Why gender-based marketing is bad for business

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.