Pub. 2 2019-2020 |Issue 1

9 you offer one step further and create a relationshipwith your consumers, you are entering a bonding zone. Once she has bondedwith your brand, she is bound to be fiercely loyal. Why do you want the decision-maker (she) to fall in love with your brand? So why should you take out time to tailor your Consumer Brand Experience for female consumers? Women are the Chief Purchasing Officers for their households and themost influential consumers in the world. According to Inclusionary Leadership Group, women influence 83%of all consumer spending in the United States, which is worth $7 trillion annually. Not only do they hold the veto vote on the majority of purchasing decisions, but they can also be your number one referral source! Most businesses don’t take this customer segment seriously and do not invest in enough resources to tailor the experience a woman receives when doing business with them. Further, according to author Bridget Brennen, men make up 85% of the executives of the world! This gap between who buys and who designs the customer experience is enormous. The brand experience is ultimately created by men who are physiologically different from women. It’s about the chase! I am going to let you in on a little secret; it’s not about the product she buys. What matters is the journey she takes when she interacts with your brand. It is the chase she enjoys! It is about the little moments when she connects with your brand and creates a relationship with you that dictates whether or not she’ll choose to do business with you again. Women tend to go out when they are having a bad day or feeling down for some retail therapy. I know this is something that is made fun of in movies and books, but there is some truth to it. Women feel better when they journey through amall; they get little hits of dopamine and a release of serotonin, turning their not so great day into a better one (until she gets her credit card bill that is!) Brands can learn from this habit of retail therapy. She will have hits of dopamine and serotonin, and if you do a really good job, she will start to create a bondwith your brand. Examining the journey your female consumer takes with your brand and tweaking it to include all the littlemoments that make her fall in love with your product or service is in your best interest! How is a woman’s buying behavior different from those of men? There are behavioral differences between men andwomen and their expectations from interacting with the brand. These differences can be scientifically linked to the physiological differences betweenmen andwomen. Both genders are different, and it’s up to you to identify how to tailor an experience that works for bothmen andwomen. Inmy experience, if you build a brand experience, keeping women inmind, men should be ok with it. However, if you build an experience for themale customer, the female consumer will not like it in the slightest. I always urgemy clients to build their experience with the woman inmind. Research shows the size of a female’s limbic brain (the part of the brain that controls emotions andmemory) is double the size of aman’s limbic brain. We don’t make decisions based on logic; rather, wemake decisions based on our feelings. Drawing physiological differences betweenmen andwomen are important. Women need to feel good about interacting with your brand. Conversations are the glue that binds women from an early age, and women are master communicators. They use both sides of their brain to communicate while men only use one. Women want a relationship with your brand, and she needs to be able to communicate how she’s feeling and what she wants and expects from your brand. Letting the female consumer communicate with your brand goes a long way to creating an experience that she enjoys having. So you should utilize every opportunity to communicate with her over multiple channels, be it social media, live chat, help desk or surveys. Three tips tomake the DecisionMaker fall in love with your brand/business. Here are three tips you can implement to help nudge her down the path of falling in love with your brand: 1. Understand the decision-maker The female consumer wants to be understood as a woman first and a consumer second. Typical age/sex and other demographics aren’t adequate for segmenting and creating a consumer persona. You’ll need to break your female consumers into life stages; the 40s are the new 30s, and the 30s are the new 20s; women are gettingmarried later in life and sometimes even have kids in their late 40s. Once you have your female customer broken down into life stages, you will want to define the goals she has and the challenges she faces at each life stage. You will nowbe able to determine how your brand and its services can help her fulfill her dreams and resolve the challenges. 2. Journey through her eyes We experience approximately 20,000 moments in a day, andwe determine whether we’ve had a good or bad day based on the number of positive, neutral, and negativemoments we have. Our brain then sidelines neutral moments (because they leave no impact), andwe hold on to the good or bad. If your customers have hadmore bad moments before they interact with your brand, you can almost guarantee their day is already off to a “bad start.” Don’t you