Social Web Branding Not Connecting with Women

Enlightening study to brand managers and social media evangelists. In general, women use the web for knowledge and socialization. We examine price and quality first. Previous to this downturn economy quality was more than likely number one and price second. One key piece that is missing is the age demographic of those surveyed.

My thoughts on shopping and branding? This to me is a question asked by someone who doesn’t do the grocery shopping.

I recall a male Republican president being astonished at seeing checkers scan items at a check-out stand, and I recall thinking the same thing: this guy obviously is so out of it, he doesn’t even know the most rudimentary facts about the world of people who do grocery shopping. Our world, the world of those who keep the home together; the ones who do the grocery shopping.

Whenever I go shopping, I see examples of these men–and it’s usually men: they can’t really handle the grocery cart, and in their trip through the store either crash into things or block aisles. They stand, glazed over for long minutes, at the massive diversity of toilet paper or cereals, unable to make a purchasing decision. They often get way too much of some things and not enough of others. They are unable to mind the children at the same time as shopping. They look uncomfortable. And, they always go for the Brands, the things they’ve seen on TV or the Internet. Over and over. Over and over.

I stopped at one fellow’s obvious dilemma distress and asked if he needed more information. I showed him where he could find the unit price of an item on the shelf sales tag. He never had looked at those tags that closely and hadn’t thought about what might be the better deal. He was staring at eye level goods, not those on the bottom shelf.

Every person shopping to make a home knows that the expensive stuff is always at eye level and the good buys are always harder to reach. I realized cost might not be a consideration for these male purchasers. Cost hadn’t been a consideration for that aging Republican president either. Cost is rarely a consideration for the male party making the purchase or for those whose main goal isn’t to “make a home.”

I include in this group the bachelor who shops as if he were 14. He buys TV dinners and cookies and soda (what I call Corporate Sugar Water). All those things heavily advertised on TV and many well-traveled Internet sites. He buys Brand-name dog food, and Brand-name baked goods, and Brand-name detergent. And Coke or Papsi. Women squeeze by his misaligned cart and grab the bigger bag of dog food from the bottom shelf, the locally baked no-name brand bread, the 100% juice, and the store-brand detergent (again from the bottom shelf).

So, you want to know why women aren’t attracted to brands on Social Media. It’s simple. We’re the ones juggling things in inflationary times, attempting to maintain certain living standards for more than ourselves while our real income drops and drops again. We don’t give a big amount of attention to TV ads that promise us we’ll look like those blonds or live as well as those wealthy looking couples. We know better. We use Social Media to find connections with the real—not imaginary—consequences of a purchase. We sometimes bend to the wishes of a brainwashed child, demanding a cereal marketed for 37 minutes out of every four hours of Saturday TV, but not often.

We have long bought the store brand. We’ve begun buying used things. We have begun clothing swaps and book swaps. We started using Freeycle and craigslist to move our possessions around. We are falling back on stories heard around the kitchen tables from our grandmothers and mothers. We even took a class on canning tomatoes and making pickles.

We have begun living even more inexpensively than we did in the ’60s and ’70s when we experimented with buying clubs and food co-ops and barter networks. We connect and compare and cooperate. Brands are something that don’t even catch our eye except in a negative way. The results of your study indicated this: Brands come in last, after Other as the reason for purchase.

So get a clue. Go grocery shopping. Ask a woman for explanations (if she looks as if she has the time; don’t if she looks harried, hurried, or tired). Get some opinions from the people who are holding this country together while all else fails. It isn’t the men.

p.s. I apologize for generalizing this into black and white. It is stark but important to see the contrast. I know men who know how to shop, and who are more concerned about excessive packaging than about Brand name. They purchase items carefully and conservatively, following Slow Food’s and Michael Pollen’s guidelines for shopping. I am exaggerating this to make a point.