Why She Buys (25 page)

method elevated the idea of household cleaning into a campaign to rid the world of dirty things. Is there a bigger idea you can wrap around your brand?

•
Challenge yourself from a design standpoint
.

Pretend you’re from an entirely different industry when looking at your design and packaging. If you worked at BMW, how might you approach the design of your product? Can you bring in fresh industrial design resources? Packaging has the power to shake up commoditized industries. method did it. Altoids did it. Dutch Boy did it. Kleenex did it. Maybe you can, too.

Bluefly Masters the Sweet Spot: Integrating Online and Offline Marketing

H
OW
often do you watch TV while tapping on your laptop or mobile phone? If your answer is “a lot,” you’re not alone.

Research about Internet use makes it clear that most people multitask. More than 80 percent of people online are involved with another medium, activity, or device at the same time they’re on their computers.
⁴
Most often that medium is television. And when it comes to integrating TV with the Internet, few people have done it better than the folks behind the partnership of online fashion retailer
Bluefly.com
and the Bravo network’s
Project Runway
. (The show has since moved to Lifetime.) In the parlance of its viewers, this partnership was the ultimate hookup.

The
Project Runway
reality show pits up-and-coming fashion designers in a contest to be anointed as the next big thing. Hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum and featuring fashion heavyweights as judges, the show decides the fate of aspiring designers by pronouncing who’s in and who’s out at the end of every episode. The winner gets $100,000 to start his or her own line of fashion clothing.

Bluefly teamed up with the show during its fourth and fifth seasons, and brought
Project Runway
to life by integrating its products into the show so seamlessly that it effectively became a player in the drama. How Bluefly did this is a veritable primer on integrated marketing.

First, Bluefly cleverly made available for purchase (on its website) the styles featured on every episode. Viewers didn’t have to passively watch all the fashions paraded before them—they could buy close approximations of each designer’s styles by 6:30 a.m. on the site the morning after each show. “We knew that everyone was talking about
Project Runway
on Thursday mornings, so we wanted to send them to Bluefly,” says Melissa Payner, the retailer’s CEO. The theme of the promotion was “Bluefly and
Project Runway:
Shop What Happened.”

A key part of the promotion was Bluefly’s sponsorship of the highly promoted “Accessories Wall” in the design contestants’ workroom, showcasing bags, jewelry, and shoes the designers could use to accompany their designs. The Bluefly name was mentioned several times each episode, usually by the show’s design mentor, Tim Gunn. In an accompanying feature on Bluefly called “Off the Wall,” viewers
could then buy the same accessories featured on the wall in the show. By allowing visitors to “shop what happened,” Bluefly effectively transformed its inventory into a story. The outfits Bluefly featured were now more than just clothes—they were part of the excitement of
Project Runway
.

The retailer also made itself an integral part of the winner’s prize.
Project Runway
heavily promoted the fact that the winning designer had the opportunity to sell their new collection on Bluefly. It also offered a $10,000 shopping spree on its site for a winning viewer. “Our traffic would spike the same moment Tim Gunn would mention the shopping spree,” says Payner. As a way to more closely link itself to the show, Bluefly’s website featured a charming blog by its merchandising coordinator, Mindy Dorf, who shared what it was like to be behind the scenes of the show. She wrote it with all the gushing enthusiasm you’d expect of a young fan. Through everything it did, Bluefly positioned itself as just that—a fan that was as crazy about the show as its customers were.

Bluefly created a shared experience with its shoppers, who are overwhelmingly women. “Our customers are all about pop culture, celebrity, and dressing with individuality,” says Payner. We already know that a shared experience is a powerful bonding tool. Women rewarded Bluefly with a 30 percent increase in new, unique visitors over the weeks in which the fourth-season promotion ran, and the week that winner Christian Siriano’s collection launched on Bluefly, new, unique visitors rose 70 percent. Most important, sales rose 22 percent in the first quarter of 2008. Bluefly followed up its success by creating a promotion with the movie
Confessions of a Shopaholic
that was so integrated that the movie’s official website was actually housed on
Bluefly.com
. “It’s
not enough to run one commercial on a few different shows,” says Payner. “I’d rather be at every touchpoint of just one thing than all over the place.”

It’s not easy to reach women who are constantly on the move, but we know they do pay attention to their favorite TV shows and movies. The Bluefly/
Project Runway
campaign is a great example of speaking directly to women while they’re already paying attention to something they enjoy, whether they’ve TiVo’d it or not.

Lessons for your business

Takeaways from Bluefly include:

•
Enthusiasm is contagious
.

If your target audience is crazy about something, don’t be afraid to join in and become an unabashed fan, too. It will help you connect with your female audience.

•
Find a way to give fans a piece of the action
.

Even if it’s just a close approximation, your customers may delight in getting something from you that they will always be able to associate with their favorite show, band, or movie. McDonald’s has been doing this for years through its Happy Meal movie tie-ins, but the tactic is less common for adult women.

•
Unleash your nonpower players
.

“Regular” employees of companies are perceived as more trustworthy than CEOs, especially since the economic collapse of 2008. Which means that perhaps it’s time to unleash your unsung cube dwellers. Any one of your employees who is genuinely charming can be a face of your
brand. Maybe not
the
face, but
a
face, particularly for the younger demographic. Bluefly featured a blog from its merchandising coordinator in addition to its CEO. In a world of reality TV, the person in the cubicle is often perceived as more interesting, and more credible, than the person in the corner office.

• Go deep
.

In a fragmented media envirionment, it can be more powerful to go big with one property—if it’s the right one—rather than spreading yourself thin.

Principles of Gender Appeal

M
ASTER
C
ARD
, method, and Bluefly effectively tap into the values of women’s culture. To increase your own company’s gender appeal, consider the following female fundamentals.

Improving the world around them

Generally speaking, women are drawn to products and services that make them feel like they’re making the world better in some small way. Research shows that both cause marketing and “green” campaigns find their strongest audiences in women.
⁵
Women volunteer at higher rates than men do across all age groups and education levels.
⁶
Whole Foods Market, which bases its marketing on the premise “Feel Good About Where You Shop,” is a textbook study in this concept. The company actively communicates with customers about its products and practices, and makes people feel as if their trip to the grocery store is, among other
things, contributing to their health and that of their family members; helping to improve working conditions for organic farmers; and minimizing damage to the environment. Women who may not think twice about such things during the course of their normal routines can walk out of a Whole Foods feeling satisfied that they’ve done their bit for the world and for their own bodies, just by doing something as simple as buying organic meat and potatoes for dinner.

The ability to be organic, to be sustainable, and to improve the lives of workers in the world’s poorest countries is a lot of bang for the buck from a quick trip to the grocery store. Most companies can’t take social responsibility to the level of Whole Foods, but even small efforts—such as supporting local organizations in your own community—can have a big impact on women’s perceptions of your brand. And take some cues from Whole Foods, such as educating customers about where your products come from and who makes them; those are applicable to companies of every size.

Finding beauty in the imperfect

Because women think people are fascinating, they’re drawn to images and descriptions of people in marketing materials. People who are quirky and honest and who don’t pretend to be perfect find a welcoming audience with women, as evidenced by the popularity of Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and the success of the Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which features ordinary women instead of professional models.

Comedian Tina Fey and her ads for American Express are a great example of this aspect of gender appeal. American
Express’ long-running marketing campaign “My Life, My Card” gives people insight into the personal and seemingly honest/quirky aspects of celebrities’ lives. One of the most charming ads features Fey sitting under her desk, in a messy office strewn with crumpled papers, while her baby daughter sits in Fey’s seat, typing on her computer. Fey and the product she’s promoting seem accessible, appealing, and even endearing. People think,
I want to be her. She’s talented, smart, happy, and successful, and she’s not perfect, just like me. I’ll have what she’s having
.

Being a shrewd shopper

Being a shrewd shopper is a point of pride for most women, which means that it’s important to articulate why your product or service is a great value. Ideally, this exercise can be done with style, because for women, value doesn’t necessarily mean the lowest price—it means that whatever they’ve bought is worth more than they’ve paid for it.

Everybody’s favorite cheap-chic destination, Target, consistently makes women feel smart about shopping at its stores, and the beauty of the brand is that its marketing is in sync with the actual customer experience. A winner of countless marketing awards, Target’s team has a gift for showing mundane items such as vacuum cleaners in the hippest of graphic settings, and its design partnerships with people ranging from Michael Graves to Isaac Mizrahi add sizzle to the company’s overall brand image.

Nothing from Target feels dumbed down. When it chooses designer partnerships with trendy up-and-comers instead of predictable household names, the chain not only saves money, it positions itself as in the know, while trusting
its customers to recognize the talent of the designers, if not the names. This, in turn, makes its customers feel like Target has brought them in on something special that the big department stores haven’t discovered yet. The company’s motto, “Design for All,” communicates that even people who like low prices deserve good design. Though many of the products Target sells are identical to those in the aisles of Wal-Mart and Kmart, its marketing has positioned the Minneapolis-based retailer as indisputably “downtown” instead of downmarket. Demonstrating that it’s a true marketing decathlete, Target also promotes the fact that 5 percent of the company’s income goes back to the local communities it serves, to the tune of $3 million per week.

Caring about others

Women are the primary caregivers for the world’s children and elderly in every society in the world. According to Dr. Marianne Legato, the founder of Columbia University’s Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine, women’s interest in caring for others is hypertrophied—or overly developed. There are many theories as to why. One of them is that the activities associated with having a child—pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding—cause oxytocin levels to skyrocket in women.
⁷
Oxytocin is one of the bonding hormones that drive maternal behaviors, and its presence means that women may derive more genuine pleasure from caring for others than many men do.

Kleenex is running a wonderful marketing campaign, called “Let It Out,” in which it encourages people to listen to each other, let out their emotions (into a nice, soft Kleenex), and not be ashamed of them. On its website, Kleenex has
invited people to show they care for others by figuratively “giving” a Kleenex tissue (a tissue box icon) to anyone who might need one. People can post their emotional, personal stories on the company’s website, and readers can “pass a Kleenex” to whomever they sympathize with most. It’s a campaign with great gender appeal, executed with a light touch and tone. Kleenex has a history of creating marketing campaigns that resonate with women’s caring nature, including the famous “Kleenex Says Bless You” campaigns from the 1980s.

What it does is more important than how it works

“What is this product going to do for me?” is the question every marketer should be able to answer, with brevity. Women are interested in practical descriptions, such as “This camera takes perfect shots that you can store easily, upload to your computer instantly, and share with your friends and family.” Men tend to be more interested in the how, such as “This high-performance camera has optical image stabilization, 8 megapixels, and a 38-to-114-mm-equivalent f/2.8-to-4.9 3x optical zoom lens.”