Why She Buys: The New Strategy for Reaching the World's Most Powerful Consumers »

BRIDGET BRENNAN is the CEO of Female Factor. She has pioneered marketing and sales strategies that appeal to women and has worked with major companies to put them into practice. Throughout her award-winning career, Brennan has worked for clients such as Whirlpool, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate-Palmolive, Pizza Hut, and United Airlines. She is a popular speaker who has lectured at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She lives in Chicago.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female.
If the business world had a sex, it would be male.

And therein lies the pickle.

Women are the engine of the global economy, driving 80 percent of consumer spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they’ve got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over. Just when executives have mastered becoming technology literate, they find there’s another skill they need: becoming female literate.

This isn’t always easy. Gender is the most powerful determinant of how a person views the world and everything in it. It’s stronger than age, income, or race. While there are mountains of research done every year segmenting consumers and analyzing why they buy, more often than not it doesn’t factor in the one piece of information that trumps them all: the sex of the buyer. It’s stunning how many companies overlook the psychology of gender when we all know that men and women look at the world so differently.

Bridget Brennan’s Why She Buys shows decision makers how to bridge this divide and capture the business of the world’s most powerful consumers just when they need it most.

• No Matter Where You Live, Women Are a Foreign Country: You’ll discover the value in studying women with the same intensity that you would a foreign market. Women grow up within a culture of their own gender, which is often invisible to men. Brennan dissects this female culture and explains the important brain differences between men and women that may cause your female customers to notice things about your products, marketing campaigns, or sales environment that you might have overlooked.

• The High Fives: There are five major trends driving the global female population that are key to determining their wants and needs. These global shifts are just beginning to be tapped by businesses, and learning about them can provide you with an invaluable blueprint for long-range planning.

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Find out how the best and brightest companies have cracked the female code, and hear horror stories about those that haven’t. Through instructive case studies and interviews, Why She Buys provides practical, field-proven techniques that you can apply to your business immediately, from giants like Procter & Gamble and Toyota to upstarts like Method home-care products and lululemon athletica apparel.

At a time when every company is looking for a competitive advantage, Bridget Brennan offers a new and effective lens for capturing market share.

Publishers Weekly

The founder of Female Factor Strategic Consulting is a convincing cheerleader for marketing more effectively to women. She points out that women purchase or are the key influencers in about 80% of all consumer product sales in the U.S. alone-but 90% of marketing execs trying to reach them are men. In her crusade to teach marketers to become female-literate, Brennan offers very practical advice, urging readers to think twice before using overtly "masculine" competitive messages, to avoid violent images and language, and to realize that women, focused on practicality rather than cool bells and whistles, require fairly sophisticated marketing: "pink is not a strategy," she reminds us tartly. The five important global demographic changes affecting female consumerism-more women in the work force; delayed marriages and therefore more spending on self; lower birthrates resulting in fewer kids (but more stuff); a divorce economy, which translates into needing two of everything; and the growing rate of active older women-mean that the female market must be well catered to. Brennan's style is smart and straightforward, and her pragmatic advice is spot-on; marketers should take note. (July)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.