The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop (NelsonFree)

The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop (NelsonFree)

by Elizabeth Pace
The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop (NelsonFree)

The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop (NelsonFree)

by Elizabeth Pace

eBook

$5.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

With wit, deep insight, and plenty of humor gained from her observations of male and female purchasing patterns over the years, veteran branding, marketing, and salesperson Elizabeth Pace shows readers how to increase their revenue and sell more effectively. Pace explains that you don’t need to memorize complicated customer behavioral patterns or try to profile every individual client to know how to sell. The key, she says, can be found in the differences between genders. Based on the author’s own fascination with what makes customers tick as well as neuroscience and MRI studies on the different stimuli men’s and women’s brains respond to, The X and Y of Buy teaches readers how to become sales chameleons--able to adopt successful sales strategies when communicating uniquely with men and women.The decision to buy is based on what captures your prospects’ attention, ignites their emotion, and provides value. Department stores know how to appeal to men’s easy-in, easy-out shopping patterns while also appealing to women’s preference for a more complex, sensory shopping experience. Consider the placement of men’s suits, right up front by a door, versus women’s, interwoven with a treasure trove of other must-have items. As a salesperson, you have similar tools and tactics at your disposal. While not all men and women are the same, this must-read for salespeople at all levels of business reveals how appealing to the different things men and women crave can increase your effectiveness with the vast majority of your gender-target market.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781418578220
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
Publication date: 03/29/2010
Series: Nelsonfree
Sold by: HarperCollins Publishing
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Elizabeth Pace is the CEO of Floreat. A graduate of Ohio State University, she served for thirteen years asvice president of sales and marketing for three successful startups and has consulted with companies in a dozen different industries. Pacelives in Franklin, Tennessee.

Read an Excerpt

The X and Y of Buy

Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop
By Elizabeth Pace

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth Pace
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59555-105-4


Chapter One

DIFFERENT BY DESIGN

Men buy; women shop and then purchase 80 percent of everything.

Shopping for a man's suit? Walk through the main entrance of Neiman Marcus and-voilà: men's suits in every color, size, and design are displayed together.

A woman will get a lot more exercise searching for that new ensemble. She must turn left through the same doors, away from the men's department, and weave her way through the maze of perfumes and cosmetics, past the shoes and purses at the bottom of the escalator. Arriving on the second floor-devoted entirely to women's apparel-she has the opportunity to peruse the casual wear and the sequined formals before finding her favorite designer's section.

Will a woman reach her destination without actually buying something else on the way? Neiman's thinks not. Would a man ever make it to this remote corner for a designer suit? Not in a million years. Keen retailers like Neiman's know that while women love the search, men love the kill-most find it undesirable, if not downright tedious, to maneuver through a mall. Department stores appeal to men with an easy-in, easy-out layout while also appealing to women, who crave a complexsensory experience while shopping.

Men and women are different. The plumbing is different; the wiring is different. Not better ... not worse ... just different. We perceive, think, communicate, and respond to the world differently. To say this in the postfeminist corporate arena has been political suicide. Yet scientists have confirmed that men and women use different parts of their brains and thus behave differently in a host of situations-including the ways we shop, buy, and consume products and services.

As a sales, advertising, or marketing professional, understanding these differences is the key to your success. When you were a child, you were taught the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. But as you grew up, it became evident (often on the school playground) that half of the others-those of the opposite sex-don't respond well to being treated the way that you want to be treated. If you are still treating the other half of your customers the way you want to be treated, you are likely missing half (or more) of your market and leaving half (or more) of your sales on the table.

To increase sales, you must understand what uniquely drives your customers, male and female, and maximize your options for communicating with them. Whether you sell tangible products like cars and homes, or intangible products like financial services and business solutions, read on. Understanding the inherent perceptions, motivations, and emotions specific to the X and the Y chromosomes is the most powerful way to increase revenue.

X MARKS THE SPOT

"I Am Because I Shop" was the title of Mallory Keaton's first philosophy paper. As the family's academic underachiever in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, Mallory expressed the universal teenage girl's cry, "Shop 'til we drop!"

If the drive to buy is written into women's genetic code, scientists should search the X chromosome for the shopping gene. Doubly blessed with the X, women now control 83 percent of all consumer purchases. And these products and services are not just soap and paper clips. The majority of home computers, decking materials, new cars, and health care services are purchased by women.

Women have now taken their shopping prowess to the corporate world, where they hold 51 percent of the purchasing manager and agent positions. Women also call most of the shots on benefit purchases, holding the majority of executive positions in human resources.

Not only do women buy most big-ticket items; they have the money to spend. Women now make up 50 percent of the workforce and earn the majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees. For the first time in history, most women over the age of fifty have their own funds. Combine their individual spending power with the fact that women tend to outlive their husbands by about fifteen years, and you'll soon conclude that the money is heading straight into their Coach handbags.

Women are crying out for brands that understand their needs and make purchasing enjoyable. Many salespeople and businesses don't get it. A female attorney recently bemoaned the purchase of her gas-guzzling Suburban, in which she's logged 183,000 miles with her three boys in tow. "I can afford a new car now," she confessed, "but I am determined to drive this one into the ground just to avoid the awful experience of buying a new one."

Marketers who can transform this woman's dread of shopping for a new computer, car, or financial planner into an enjoyable experience will reap substantial rewards.

WHY TARGET Y?

While the above statistics make the case that marketers must do a better job of designing and branding services that appeal to women, there is also ample room to improve your sales with men. Men might be more predictable buyers than women, but they are by no means an easy sale. And to presume that you know how to sell to your male customers can have quite painful consequences. While women will tend to let a salesperson down easier, men will call you out and shoot you straight between the eyes if you miss the mark with them. And to ignore their buy buttons is to potentially forgo 20 to 50 percent of your prospects-something no savvy business would do. We'll discuss the specifics of this topic shortly, but for now it should be clear that to increase your bottom line also requires understanding a man's motivation and what triggers his emotional connection to a product or brand. To achieve such a feat for both X and Y, you must first appreciate the unique differences that are hardwired into the male and female brains.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONSUMER

When early mankind roamed the earth, they hunted and gathered for something quite specific: food. A day's work was to get the day's meal. Men and women did very different work that was considered equally important to their clan.

THE HUNTER

Men hunted in groups, made weapons, and traveled great distances from their homes. They lived a focused, dangerous existence. The man's mission statement was, "Kill my dinner before it kills me!" To thrive, men needed navigation skills, good long-distance and night vision, and spatial aptitude. Strength and a heightened fight-or-flight response defined the survivors. Hunting was a strategic exercise requiring quick decisions, distinct roles, rules, and hierarchy among the group. And it required absolute silence with zero tolerance for emotional displays.

What were the women doing? They were keeping the campfires burning, chasing the children away from the fires, protecting the camp from snakes and other predators, listening for thunder in the distance, and providing care to the sick. Because there were no tools to puree food, each child would be nursed until four years of age, when he or she had the teeth and digestive system to manage the diet of fresh boar, nuts, and berries. Our gatherer ancestors made clothes from animal hides, organized the society, and foraged food for each day's meals. They stored food for the winter or the frequent occasions when the men did not come home with the kill. Anthropologists estimate that women provided at least half of the food for their clans. And in this era devoid of scientific explanations, women had the elevated status of the mystical creators of life.

What traits were necessary for a woman to ensure her clan's survival? To start, a great sense of smell, taste, hearing, and peripheral vision. Women negotiated and settled arguments in the clan, so they had to be able to weigh many issues. While men had to have quick, explosive energy, women needed stamina to get through the long days and the nights interrupted by nursing babies. The hunter-man concentrated on that day's kill; the gatherer-woman had to plan for the longer term and was the original queen of multitasking. This nomadic way of life-following the food source season to season-continued for hundreds of thousands of years.

THE GATHERER

Along Comes Mary

With the 1960s came more change in America than witnessed by any prior generation. The dawning of the technology era coincided with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the women's movement. The FDA's approval of "the pill" in 1960 and the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 were catalysts propelling women into "male" professions.

In America and a few other countries today, men and women have comparable educations and relatively equal opportunity. And for the first time in history, we are competing for the same jobs. Yet we come to these positions with different perspectives and innate skills hardwired into our brains that define much of who we are. Only through understanding the primary differences can we unleash the economic power of gender diversity.

DESIGNER GENES

We've come a long way since the turn of the twentieth century, when early brain scientists believed that a head circumference of fewer than fifty-two centimeters indicated a lack of intellectual performance. We now know that the structural gender differences of the brain that endow men and women with innate abilities are determined not by brain size but by the brain's efficiency, connectivity, and intensity during activities.

For example, in general, a man's brain is like a file cabinet. Everything has a file. The job has a file, the wife has a file, the kids have a file, golf has a file, and tools have a file (sometimes a very big file). Here's the first and most important man rule: the files never touch. When a man contemplates his financial future, with the focus of a laser he very carefully pulls the "money" file, methodically sorts through it, and replaces it without stirring another file. A man zeros in on the task at hand. He has very specific and highly developed brain regions located on the right hemisphere, which is the larger of the two in the male brain and the source for spatial reasoning. Depending on his current focus, he generally uses the right or the left hemisphere-but not both simultaneously. As a result, a man's brain structure allows him to separate his emotions from a problem, act quickly, and move on to the next specific activity.

Picture a woman's brain as a large table. Her files are all laid out in groups touching each other. During the meeting with their financial planner, the husband is a bit surprised when his wife says, "Yes, that is a good point, but you have to think about your Aunt Janet and her failing health when you consider our next five years." His "Aunt Janet" file is not even in the same file drawer as the money file, if the file exists at all. The woman's brain is like a searching lighthouse-seeing, processing, and connecting all things on a 24/7 basis. Ruben Gur, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that while men can zone out, taking brief mental naps in front of the TV, for example, women's brains are constantly working. There is about 15 percent more blood flow in the female brain than in the male, lighting up more areas in the female brain than the male brain at a given moment.

The first and most important woman rule is that every file in the female brain relates to all of the other files.

In a woman's brain, the left hemisphere has 11 percent more neurons for language skills than a man's. The corpus callosum, which connects and facilitates communication between the two hemispheres, is 23 percent larger in women, relative to brain size. This strong connection is considered to be a logical explanation for women's heightened senses, social awareness, and ability to connect seemingly random files to each other.

It doesn't seem fair, but as we age, our brain shrinks noticeably in areas where we are least proficient to begin with. Men lose their brain tissue in the frontal and temporal lobes-the areas associated with feeling and thinking. By age fifty men also lose up to 20 percent of their neurons in the corpus callosum, the region that provides connections between the two hemispheres. Women lose brain tissue later in the aging process but lose it where they are already most challenged-in the viso-spatial area. This explains why Grandma has problems remembering where she parked the car at the grocery store, while Grandpa grows crankier and less articulate with the salesperson. (See the chart below for a breakdown of the primary differences we've just discussed.)

Is a business book an appropriate place to discuss raging hormones? Absolutely. The knowledge of the differences in architecture and the chemicals that fuel our brains arm us with a new interpretation of how men and women naturally vary in their perceptions and actions as consumers.

Testosterone is associated with aggression, competition, self-reliance, self-confidence, and sexual urges. Men have twenty times more testosterone than women and experience six to seven testosterone peaks during each day. In the morning, when testosterone surges are strongest, men are most alert, competitive, and creative, and they perform higher overall on math and spatial tests. Their writing and verbal skills are better later in the day as testosterone levels fall by as much as 25 percent. If you want to close the deal or negotiate next year's contract with a man, schedule meetings in the late afternoon or early evening when he is least aggressive.

Estrogen and progesterone levels change on a monthly cycle from the time a woman reaches puberty until the completion of menopause. Estrogen is credited with making the brain more alert, heightening the senses, increasing absorption of information, and general feelings of contentment. Progesterone releases nurturing feelings and has a calming effect on the brain. Expect that closing the sale with a woman may take more time as she sorts through all of the ways this purchase will affect her life or business.

As hormones decrease with age, men and women become more alike. Perhaps this is why most couples who survive past their fortieth anniversary seem so content with each other. Starting at the age of forty, a man's testosterone level decreases 1 percent each year. This explains why men become more laid-back with age. Many new grandfathers astound their adult children, who hardly recognize the attentive man, so unlike the absentee, workaholic father that raised them. Decreasing testosterone levels, rather than recognition of what they missed the first time around, usually account for the more nurturing behavior. Think you can sell to a retired man the same as you would that executive in his forties? Think again. The retired man might scold you for the same hard-line approach you used successfully last week on the younger VP of marketing.

While men become more nurturing with age, women frequently report becoming more focused, energetic, and self-confident as the decreased estrogen levels reveal their natural testosterone levels. At the completion of menopause, a woman's estrogen level plummets to one-tenth of its earlier level-so low that a man, at any age, will produce higher estrogen levels than a postmenopausal woman. This bears out in statistics that show an increasing percentage of women over fifty-five entering the labor force while workforce participation rates for men in the same age bracket are declining. When selling to a female empty nester, bear in mind that you might want to be quicker to the point than you were with the inquisitive new mom last month. With lower levels of estrogen, your postmenopausal prospect may appreciate a more direct, bottom-line approach.

Chemical Cocktails Served Here

During every waking moment we are bombarded with sensory input, and our brains respond with doses of hormones, blended especially for the occasion and for each gender. As you prepare to market or sell to X and/or Y, you must consider the cocktails by which each is influenced. (Continues...)



Excerpted from The X and Y of Buy by Elizabeth Pace Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Pace. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sex, Sales, and Stereotypes xi

Part 1 Targeting Hardwired Gender Differences 1

1 Different by Design 3

2 Buyoscience 21

3 Diverse Drives 37

4 What Makes Him Tick, What Makes Her Tock 53

5 Target the Eye of the Beholder 67

6 Sense and Sensibility 87

7 Give Them Something to Talk About 103

8 The Economics of Emotion 119

Part 2 Gendercycle SellingTM 139

9 The X of Buy 141

10 The Y of Buy 173

Conclusion: Final Thoughts on the X and Y of Buy 193

Q&A with the Author 195

Notes 201

Acknowledgments . . . and Confessions of a First-Time Author 207

About the Author 211

Index 213

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews