Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online (Paperback)

~ Yvonne Divita (Author) "When 61% of women and 55% of men currently access the Internet for business and/or pleasure, you have to stop and consider who is reading..." (more)
Key Phrases: prime real estate section, dirt world, framed site, Dickless Marketing, New York, Victoria's Secret (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book is fabulous! ... it should be the cornerstone for anyone building a business and marketing it online. -- Kim Haas, owner/publisher, Womans-Net.com

To help you understand how women shop (whereas men get), this book is for you! -- Sandra Beckwith, author, Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman?

Yvonne DiVita is one savvy woman. Buy her book. Put her wisdom to work on your Web site. -- Tom Collins, JD, consultant --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Description

In the pages of this book you will learn how to successfully draw in those eager women shoppers. Then, you will learn how to get them to buy, using today’s mouse-to-house expediency.

Consider this challenge from the author:

My experience as an Internet consultant was showing me that many online businesses approach the Internet thinking they have the right answers, when they don’t even know the right questions! Here are the questions you should be asking: "Who is spending the most money online?" And, "What will get this market to my Web site to buy from me?"

The answer to the first question is: "Women."

The answer to the second question is: Dickless Marketing.

Chapter by chapter, DiVita shows how...and more importantly, WHY...some sites successfully market to women and other don’t. Chapter 9 is entirely devoted to analyzing six e-commerce sites using DiVita’s "Dick-e-meter" rating.

In Chapter 10, DiVita says, "Don’t ask Freud what women want, read on--" Get your copy of Dickless Marketing and read on. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: WME Books (January 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1414035799
• ISBN-13: 978-1414035796
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,705,883 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Flawed at best, October 19, 2005

By	T. Peterson (Winnipeg, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This title purports to be a guide to marketing to women in the 21st century. While it does have some useful information, it is a flawed work at best: Throughout, the author decries traditional gender stereotypes, only to replace them with images no less stereotypical, and no more accurate.

A great deal of every chapter is fluff, merely repeating in different ways how women have become internet savvy, and how they do most on-line purchasing, and must be courted as a target market: Pointless, as anyone who didn't believe this wouldn't be reading the book in the first place.

Numerous examples of on-line behaviour are given, then used as proof that the example is correct: 'When Cathy is on-line she does x, y, and z': As you can see, Cathy is proving whatever point I am trying to make!

Don't get me wrong: The basic marketing techniques in the book aren't bad. The comments on web design aren't bad. And the book is correct in that women are a valuable market that shuld be courted.

But this book is more fluff than crunch. I'll be checking out the 'customers also bought' section of the website, looking for something better.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You know you need this . . ., February 5, 2004

By	T. Collins (Rochester, NY, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Most books on e-commerce offer advice on hardware and software, or web design, or e-mail marketing campaigns, or a dozen other pieces of doing business on the Internet. A few recent books and articles have called attention to the importance of marketing to women in the bricks-and-mortar world. Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online pulls all of these pieces together and explains why you need to refocus your online efforts to make sure your Web site rates a "female-friendly" score on the Dick-e-Meter.

Backed by solid research, statistics gathered into the second half of 2003, and her own survey results, Yvonne DiVita has created a roadmap for successful selling online. She provides compelling evidence that success online means selling to women (even if your target market is men; even if you sell a product or service traditionally associated with men; and even if you're selling to businesses rather than consumers).

Most important, she explains how to revamp your Web site and your business processes "to gain the trust and support of the largest and most generous group of consumers in the world." From site design details to customer service practices to creating community, DiVita teaches us how to do better. She uses dozens of examples, with screen shots and detailed analysis, to guide us.

In a chapter called, Can You Handle It?, she reviews in detail half a dozen sites for female friendliness, applying the concepts developed throughout the book to real situations. Even if your site is not one of those reviewed, you will likely find much to learn from these reviews that will apply to improve your Web presence.

You do have a Web presence, right? (As DiVita points out in the Introduction, "If you have a business, and you do not have a Web presence, it's been nice knowing you.")

Whether you do or not, you need the information she has collected and presented in her wonderfully readable, sometimes playful, writing style.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, November 14, 2005

By	J. Sheriff (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

I looked forward to reading this after reading the other reviews, but Divita never really settles into a comfortable voice. She did offer some constructive ideas about specific web content and design techniques to target women. I appreciated this information, and wished she would have focused her energy more in that direction--more of the how-to, and less of the disjointed commentary. Statements that are supposed to be humorous are too often condescending or arrogant. While some degree of stereotyping is expected in a book about marketing (which, after all, targets groups with similar characteristics), Divita too often describes female behaviors, then immediately defends or apologizes for them.

She also reveals a disparaging attitude toward anyone in business who is slow to embrace new technology, and specifically, selling on the Internet, but this attitude often seems hypocritical, since her book came out in 2002 and numerous sections of it--from discussions on web trends to TV commercial examples--are necessarily dated and anachronistic.

Another frustrating thing I found with Divita's writing voice was the unnecessary refrain, "What's not to like about that?", along with a continuous sense that she was working too hard to sell me something. Women are an important market--I believed this premise, so I bought the book and wanted to read Divita's insights. I am a woman; it's not difficult to convince me I belong to an important group of consumers, so the overkill of anecdotal and statistical evidence on this point was almost offensive--how could anyone believe women are not an important market? I wish Divita had focused more on specific strategies to target women, and left the hard sell of the premise to the book jacket and introductory chapters. She had me at hello, but she lost me with the same kind of car salesmanship tactics she advises against in her book.

It's clear Divita has useful insights to share regarding website design. The end of the book includes an interesting analysis of the effectiveness of several actual websites. While I didn't always agree with her conclusions, this part of the book did offer the kind of specific food for thought that I was looking for. I hope subsequent works will make use of her knowledge, in a voice that addresses the "how can I help you," as opposed to the "I told you so."