Like millions of women across the country, one of the first things Rachel Sawyer does each morning is to log onto her computer. That moment marks the dawn of 12-plus Web-rich hours where she is exposed to marketing messages, ads and other inducements to buy everything from shoes to financial services. "Everything I do is online," says Sawyer, 45, a librarian who lives near Baltimore with her teenage son. "I shop online, I read the news online, I bank online. I probably would never need to leave the house."


            Sawyer gets RSS feeds on politics, subscribes to e-mail alerts about clothing sales, and downloads grocery coupons. Where she once subscribed to three home-delivered newspapers, now she reads them on the Web. When she's done with work, she'll add to her blog, Tinkertytonk. Toward the end of her Internet saturated day, she'll turn on the TV to relax.


            "I'm a big consumer," she says, "but most advertising just annoys me."


            Ouch. Why is marketing to women so challenging? With blogs, message-boards, social networks and other Internet-based feedback, what women think and want is easily at hand for brands that are listening.






            "Demography is dead," says Ann Mack, director of Trendspotting for New York-based agency JWT. "It's horrible to say in our industry, which has so easily sectionalized people and targeted them with advertising. But in this world, you can no longer simply target to a demographic. You also have to look at life stage versus age."


            Michele Miller, author of The Soccer Mom Myth and the WonderBranding blog on marketing to women, agrees. "Big marketers, if they haven't adjusted already, are about to receive a very big surprise," Miller says. "We are experiencing a major shift in our culture."


            The changes are dizzying. "We always have to be five steps ahead of the audience," says Bob Bibb, co-chief marketing officer for Lifetime Networks. "It used to be that the culture would shift every couple of years; now it's every three months or so."


            To stay ahead of the curve, savvy brands and media increasingly are segmenting their marketing by life stages. The vocabulary varies: Women may be categorized as Millennials, Gen Y or X'ers, Moms, or boomers, or grouped by consumer "accumulation" stages, Myers-Briggs personality types or psychographics. Oxygen Media just announced a strategy to target what it calls "Generation O," women aged 18 to 34 who are "trenders, spenders and recommenders."


            Women and their busy lives can no longer be slotted into neat generational labels. For example, a brand marketing to mothers should be looking at women who may be 24 years old-or 44. Career women could be 30-or 60. They are all going through the same life stage, but they are not the same age.

            "From a marketing standpoint, we think more about key life events, rather than age, such as married with kids, single, college," says Suzanne Kolb, chief marketing officer for E! Entertainment Television and The Style Network and general manager of E! Online.


            At the same time, major woman-targeted media companies are offering more and more touchpoints for their advertisers' (and their own) brands to integrate into women's lives, from online games to experiential efforts. Witness The Style Network's traveling "Beauty Bus," a Winnebago that offered local residents free makeovers, beauty tips and goodie bags. Likewise, ABC heralded the return of two popular soap opera characters by targeting African-American fans at 12,000 beauty shops.

For more Marketing to Women coverage:
What Women Want: the New Terms of Engagement Part I
What Women Want: the New Terms of Engagement Part II
What Women Want: the New Terms of Engagement Part III
What Women Want: the New Terms of Engagement Part IV