Women are placial; men are spatial
There's a scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in which Prince Herbert is talking with his father. The classic dialogue is "Someday, all this will be yours," to which Prince Herbert replies, "What? The curtains?" The conversation degenerates into gender confusion with father being called "Mother" and Herbert being called "Alice." This scene amusingly demonstrates cogon-emotive placial and spatial concepts in the human psyche. The male time sense might be fixed on the now or near-now, but the male spatial concept extends as far as the eye can see. The female time sense extends through time, but the female spatial concept has a strong boundary, and that boundary is (metaphorically) within arm's reach.
Gender-based spatial concepts play directly into marketing design. Consider a webpage or a brochure as an example. It's well understood that the material must capture the eye before it is acted upon. Gender-based spatial concepts also indicate that women will give that initial interaction -- the capturing of the eye -- much more weight than men will.
Women, the strategists supreme, want to know now that something will be worth their time and energies later. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to pick up and scan a brochure or click on a link to the next page. A way to think of this is that women want to know more up front than a man does; men are more willing to gamble a bit in the hopes of a greater reward.
Advertising designers have known this for a long time. It can be summed up with the old adage, "sex sells".
Another way in which spatial concepts come into marketing design is in story telling, and gender-based studies of humor are replete with examples.
Males will pay attention to a story in order to get to the end, and often they forget the details that got them there. Women pay attention to the details and want to make sure there's a good cause for the story's end. Both genders want a reward: men tend to pay less attention to rules than to outcomes; women are more comfortable with lesser rewards if the rules are fairly applied.
The marketing middle ground is to have a good story arc that satisfies the emotional requirements of both genders, if that's your audience requirements.
Women's decisions and men's decisions
Women consider other's opinions as a guide to making their own decision. Men consider others' decisions as a guide to forming their own opinions. Again, this seems a contradiction to the male "now" and female "not-now" time sense. It does play well into the female and male spatial concepts, however.
Men are willing to make a purchase once it has been demonstrated that someone else was successful with the same purchase; kind of a, "that worked for Joe, so it'll probably work for me" mentality.
Women posit things differently. It's good to know if something worked for Sally; it's better to know what Sally's motivations were for her purchase. Success in itself isn't meaningful unless the conditions leading to success are the same. (So much for women not being cut out for the sciences!) This can be thought of as, "it may have worked for Sally, but Sally bought it for reason A and I'm interested in reason B, so the same purchase might not work for me."
This kind of thinking is another example of how loyalties can grow. Men tend to stay away from something if it caused someone else's failure regardless of the reasons failure occurred. Women want to know the reasons for the failure and will decide accordingly.
This information violates typical gender stereotypes. Women will gather together but will make their individualized decisions in the end. Men, on the other hand, will make "individual" decision based on following the herd. Men may be the explorers but more often than not they're exploring where women lead them (way to go, Sacagawea!).
The moral on this one is simple and easy enough:
Marketing to women: show women together with some other element indicating the reasons they acted upon marketing information as they did.
Marketing to men: show a single male or small group of males using the product or interacting with each other about the product, and add to this some other element listing the successes this individual or group of males had based on the marketing information.
Men and women shop and make purchasing decisions for different reasons, that's not new. Understanding the gender-based differences in serviceability over time, spatial concepts and purchasing rationale is new and can be quite helpful when developing marketing and campaign specific material.
Listen to MarketingMonger Eric Mattson's podcast with NextStage's Dan Sobotincic, Joseph Carrabis, Susan Carrabis and Dr. Cindy LaChapelle.
Additional resources on gender-based behavior differences:
- Social Development
- Journal of Applied Communication Research
- Journal of Pragmatics
- Psychology of Women Quarterly
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global. Read full bio.
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