Marketing to Women

Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the Largest Market Segment

I wanted to read this book because I produce a unique line of adult hypnosis recordings for women and I need help reaching and selling to women. Unfortunately, I didn't find any new or phenomenal marketing strategy I could use. But I did find the book interesting and useful in a way the author probably didn't intend.

This book spends a lot of time illustrating the differences in the way men and women think about products, the way they gather and evaluate information, and the way they make purchasing decisions. In the end, it's easy to understand why you emphasize how the products make a woman's life easier or less complicated, and why third-party product reviews and word-of-mouth are such important parts of a marketing campaign for most products. These strategies not new. Even as an novice marketer, I had already tried to adopt them. But now I understand more about how to make them work [with products like cell phones and computers]. Unfortunately, with my uniquely sexual products, word-of-mouth isn't an option. And only small niche magazines are willing to post reviews.

But while this book wasn't as helpful to me in marketing as it would be to someone with a more mainstream product, it has become helpful in my fiction writing. As a man, I struggle to develop and write believable, 3-dimensional female characters. In the past my female characters were either indistigusiable from men (their thoughts and actions were pretty much the same), or they were 1-dimensional sex objects (they became idealized sexual fantasy characters)

Marketing to Women so clearly illustrated the differences in ways that men and women approach problems, that it has helped me develop and write more unique and gender-believable characters. So now while I'm writing my first full-length erotic novel, I can write a female character who is caring and supportive while still being strong and sensual... and hopefully unique.

Marketing to Women is a good book and worth reading for both marketers and fiction writers.