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Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Woman Centric Retail...

Pearl Harbor widows have gone into war work to carry on the fight with a personal vengeance, Corpus Christi, Texas.

What would woman centric retail look like?

Let's start with woman centric homebuilding as described in the 2/6/08 article titled "A woman's place... is in their designs" from TwinCities.com by Jennifer Bjorhus - and unfortunately no longer available online. [Grrrr.]

As in retail [yes, flooring retail especially], homebuilding is male dominated. And, yet, the purchaser is a woman 91% of the time...

Luckily for women home buyers in Minnesota, there's the Minnesota Woman-Centric Homebuilders Consortium. And, they've transformed several aspects of the overall home buying experience by:

1. Enhancing and simplifying the buying experience for women
2. Re-evaluated in-home features and amenities so they makes sense and add value to women buyers
3. Redesigning floor plans to be more relevant to women's multi-tasked lives.

More specifically, you'll find kid-friendly areas in model homes. You may receive postcards of the purchased home to send out to friends/family. And the home-builder website will include tools for sharing photos and articles. There's lots more, though, including color-coded floor plans address four areas of importance to women [i.e., livability at a glance]:

+ de-stress
+ organize
+ flexible living
+ entertaining

Check out the woman centric videos and the woman centric home building blog, too.

All common sense approaches especially if you're in touch with your customers, listening to them, asking questions, observing trends and responding to their suggestions... which I know you're doing, right?

So, how would you apply Woman Centric Home Building to create a Woman Centric Retail Experience?


Photo Credit:
Pearl Harbor widows have gone into war work to carry on the fight with a personal vengeance, Corpus Christi, Texas. Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.


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4 comments:

Unknown said...

In my area the building contractors are all male orientated. A big mistake in my opinion when 98% of your customers are female. But in their defense, it takes time to make changes..better not take too much time. We have made a concentrated effort to increasingly focus on our female clients to reflect where we should be.

Troy Aeby
Duralum Carpets Inc.
Stevens Point, WI. 54481
www.duralumcarpets.com

Babble said...

You've bought into the hype. The marketing strategy these "woman centric" home builders hawk assumes 1) that men don't know anything at all about women, 2) that all women are 20-40 something wives and mothers rather than single young women just starting out or older women who want to age in place, and 3) that as long as the female is happy, what the male may want in the home is irrelevant. I've listened to their sales spiels, and I've talked with a remodeler who left the MN WomanCentric Homebuilder Consortium specifically because of the false and limited scope. Believe me, it ain't all it's cracked up to be. As always, caveat emptor.

CB Whittemore said...

Troy, I'm sure you have interesting success stories, too. There's a lot of value to understanding what our customers want and need and then finding ways to offer them that. Thanks again for being part of these discussions. Best, CB

CB Whittemore said...

MG Arnold, is it really hype if you are observing who your customers are and doing your best to listen to them so you can actually offer them what they need?

And, in home building as in flooring, women make or influence a significant majority of purchase decisions in our country [others, too] ~80+%.

The beauty of listening to women customers [and this is something AMEX discovered with some of its business card products] is that women are more observant and articulate better than men do what matters. And what matters to them often matters to men, too. Seems like win-win all around with the opportunity to uncover significant insights.

About your MN remodeler - that situation sounds like an issue of execution and implementation rather than misdirected strategy.

Thanks for visiting and adding your perspective.

Best,
CB

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Reminder: Please, no self-promotional or SPAM comments. Don't bother if you're simply trying to build inauthentic link juice. Finally, don't be anonymous: it's too hard to have a conversation. Thanks, CB

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