Customer Reviews

The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers-Women

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Somewhere in the first five minutes of any good business school's initial marketing class, the professor will sternly admonish students to listen to their customers and provide what's relevant. Ms. Warner in this book suggests that many such students must have fallen asleep during that lecture . . . or didn't understand the point.

In The Power of the Purse, Ms. Warner shows how some of the largest companies in the world fell asleep providing offerings and marketing to support those offerings that perhaps fit the U.S. market in 1955 . . . but certainly don't fit the market today.

To me, the most powerful case history was for Bratz, the new doll series that overtook Barbie in three years after 50 years of doll dominance. Few parents in my experience failed to note that Barbie wasn't right for their daughters. But it was hard to find alternatives that were any better. Bratz was based on the idea that pre-teen girls grow out of wanting to play with a doll that's Mommy and want to play with dolls that are like the girls and their friends. To do that, the dolls needed to look like real girls and not Donald Trump's idea of a dream date or trophy wife. They also needed to dress like contemporary girls. Bratz provides those obvious benefits and took the world by storm. The company's leader credits much of the inspiration from watching his daughter play with her dolls.

If you survey women over 70, their attitudes are pretty much the traditional ones. If you survey girls, you find that they believe that can do anything and want to be in charge of their lives. The age groups between those extremes express blended combinations of those views with the mixed based on the age.

In other words, women in the U.S. have been changing and marketers have been missing the boat. These case histories eloquently combine statistics and stories to prove that point.

The cases include McDonald's discovering that women want to eat something remotely healthful when they bring the kids in for a treat, Kodak finding out that women want simple ways to develop family photo memories, Torrid providing plus size fashion like what the fashionably anorexic normally wear, Avon discovering that the daughters of Avon Ladies want to make a buck too . . . but in a different way, Procter & Gamble making it easier to be a bread winner who enjoys the satisfaction of a clean floor, Nike learning that women's feet are different from men's, Home Depot uncovering male-female partnering in home improvement projects and women discovering the joy of buying diamond rings for the right hand.

Reading these stories made me think that most companies have a long way to go.

The main drawbacks of the book are three. First, Ms. Warner loves to give you all the details. Her case histories are longer than they need to be, as a result. The first one on McDonald's is a real snore. Keep reading. It gets better. Second, Ms. Warner adds almost no management insight to her case histories. These cases are like stories written for a glossy magazine rather than to train marketers. Third, Ms. Warner spreads her points about how women have changed throughout the book. She takes a long time to get her point across. A better opening that summarized the key elements would have made the rest of the book a lot more interesting by providing the context before the examples.

Normally, I wouldn't rate such a bare bones book as highly as this one. But I don't know of any better book on how marketers are overcoming decades of bad habits in serving women. So any book that's the best in its field deserves five stars.

Nice insights, Ms. Warner!

Businesses are becoming ever more aware of the way the lives of women have changed and the many kinds of roles they fill in the workplace, in their home, and even whether they are mothers or not. This book does a fine job in showing us how companies such as McDonalds, Nike, Kodak, DeBeers, and others have learned these lessons to their benefit.

McDonalds used to ignore women while focusing on children and men. By listening to women and letting women help design their new salads, they have not only increases sales, but increased the dollars per order as well. Kodak, went back to its roots and created products for digital photography that were easy to use and empowered women who weren't interested in becoming technical experts to take and print great pictures. Nike opened a huge new market by creating products specifically for women rather than simply cutting down men's products. Women want and need different equipment and fashion. DeBeers realized that their traditional market of selling to men to buy for women was cutting them out of the market of single women who could buy diamonds for themselves.

This is a book of eye opening case studies and contains lessons for every business. There may be things to bemoan about the course our current culture is taking, but businesses have to function and sell in the present. This book can help you see what others have found and maybe help you think through possible new directions for your own company and its products and services.

This book combines the story of women's new economic power with case studies that detail how major companies have revamped their marketing to target women customers. Author Fara Warner, a journalist, knows her beat. In fact, she sometimes gets carried away with the facts, and her style can be dry and predictable. Still, we find this book invaluable for marketers and people interested in women's emerging economic clout, a major social and demographic trend. Warner provides specific advice that will help you avoid costly, time-consuming marketing mistakes as you pursue these crucial customers.

Many books purport to offer marketing advice. However, most of them, especially those that are case study-oriented, are somewhat superficial and simply reiterate some basic truths that most practitioners already know. In contrast, Warner's book digs in deep to provide the nitty gritty "so what" details that readers need in order to actually apply the lessons to their own work. You are not left hanging as to what the company under discussion actually did, or what results were achieved. As a marketer with a leading technology company, I was particularly interested in the chapter on Kodak's success with the EasyShare camera and software. There are some great lessons on how to get beyond the "early adopter" crowd to succeed with the mainstream consumer. I have passed this book on to others in my organization, who report that they too have found it both insightful and useful.

This book, written by a woman, presents eight case studies in eight chapters, each detailing how a specific corporation has changed its business practices in the past decade to adjust to the growth in purchasing power of female consumers. Half of these companies had traditionally sold to men only; these being DeBeers Diamonds, Home Depot, Nike and Kodak. Two had traditionally sold to women; Avon and Proctor & Gamble. The last two, MGA (maker of Bratz dolls) and McDonalds sold to youngsters, both boys and girls. Most of the chapters showed how its subject's past practices led to stagnant sales and declining market share, which was reversed when new people came on board and revamped both products and product advertising to make them more appealing to a new breed of female customers; wealthy, independent, and often single. One chapter, the one on MGA, showed how this company created an entirely new product line, Bratz dolls, that overtook Barbie dolls within two years of product launch.

Each chapter consists of the story, followed by a one page summary of key lessons learned by the company that was highlighted. As such, this book serves as both history text, and educational text; a great combination. The length of the book was great, readible within a weekend, and the reading difficulty was appropriate for college freshman in business. The only drawback of the book was what was left out. Specifically, the book ignored the financial and automotive industries. Regarding the former, the last twenty years has seen a huge growth in the number of women investing for themselves independently of spouses or families. Regarding the latter, the Japanese auto companies made their initial inroads into the American car market by selling cars geared for women customers; think of the vanity mirror on car sunshades. But overall, this is still a good book.

Warner with her precise indepth business examples covering varying types of businesses shows us how powerful "listening" to women can be. Increased revenues in marketshare from both gender segments. Warner doesn't pidgeon hole women, which is refreshing. She is a keen observer and makes the point clear just how simple and easy it can be for businesses to ask women what they want how powerful it is when businesses really listen and then take the necessary steps to make it a reality. Warner's examples shows when businesses do this it's a win win for everyone. It also puts honesty back into marketing.

Books about product development and marketing are usually written by either business school faculty members, or consultants. The former prefer to take a single example and analyze it in great depth, the later often take hundreds of examples and zip through them in a shallow and breezy manner.

Ms. Warner is neither an academic nor a consultant, and for this we should be thankful. She is a journalist with powerful skills. She has chosen a broad enough range of examples to give an overview of women as consumers, and the companies who have profited from changing their products and tactics. She has also explored each example thoroughly enough to show that in each case there was a person inside the company who championed change.

By drawing on her journalism skills Ms. Warner has written a clear and concise overview of women and thier current role in the
marketplace. In less than 200 pages Ms. Warner has clearly articulated where and how most businesses will need to improve to
thrive.