Page 109 - HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

SILVERSTEIN AND SAYRE
Idea in Brief

As a market, women represent an would be wise to target female
opportunity bigger than China and consumers, they say, the greatest
India combined. They control $20 potential lies in six industries:
trillion in consumer spending, and food, fitness, beauty, apparel,
that figure could reach $28 trillion health care, and financial services.
in the next five years. Women drive
the world economy, in fact. Yet Address women’s concerns
most companies do a remarkably effectively, and your company
poor job of serving them, a new could see the kind of rapid growth
study by the Boston Consulting that fitness chain Curves enjoyed.
Group reveals. Most health clubs are expensive
and designed for men, with lots of
BCG surveyed more than 12,000 complicated body-building
women from a variety of equipment. Curves, however,
geographies, income levels, and understood that time-pressed
walks of life about their education, women needed quick, affordable
finances, homes, jobs, activities, workouts, and came up with the
interests, relationships, hopes, concept of simple, 30-minute
and fears, as well as their exercise routines geared to women
shopping behaviors and spending and offered in no-frills spaces.
patterns. In this article, Silverstein Companies that likewise success-
and Sayre, two of the firm’s fully tailor their offerings to
partners, review highlights of the women will be positioned to win
findings and explain the biggest when the economy begins to
opportunities. While any business recover.

is what really matters to women. No SUV is built to accommodate a
mother who needs to load two small children into it. Or consider a
recent ad for Bounty paper towels, in which a husband and son stand
by watching a spill cross the room, until Mom comes along and
cheerfully cleans up the mess.
Meanwhile, women are increasingly gaining influence in the
work world. As we write, the number of working women in the
United States is about to surpass the number of working men. Three-
quarters of the people who have lost jobs in the current recession are
men. To be fair, women are still paid less, on average, than men, and
are more likely to work part-time—factors that have helped insulate
them somewhat from the crisis. Nevertheless, we believe that as this

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