Like a lot of people around the world,
earlier this summer my friends and I were obsessed
with the Women's World Cup held in France.
Here we are, watching these incredible athletes,
the goals were amazing, the games were clean and engaging,
and at the same time, outside the field,
these women are talking about equal pay,
and in the case of some countries, any pay at all for their sport.
So because we were mildly obsessed, we wanted to watch the games live,
and we decided that one of the Spanish-speaking networks in the US
was the best place for us to start,
and it wasn't until a few games into the tournament
that a friend of mine talks to me and says,
"Why does it feel like everything I'm seeing
is commercials for makeup and household cleaning products and diets?"
It did feel a little bit too obvious,
and I don't know if we were sensitive about it
or the fact that we were watching with men and boys in our lives,
but it did feel a little bit too obvious
that we're being targeted for being women.
And to be honest there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
Someone sat down and looked at the tournament and said,
"Well, this thing is likely to be seen by more women,
these women are Hispanic because they're watching in Spanish,
and this is women content.
Therefore, this is a great place for me to place all these commercials
that are female-centric and maybe not other things."
If I think about it as a marketer,
I know that I absolutely should not be annoyed about it,
because this is what marketers are tasked with doing.
Marketers are tasked with building brands with very limited budget,
so there's a little bit of an incentive
to categorize people in buckets
so they can reach their target faster.
So if you think about this,
it's kind of like a shortcut.
They're using gender as a shortcut to get to their target consumer.
The issue is that as logical as that argument seems,
gender as a shortcut is actually not great.
In this day and age, if you still blindly use a gender view
for your marketing activities,
actually it's just plain bad business.
I'm not talking even about the backlash on stereotypes in advertising,
which is a very real thing that has to be addressed.
I'm saying it's bad business because you're leaving money on the table
for your brands and your products.
Because gender is such an easy thing to find in the market
and to target and to talk about,
it actually distracts you from the fun things
that could be driving growth from your brands,
and, at the same time,
it continues to create separation around genders
and perpetuating stereotypes.
So at the same time this activity is bad for your business
and bad for society, so double whammy.
And gender is one of those things like other demographics
that have historically been good marketing shortcuts.
At some point, however,
we forgot that at the core we were targeting needs
around cooking and cleaning and personal care and driving and sports
and we just made it all a bucket and we said, "Men and women are different."
We got used to it and we never challenged it again,
and it's fascinating to me
and by fascinating I mean a little bit insane
that we still talk about this as a segment
when it's most likely carryover bias.
In fact, I don't come to this conclusion lightly.
We have enough data to suggest that gender is not the best place
to start for you to design and target your brands.
And I would even go one step further:
unless you are working in a very gender-specific product category,
probably anything else
you're hypothesizing about your consumer right now
is going to be more useful than gender.
We did not set up to draw this conclusion specifically.
We found it.
As consultants, our job is to go with our clients
and understand their business
and try to help them find spaces for their brands to grow,
and it is our belief that if you want to find disruptive growth in the market,
you have to go to the consumer
and take a very agnostic view of the consumer.
You have to go and look at them from scratch,
remove yourself from biases and segments that you thought were important,
just take a look to see where the growth is.
And we built ourselves an algorithm precisely for that.
So imagine that we have a person and we know a person
is making a choice about a product or service,
and from this person, I can know their gender, of course,
other demographics, where they live, their income, other things.
I know the context where this person is making a decision,
where they are, who they're with,
the energy, anything,
and I can also put other things in the mix.
I can know their attitudes,
how they feel about the category,
their behaviors.
So if you imagine this kind of blob of big data about a person,
I'm going to oversimplify the science here
but we basically built an algorithm for statistical tournaments.
So a statistical tournament is like asking this big thing of data,
"So, data, from everything you know about consumers at this point,
what is the most useful thing I need to know
that tells me more about what consumers need?
So the tournament is going to have winners and losers.
The winners are those variables, those dimensions,
that actually teach you a lot about your consumer,
that if you know that, you know what they need,
and there's losing variables that are just not that practical,
and this matters because in a world of limited resources,
you don't want to waste it on people that actually have the same needs.
So why treat them differently?
So at this point, I know, suspense is not killing you,
because I told you what the output is,
but what we found over time
is, after 200 projects around the world, this is covering 20 countries or more,
in essence we ran about a hundred thousand of these tournaments,
and, no surprise, gender was very rarely the most predictive thing
to understand consumer needs.
From a hundred thousand tournaments,
gender only came out as the winning variable
in about five percent of them.
This is true around the world, by the way.
We did this in places where traditional gender roles
are little more pronounced,
and the conclusions were exactly the same.
It was a little bit more important, gender, than five percent,
but not material.