Researching women’s needs

We use this chapter to introduce the best way to define a specific target audience of women for your brand. This begins with female segmentation fundamentals and is followed by detailed examples of how demographic, behavioral and attitudinal segmentation techniques can be applied to different female audiences. It highlights the main female life stages and their implications for marketers. Three of the most important demographic and attitudinal female segments – Generation Y, Generation X and Baby Boomer – are examined in exhaustive detail in the subsequent three chapters of this book. One of the most important aspects of long-term brand management is the ability to manage female customer relationships across the transition points in a woman’s life journey. Understanding what women want is just as difficult as understanding what men want, but the research techniques we need in order to find this out are somewhat different. It is crucial for marketers to accept this issue. Because women are different from men, they require different techniques to unlock their attitudes to the brand. It is no good simply avoiding the differences or expecting our normal methods to deliver insightful results if the research methods are not attuned to what we already know about women. This chapter examines the latest methods for identifying uniquely female needs and desires.