACTION

The emergence of the female economy holds the potential for the creation of vast wealth—the $20 trillion of consumer spending now controlled by women could climb to as high as $28 trillion in the next several years. Women’s $12 trillion in total earnings could grow to as much as $18 trillion in the same period.

The phenomenon is worldwide. Although we found differences between women in the countries we studied, similarities are more significant. A woman living in Guangzhou, a second-rank city in China, has expectations very different from those of a woman who lives on the East Side of Manhattan. But the Chinese woman influences the purchases in her household just as women do in New York and around the world, and the wealth of her household is steadily increasing. The Chinese woman—even if her absolute spending power is lower than that of consumers in other countries—is a highly profitable customer.

The rise of the worldwide female economy will challenge assumptions about how companies do research, how they develop products, how they sell and merchandise, and how they add services to their value proposition. Companies must rethink how they segment their audiences, how they react to changes in consumers’ behavior, and how they capture the imagination.

Further, the female economy will challenge corporate leaders and managers to reexamine their human resources practices—how they recruit, select, develop, integrate, retain, and provide support to their people and how they help nurture and facilitate a healthy work-life balance.

The bad news is that only a small percentage of the companies we studied understand the significance of the female economy to their business. If they respond to this economy at all, they do so by fiddling with segmentation or by making small adjustments to their product line or to their organizations, as if these powerful trends were nothing more than incremental shifts in existing patterns. These companies do not look at the world and how it is changing through a woman’s eyes. They do not prioritize the way their female consumers prioritize. They fail to recognize that time is scarce for women or that easy access to information is essential; and as a result, few companies achieve the position of trusted adviser.

The good news is that some companies do recognize the opportunity and respond to it brilliantly, with skill, nuance, and genuine engagement. They occupy a privileged position in the market. They enjoy breakout growth, unprecedented consumer loyalty, and category dominance. Companies like Gerber, Banana Republic, Ecute, Haier, Harpo, and others really get women and serve them well.

We have found that these companies follow a set of practices that we call the four R’s.

Recognize. They understand the size of the opportunity in women’s goods and services and commit themselves to researching where, how, and what the opportunity is for them.

Research. They study how their product or service is consumed, from the beginning to the end of the process of consumption, paying careful attention to frequency of use, habituation, the process by which dissatisfaction occurs, and the total time each consumer segment requires to buy, use, and finish with a product or service.

Respond. They identify, with brutal honesty, the good points and the unsatisfying points of their offering and then aggressively respond to each source of dissatisfaction.

Refine. Finally, they take their ideas to market in a way that creates lasting relationships with their female consumers, they build connections and bridges, and they continually improve their products to strengthen those relationships.

Our hope is that as more and more companies adopt the business practices described in this book to better serve women, they will not only succeed for themselves but will also enable more women to succeed and prosper.

In the chapters that follow, we will first examine forces that drive the female economy, what more women want from their lives, and some archetypes that can help companies better understand their customers. Then we’ll look carefully at the categories in which women report their deepest levels of interest—and corresponding dissatisfactions. These are the areas that offer companies opportunities to develop products and services that serve women better than ever before:

Food. Women love food, just after love itself, but find that food shopping and preparation are chores that never end and take up far too much of their precious time, and that healthy options often are hard to find, cost too much, or take too long to prepare.

Fitness. Most women want to be healthy and fit but are not interested in bodybuilding or working out for its own sake. They rank fitness activities low on the list of priorities and try to squeeze fitness in during spare pockets of time.

Beauty. Women are constantly in search of new and better ways to achieve a holistic kind of beauty that includes appearance, especially of the face and hair, and also wellness of skin and body. They expect the most advanced technologies, constantly improved efficacy, and also the latest in colors, forms, and styles.

Apparel. Women want apparel to do a lot of work for them—make them look and feel good, minimize what they consider their physical shortcomings, make the right statement at work, be comfortable, and let them express their personal style.

Financial services. In most households women handle the finances, and the majority of women say they dislike the job. Financial products are confusing and complicated. Financial advisers are predominantly male. Women typically pay more for insurance than men do and have compensation and retirement packages that are not as good as men’s.

Healthcare. Women generally like their doctors and the care they receive from them but are not pleased with the delivery systems in which their doctors must work. Too little access. Too much waiting. Not enough contact. Billing and management processes that are far too complex.

In this book, we examine these areas and describe companies that are leading the way in each area—and how they are doing so. Perhaps even more important, we provide you with firsthand observations and insights from a number of women we met in the course of our research whose engagement and intelligence speak more clearly than we ever could about what women truly want and how they are exercising their buying power as never before.

PART I

The Female Economy

The World’s Most Demanding Consumers

The Archetypes and Life Stages

Brands That Understand

1.

The World’s Most Demanding Consumers

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Women have achieved a great deal but still have important dissatisfactions. The triple time challenge: Too many demands on my time. Do not have enough time for me. I have conflicting priorities. They have the double duty of working at the job and working at home, and they wage a battle for balance. Despite the complexity of their lives, women are generally optimistic. Women want products and services that help leverage time, facilitate connection, and contribute to happiness for themselves and their families.

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Although Nicole Green has a great deal to be thankful for, she still wants more.

At 43, she is slim, youthful, and fit. She is in a stable marriage to a nice guy. They both have good jobs, she as a healthcare administrator; her husband, Peter, as an executive in a nonprofit organization that does poverty research. They have three healthy kids—Zack, age 8; and two girls, Megan, and Holly, 7 and 4. They have lived for a decade in a Victorian house in an affluent Boston suburb with good schools and neighborhood services. Their household income is $160,000. As in many households where both spouses work, Nicole earns more than Peter does. She makes about $87,000; he makes about $73,000.

But a stable marriage, happy kids, and a high income—seemingly the ingredients of an ideal life—do not seem to guarantee happiness or even a modest degree of contentment for Nicole. In fact, quite the opposite. She is seriously time-deprived, is almost absurdly overbooked, and has to employ every scrap of her time, energy, brainpower, and emotional strength to keep it all together.

This is a woman who—to save both time and money—cuts her wavy, light brown hair only twice a year, in a style that will grow out nicely. Who can’t remember the last time she bought clothes for herself. Who, as desperately as she craves sleep, misses books so badly that she will prop her eyes open for twenty minutes of reading rather than crash instantly at 1 or 1:30 a.m. or whenever she finally gets to bed. Whose days are so crammed with work, tasks, and appointments that it took three weeks to find a time when she could sit down with us for a one-hour interview.

Nicole, who speaks with intensity and animates her thoughts with quick gestures, starts by describing a typical weekday. The alarm goes off in our bedroom at 6:30 in the morning. Peter and I have a half hour to get ourselves showered and dressed, so we can wake Zack and Meg at 7 in order to get them downstairs by 7:25. Zack pops out of bed right away, picks out his own clothes, and is downstairs sitting on the sofa reading in ten minutes flat. But Megan pulls the covers over her head and stays there until I come in and literally poke her, and it can take fifteen minutes to get her organized. Then those two have to eat breakfast, brush their teeth, fill their backpacks, put on their shoes, and get out the door in twenty minutes so they don’t miss the school bus at 7:50. There’s always a tremendous amount of yelling. ‘The bus is coming! You need to find your shoes! Where’s your recorder?’ The school bus is the driving factor that really kick-starts the day. Then I get Holly, the 4-year-old, ready and drive her to preschool. It runs from 9 to noon, although there’s daycare available from 8 to 9 and 12 to 6. You get billed at $8 per hour for the time you use, though, so I try to drop her right at 9. It’s painful to drop her at 8:45 and have to pay for the full hour.

Notice that Nicole does not have a lot of time to linger over personal grooming, wardrobe choices, or preparation of elaborate meals for the children or herself. She is in a race against the clock.

Nicole hurries on to work, a twenty-minute drive, and plunges into her daily round of meetings, calls, and paperwork. Her office workday ends around 4 because she picks up the kids between 4:30 and 5. The pick-ups can be challenging. Sometimes the kids don’t want to leave. Or they have a meltdown. So I have a lot of upbeat music that I play in my car to get myself revved for dealing with it.

Nicole and the kids get back to the house about 5:30, and then things get even crazier. Peter usually gets home around 6:30, so from 5:30 to 6:30 is the ‘witching hour,’ the time when I am trying to get the kids to do their schoolwork. Zack is just horrible with homework. He’s supposed to spend forty-five minutes in the after-school program working on it, but he’ll come home and will have finished maybe three out of twenty-five math problems. So he sits at the kitchen counter and works. Meanwhile, the two girls have spent the entire day being good, following all the rules, and they just kind of want to go insane. I start dinner so we can eat by 6:30. I know it will take me the entire hour to do it, because I have to stop every forty-five seconds to get somebody gum or water or resolve a fight or help Zack with a math problem. It’s a pretty crazy hour.

Notice that although Nicole allots a full hour to preparing dinner, the actual time she can spend on it is probably half that.

The Green family’s bedtime routine begins around 7:30 and—depending on whether this is bath night, how long the reading goes on, and how many times which kids call out or come downstairs after being tucked in—it’s usually 8:45 before all is quiet. And that’s when my next shift begins. I need to finish cleaning up the kitchen from dinner, empty all the lunch boxes, get the dishwasher loaded and going, and pick up whatever messes there might be around the house. I always do at least one load of laundry every day, because if I don’t, it would be insane. I make all the lunches for the next day. Then I have to sort through the seventeen inches of paper that I seem to bring home every night. I technically spend only five or six hours doing work in the course of a day, so I always have some to catch up on at night. That’s the only way that I’m going to make it work. We usually don’t get upstairs until midnight.

Nicole has three hours to wash the dishes, clean up the kitchen, wash and dry a load of laundry, make five lunches, and do the equivalent of about three hours of office work. Notice that she did not mention watching television, surfing the Web, chatting on the phone with friends, luxuriating in a warm bath, exfoliating or moisturizing, sipping wine, or nibbling chocolates. These would be luxuries for Nicole.

Weekend days are filled up, too. Ice skating, swimming lessons, ballet, gymnastics, flute, and karate. There’s so many things that kids need to do, and it’s so hard to find the time to fit it in. Last year, I crammed it all in on the weekends, which was tough because my husband was working a lot on Saturday and Sunday. So I spent all weekend shuttling people around from one lesson to another lesson. But I felt it was my fault that the kids had to do the stuff on the weekend, so I needed to make the sacrifice. It gets down to, well, if I didn’t work, the kids could do these things more easily and it wouldn’t impact our life on the weekend so much.

Nicole feels guilty for working, but if she didn’t work, the Greens probably wouldn’t be living in their Victorian home in their leafy suburb and their kids wouldn’t be involved in so many special activities. Nicole makes more money than her husband does, after all. Lately, however, she has also been feeling guilty for doing too much. I sometimes feel their lives aren’t as good for them as they would have been if I didn’t work. Maybe they needed more time to just hang around the house?

Even with all she does, Nicole worries that it’s not enough, or is too much, or is not right in some way. Like most women we spoke with—especially married women with children—Nicole puts herself and her own needs last on the list of priorities.

It’s unlikely that the Greens’ routine will change much until the kids get a little older, and Nicole is already looking forward to those days. With one kid already in middle childhood, I’m starting to see that I’m going to love the middle childhood years. There’s going to be about four or five years when all three of my kids will be much more self-sufficient, but I will always know where they are. I think of that as the ‘golden window.’ That’s going to be a lot nicer, because I think so much of my daily stress now is just because so many people need so much from me. I just do and do and do and do and do and do for others. There’s a fixed number of things that absolutely have to happen and they already fill eighteen hours every day. I am always robbing Peter to pay Paul with my time.

THE STRESSES AND DISSATISFACTIONS OF WOMEN TODAY

Nicole Green is no anomaly. Our research shows that women around the world—especially working mothers, but not only working mothers—feel incredibly stressed, overburdened, out of balance, and dissatisfied. Work, ambition, and education have inarguably produced wealth, power, and influence for women. But they have also created stress, disequilibrium, frustration, unhappiness, and a host of difficult decisions, trade-offs, and compromises.

Overall a woman is stressed, time-pressured, and money-tight

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Looking for agents of leverage and savings to help her mitigate these challenges

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Source: Online survey, questions Q24 / Q28 (Absence of stress is very important or important / absence of stress is below or far below expectations), Q30 (What type of challenges do you face in your daily life); Q77 (How would you describe your household's current financial situation?); N = 11,747.

We spoke with many women for this book, in countries around the world, and found that, for the most part, women don’t really care about goods and services as such. Yes, they pay very careful attention to what they buy. They know in detail the good points and bad points of all the products they purchase. There are certain brands they love and respect. But products, services, companies, and brands take a very distant backseat to the things that truly demand women’s attention, care, and love: family, health, security, lovers, friends; learning and education; work and career; helping others and giving back.

Women told us that the most important values to them are:

Love, 77 percent

Health, 58 percent

Honesty, 51 percent

Emotional well-being, 48 percent

So a product’s ability to claim the first position in a woman’s mind or life is very limited. Every claim about a product is subject to scrutiny, discussion, and often amused derision (Who do they think they’re talking to?). Every product relationship is subject to instant revision, should the product fail to keep its promise, or should another product come along that can better help women live as they want.

The Triple Challenge of Time

Above all other issues, women everywhere intensely feel a lack of time in their lives and the pressure of trying to contort time to accommodate everything they want to achieve. The time pressure is very real, and nearly all our survey respondents mentioned it. I’m afraid of being overworked and having life pass me by, one woman wrote.

And it’s not just a simple shortage of time. Women find themselves caught in an almost inescapable lack of time. Typically, a woman says she must deal with:

Too many demands on my time. There are just too many things to do in a day. Nicole Green says that every second of every eighteen-hour day is accounted for. Demands on time were cited as the number one challenge by 47 percent of our survey respondents.

Too many conflicting priorities. Not only are there too many things on the to-do list, but many of them seem to conflict with others.

Not enough time for me. When do I get a moment to close the door to the bedroom, take a walk by myself, read