Free Why She Buys by Bridget Brennan Page B

both know they wouldn’t have talked about anything else. They might not even have come up for air.
    The differences between male and female communication styles are easy to see when you look for them. Check out the cover blurbs on the issue of Men’s Journal that hit my mailbox a short time after I picked up the issue of O, The Oprah Magazine:
    • Lance: The Relentless Drive of America’s Alpha Bachelor
    • NASCAR Bad Boy Tony Stewart
    • Death to Sportswriters!
    • Inside the Quarterback Factory
    • Best Beers 2008
    • Great Fall Adventures
    Words such as alpha , bad boy , death , and beer  … this is the language that sells men’s magazines. Men’s Journal is tame compared to the so-called lad magazines, such as Maxim or Stuff , which throw around words like hottielicious and have the wet-bikini images to back them up. Next time you’re at a bookstore, head over to the magazine aisle to compare male and female cultures in all their glory. It’s an exercise inwhich everything we know intuitively becomes gleefully obvious. In male culture, the entire world is a stage in which men compete for women, success, and victory. In women’s culture, the entire world is a community, where people connect with one another to help others realize their potential inside and out, and to make life happier for everyone.
    These gender differences have business implications for everything from sales training to client service, from call-center scripting to consumer research, and from advertising copy to public relations programming.
• Empathy is an effective sales tool .
Disclosing vulnerabilities can bond salespeople to their women customers. Saying something like “I remember the first time I installed this computer program—I found it confusing, too” can immediately make a woman feel comfortable. This is the reassuring style of communication that women use with each other in conversation. The technique is especially powerful when it comes to complex and expensive purchases such as insurance policies, new homes, cars, mortgages, consumer electronics, and financial services.
• Validation and affirmation help women say yes .
Being a shrewd buyer is a form of status for women. (“I never pay full price!”) And more than men, women need help justifying their purchases, especially when it comes to products they consider indulgences. Women tend to feel guiltier than men when spending money on themselves. Help women justify buying your product or service by actively validating their decision through words and images. LG Appliances has been running a clevercampaign that gives women permission to upgrade their appliances even when their old machines are working just fine. The ads show humorous fantasies of women bulldozing, sledgehammering, and otherwise destroying the unstylish old appliances in their homes. The message of the ad is, We give you permission to get rid of that old hunk of junk, even though it’s still working!
• Humanize your company by minimizing status differences and leveraging a sense of humor .
Apple has successfully humanized technology products through intuitive design. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has humanized IT support through its people-powered business model and self-deprecating use of the word geek , not to mention its use of quirky Volkswagen Beetles as its fleet. MasterCard has humanized the faceless credit-card business through its “Priceless” marketing campaign, which is inherently self-deprecating, since it admits that there are some things that its credit card just can’t buy.
• Demonstrating appreciation is one of the simplest ways to generate word-of-mouth publicity and repeat business from women .
Show your appreciation to women customers and clients early and often. Women are the thank-you people of this world. You can bet they notice when a thank-you hasn’t been given to them. They prefer to give their business to the companies that demonstrate appreciation for it, and in return