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Like a lot of people around the world,

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earlier this summer
my friends and I were obsessed

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with the Women's World Cup held in France.

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Here we are, watching
these incredible athletes,

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the goals were amazing,
the games were clean and engaging,

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and at the same time, outside the field,

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these women are talking about equal pay,

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and in the case of some countries,
any pay at all for their sport.

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So because we were mildly obsessed,
we wanted to watch the games live,

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and we decided that one of
the Spanish-speaking networks in the US

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was the best place for us to start,

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and it wasn't until a few games
into the tournament

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that a friend of mine
talks to me and says,

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"Why does it feel like
everything I'm seeing

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is commercials for makeup and
household cleaning products and diets?"

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It did feel a little bit too obvious,

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and I don't know if
we were sensitive about it

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or the fact that we were watching
with men and boys in our lives,

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but it did feel a little bit too obvious

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that we're being targeted for being women.

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And to be honest there's nothing
necessarily wrong with that.

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Someone sat down and looked
at the tournament and said,

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"Well, this thing is likely
to be seen by more women,

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these women are Hispanic
because they're watching in Spanish,

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and this is women content.

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Therefore, this is a great place for me
to place all these commercials

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that are female-centric
and maybe not other things."

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If I think about it as a marketer,

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I know that I absolutely
should not be annoyed about it,

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because this is what marketers
are tasked with doing.

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Marketers are tasked with building brands
with very limited budget,

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so there's a little bit of an incentive

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to categorize people in buckets

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so they can reach their target faster.

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So if you think about this,

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it's kind of like a shortcut.

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They're using gender as a shortcut
to get to their target consumer.

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The issue is that as logical
as that argument seems,

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gender as a shortcut
is actually not great.

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In this day and age, if you still
blindly use a gender view

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for your marketing activities,

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actually it's just plain bad business.

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I'm not talking even about the backlash
on stereotypes in advertising,

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which is a very real thing
that has to be addressed.

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I'm saying it's bad business because
you're leaving money on the table

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for your brands and your products.

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Because gender is such an easy thing
to find in the market

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and to target and to talk about,

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it actually distracts you
from the fun things

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that could be driving growth
from your brands,

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and, at the same time,

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it continues to create
separation around genders

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and perpetuating stereotypes.

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So at the same time this activity
is bad for your business

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and bad for society, so double whammy.

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And gender is one of those things
like other demographics

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that have historically been
good marketing shortcuts.

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At some point, however,

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we forgot that at the core
we were targeting needs

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around cooking and cleaning
and personal care and driving and sports

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and we just made it all a bucket and
we said, "Men and women are different."

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We got used to it and
we never challenged it again,

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and it's fascinating to me

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and by fascinating I mean
a little bit insane

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that we still talk about this as a segment

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when it's most likely carryover bias.

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In fact, I don't come
to this conclusion lightly.

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We have enough data to suggest
that gender is not the best place

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to start for you to design
and target your brands.

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And I would even go one step further:

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unless you are working in
a very gender-specific product category,

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probably anything else

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you're hypothesizing about
your consumer right now

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is going to be more useful than gender.

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We did not set up to draw
this conclusion specifically.

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We found it.

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As consultants, our job
is to go with our clients

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and understand their business

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and try to help them find spaces
for their brands to grow,

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and it is our belief that if you want
to find disruptive growth in the market,

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you have to go to the consumer

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and take a very agnostic view
of the consumer.

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You have to go and look
at them from scratch,

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remove yourself from biases and segments
that you thought were important,

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just take a look to see
where the growth is.

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And we built ourselves
an algorithm precisely for that.

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So imagine that we have a person
and we know a person

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is making a choice
about a product or service,

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and from this person, I can know
their gender, of course,

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other demographics, where they live,
their income, other things.

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I know the context where
this person is making a decision,

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where they are, who they're with,

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the energy, anything,

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and I can also put
other things in the mix.

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I can know their attitudes,

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how they feel about the category,

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their behaviors.

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So if you imagine this kind of blob
of big data about a person,

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I'm going to oversimplify the science here

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but we basically built an algorithm
for statistical tournaments.

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So a statistical tournament
is like asking this big thing of data,

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"So, data, from everything
you know about consumers at this point,

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what is the most
useful thing I need to know

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that tells me more
about what consumers need?

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So the tournament is going
to have winners and losers.

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The winners are those variables,
those dimensions,

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that actually teach you
a lot about your consumer,

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that if you know that,
you know what they need,

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and there's losing variables
that are just not that practical,

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and this matters because
in a world of limited resources,

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you don't want to waste it on people
that actually have the same needs.

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So why treat them differently?

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So at this point, I know,
suspense is not killing you,

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because I told you what the output is,

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but what we found over time

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is, after 200 projects around the world,
this is covering 20 countries or more,

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in essence we ran about
a hundred thousand of these tournaments,

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and, no surprise, gender was very rarely
the most predictive thing

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to understand consumer needs.

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From a hundred thousand tournaments,

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gender only came out
as the winning variable

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in about five percent of them.

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This is true around the world, by the way.

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We did this in places where
traditional gender roles

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are little more pronounced,

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and the conclusions were exactly the same.

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It was a little bit more important,
gender, than five percent,

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but not material.