The Richer Sex: Why Companies Need to Cater to Women
Colleague Rana Foroohar has a great piece in this week’s Women & Leadership issue of Newsweek, about female spending power.
By 2024, Foroohar writes, the average woman will outearn the average man (even with the wage gap!). But what’s shocking is that more companies haven’t tapped into that spending power.
The most obviously female-oriented sectors, like food, packaged goods, and apparel, do a decent job of appealing to their core customers. (Remember the Dove ads from a couple of years ago that celebrated all sizes of female bodies? They drove up soap sales 600 percent.) But there are still many industries—cars, travel, health care, and consumer electronics—where women are neglected in product development and marketing, even though they make the majority of purchasing decisions. “A lot of the people making these decisions at top firms are still older men,” says demographer Maddy Dychtwald, the author of Influence, a book on female economic power.
Better catch up, fellas. Women are going to control the majority of the world’s income over the next decade—and as Rana puts it, they’ll be buying a lot more than $800 gold heels.
