TOP TRENDS DRIVING WOMEN’S BUYING PATTERNS
A Road Map to Exceeding Customer Expectations
Now that we’ve firmly established The Four Motivators Framework and how it helps drive engagement with women customers, let’s turn our attention in another direction: the macro trends driving women’s lifestyles and purchasing patterns. While the four motivators are timeless principles that will remain effective for years to come, it’s important to stay in tune with what’s currently happening in women’s lives that impact their wants and needs. These trends provide timely context for the four motivators that will help ensure your ideas and strategies are relevant to women’s lives.
There are six major trends impacting women’s buying patterns. Separately, these trends are like dots on a map, but when you piece them together, they create a road map of where your customers are going and how you can develop strategies to stay ahead of their needs. When combined with the four motivators, they give you a complete picture of how to better understand and serve this market.
TREND #1: DOUBLE DUTY, HALF THE TIME
The mother of all trends is what I call “Double Duty, Half the Time.” It describes the blurred lines between work life and home life and the resulting time compression that comes from it—the feeling that we have less time. Each one of us has the same twenty-four hours in a day that our cave-dwelling ancestors had, but thanks to our multitasking lives and the technology that tethers us, it often feels as though we have less than that—and this drives how, when, and with whom women choose to do business.
First, let’s place our busy lives in some historical context. Before the industrial revolution, work life and home life were largely one and the same. Men, women, and children worked together in their homes on the shared goal of family survival. They used their land for growing food and raising animals. They used their houses to prepare meals and provide shelter from the elements. And they sold everything extra to generate income. It wasn’t until the advent of factories that home and work started to be viewed as separate concepts.1 Ironically, the age of technology has brought us back to this fusing of work and home life. Instead of pounding grain at our kitchen tables, we’re now answering emails, writing PowerPoint decks, or running businesses from them instead.
Modern women often experience time compression acutely, because so many of them are balancing work with caregiving roles. When you think about serving a market of working women, it can be helpful to think that many are working two jobs: the one they get paid for, if they work outside of the home, and the one they don’t get paid for, inside the home or in caregiving roles with elderly parents or in-laws. The result is that women often have less time to engage in shopping and buying. And when time for shopping goes down, expectations for ease and convenience go up: it’s an inverse relationship.
There is less patience (and often no patience whatsoever) for interacting with companies or salespeople who are not elegantly easy to work with. The less time your customer has, the more she values it—and the more she values the people who respect it and save it.
It’s All About Execution
For a vivid example of the Double Duty, Half the Time lifestyle, let’s turn to Judi, a busy executive from New York. It’s a Tuesday in Manhattan, and I’m sitting across the table from Judi in a crowded coffee shop. She’s the kind of person who exudes competence, and the minute she starts talking, I feel compelled to straighten my posture, smooth my clothes, and pay attention. Judi doesn’t waste words or time, and listening to how she runs her life as a single parent is like a master class on efficiency. I ask her to tell me how she makes her life work.
“It’s all about execution,” says Judi, who runs her own consulting business and the lives of her two elementary school-age children. “I have a lot to pull off in a day, and I don’t have time to strike out.”
I put down my pen when she says, “I don’t have time to strike out.” Let this be a lesson to all of us: when women are in the marketplace, they want to execute. They want to be productive. They want to get the job done. They don’t want to leave empty-handed. Judi lists her responsibilities on a typical day:
• job/client work
• food procurement
• cleaning
• dog care and dog walking
• repairs of any and every kind
• getting kids ready for school
• getting kids to school
• medical care for herself and the kids
• veterinary care
“I’m in charge of every department,” Judi says. She takes a breath and rattles off all the apps she used on a recent morning, while sitting in the back of a cab on her way to JFK airport for a business trip. As she speaks, I feel the kind of awe typically reserved for Cirque du Soleil performances. That morning, Judi used apps to
• schedule her dry-cleaning pickup,
• organize multiple dog walks with a hired dog walker,
• order dinner for her children,
• hire someone to assemble a desk she ordered from IKEA,
• buy flood insurance, because a hurricane was on its way to New York, and
• order new clothes for her kids.
Did I mention that she accomplished all this before she boarded a morning flight? And did you see the part where she bought flood insurance?
Judi takes my astonishment in stride. “Using these apps is not about a shortcut: it’s about a way. I’m relying on tech heavily. I need to execute on the tasks in the most efficient way possible, to clear a path so that I can do the things that only I can do.”
Judi’s experiences paint a picture of why it’s now “table stakes” to be easy and convenient to work with, no matter what business you’re in. The other side of this is, of course, the opportunity to cater to this new appetite for helpful services. Consider the list of apps Judi used on a single morning. They were mostly service-based. When I interview women, they often tell me they have plenty of stuff, and what they’re looking for is more help.
Halfway across the country from Judi, a woman named Jen gives me a simple but compelling example of what helpful and convenient looks like from her perspective. She tells me about one of the first times she left her house to go shopping shortly after having a baby.
“I remember my first time pulling in to the Nordstrom parking lot with a colicky baby and almost tearing up when I saw they had spaces designated for ‘new parent’ parking. I thought, Oh my God. Someone gets me. Someone cares about my experience here.” Nordstrom literally put up signs telling their customers they were trying to make it easy for them to do business with the company.
In the Double Duty, Half the Time world, being easy, efficient, and convenient will capture the attention of busy women who are looking for your help in achieving their goals, and increase the chances that your customers will feel connected, inspired, confident, and appreciated.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Being easy and convenient to work with is now “table stakes” for serving a market of modern women. If your business isn’t helpful, convenient, and easy to work with, you’ll eventually be disrupted by a competitor that is.2
• Busy women are looking for services and not just products.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Many of the apps that Judi uses provide a helpful service, not a product. Could you offer a complementary service for the products you sell? For example, IKEA bought TaskRabbit, an app-based business that helps people with errands and activities such as assembling IKEA furniture. It was a natural match. Ulta Beauty stores offer a variety of hair and beauty treatments. How else can you make your customers’ lives easier with a service that complements your products? Can you leverage new technologies to offer conveniences such as deliveries and automatic replenishment?
• Time is only one aspect of convenience. Write a list of other aspects of convenience that you can provide through your business.
TREND #2: THE MINI-ME EFFECT
I had just chosen my nail color when it happened. “Please take a seat,” said the manicurist, as she motioned to the small chair. It was rush hour at the salon, around five thirty on a Thursday. As is my custom, I gave a head nod and brief eye contact to the client seated next to me. I hoped my face didn’t betray my surprise when I registered the fact that the customer sitting next to me was an eleven-year-old girl.3
Getting her nails done professionally.
On a weeknight.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Have you noticed? Kids are now engaged in adult activities and adult brands more than ever—the kind that you once had to grow up to get.
Welcome to the Mini-Me Effect, the new world order in which adults and kids actively want and use the same products, brands, and services. It’s now increasingly hard to answer the questions, “What’s a product or service for kids?” and “What’s a product or service for grown-ups?”
The line between them is slowly being erased.
Kids love the brands their parents love (Exhibit A: Converse), grandparents love the brands their kids love (Exhibit B: Starbucks), and everyone from age eight to eighty wants the same technology (Exhibit C: iPads).4 Many kids no longer have to wait until they’re grown up to get the products and services their parents enjoy. No doubt you’ve witnessed this. Maybe you’ve found yourself strolling past a five-year-old in the business-class section of a flight to Orlando, flying on his parents’ miles. Perhaps you’ve walked into a hair salon near prom time and seen young girls getting professional blowouts and makeup applications. Maybe your teenage nephew asked you to pick up a latte for him on your way to his house. When I’m out conducting retail research, I routinely see mothers and daughters eyeing the same designer purses.
Previous generations were mortified by their parents’ taste in just about anything. What’s different now? Everything. The root of it is this: people are getting married later in life, which means they are often having children later in life, after they’ve been working for years and earning money. Then if they have children, they have fewer of them than previous generations. Having fewer kids later in life has a domino effect on family lifestyles. For one thing, there are now more dual-income parents who can distribute their resources across fewer children. And parents with means are often willing and able to spend the kind of adult-sized money on their kids that previous generations either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Let’s imagine the scenario of a woman—we’ll call her Tracy—who gets pregnant with her first child at thirty-four, an age that is no longer unusual for young motherhood. By the time she’s thirty-four, Tracy’s had at least twelve years of establishing an income and lifestyle before a baby enters the picture, and so has her husband. By that time, she’s been going to Starbucks for longer than she can remember; manicures have become a routine event, no longer reserved for special occasions; she earns air miles for frequent flying and credit card spending; and she has long ago traded up to better brands than she and her husband could afford when they were in their twenties.
Once they have a baby, the child naturally becomes a part of her parents’ world. As a result, Tracy’s daughter has been going to Starbucks since she was in a stroller and will not wait for her wedding day to get her first manicure. She’s already had plenty of them, many of which have served as a treat for accompanying her mom to the nail salon. And since Tracy is a working mom, she is always looking for ways to spend free time in the company of her daughter.
Kids are involved in family decision-making more than ever. This is particularly true in single-parent households. And when it comes to product research, some kids consider themselves to be the Google “researchers in chief” for their households, in addition to the resident tech experts.
If you’re in a consumer business, it’s worth looking at the opportunity that could come from embracing younger consumers, assuming your product is appropriate for buyers under eighteen. Successful examples of brand extensions are everywhere you look: from Athleta Girl to CLIF Kid Zbars to Baby Dior, to resorts that feature kids “camps” and clubs. There are some powerful forces working in your favor when you do embrace young buyers: you’re appealing to parents with means who are willing to spend adult-size money on their kids, and kids who want to engage in the same brands and activities that their parents do. And lest you think this trend is occurring only in the worlds of salons, fashion, and technology, it’s not. Just look at your local golf course.
The Mini-Me Effect in Golf: A Sport That’s Also a Service Business
From the outside, golf is a glamorous and graceful sport, played in the world’s most beautiful locations. From the inside, it’s a service business that must cultivate the next generation of players to thrive and grow. The people on the front lines of delivering player experiences are the 29,000 PGA of America (PGA) Professionals working at courses and clubs throughout the United States. From providing lessons to running golf shops, courses, and clubs, they’re in the business of delivering great player experiences that inspire amateurs like us to take lessons, join clubs, and renew memberships. So how are they reaching out to the next generation of golfers? They’re tapping into the power of the parent-child connection.
“Women are key to the next generation of golfers,” says Sandy Cross, senior director of diversity and inclusion for the PGA of America. This is because mothers typically play a strong role in determining their children’s recreational activities. Cross’s goal is to bring more players from all types of backgrounds into the sport. Making this a reality are people like PGA Professional Ernie Ruiz, director of golf at Lago Mar Country Club in Plantation, Florida.
Ruiz tells me that earlier in his career, he created a junior program designed to get kids out on the golf course. Something unexpected happened along the way: he got the parents out too. “I drove out to watch our kids in a clinic and saw all these parents sitting around with nothing to do,” says Ruiz, who was working at a different club in Florida at the time. “So we created a tag-along clinic for the parents. A lot of them hadn’t played golf before. They were out there supporting their kids, but they weren’t necessarily golfers. The clinic gave them a first step into the game.”5 Voilà: the creation of parallel programming to cater to parents and kids at the same time.
There are so many possibilities for parallel programming in service businesses. Think about hair salons providing parallel appointments for parents and kids. Or gyms offering tumbling classes for kids, while Mom or Dad attends a yoga class at the same time—instead of sitting in their cars, killing time before pickup. Are there opportunities for your business to leverage the Mini-Me Effect?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Unlike previous generations, parents and kids now often want the same brands, products, and services. The potential for business growth through “age elasticity” exists in many products and services, thanks to the Mini-Me Effect.
• Kids are more active and engaged in family decision-making than in previous generations. They are brand aware at a young age, and as digital natives, some kids regard themselves as product “researchers in chief” for their households.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Consider how this trend could be an opportunity for your business to grow. Does it make sense for your brand to move up or down the age spectrum? Is there an opportunity to provide “parallel programming” for both kids and parents?
• Pets are a part of the family too, and a fast-growing sector of the consumer economy. Determine whether your business has an opportunity here too.
TREND #3: VISUAL STORYTELLING
Life has become one big photo opportunity waiting to happen. Thanks to social media, many people walk around with a mental “shot list” in their heads, constantly framing scenes that would make great photos or videos to post online. (They’re thinking of captions too.) Using the cameras in our phones, we are all shooting the documentary of our own lives—and then, we’re often posting it. With women dominating the biggest social networks, how can your business be a part of the visual storytelling trend and inspire people to document their purchases and experiences with your company?
It made international news when a five-star resort in the Maldives began offering “Instagram butlers” to help guests capture the perfect shot for their social media networks.6 In retrospect, the idea of Instagram butlers seems like an inevitability. When someone buys a product or has an experience that she views as particularly exciting or important, she often tells the story through pictures and videos, so much that it’s almost as if we could ask a new type of existential question: If you bought something really exciting but didn’t post a picture of it, did you really buy it?
I have a friend who’s a Realtor in Texas, and every time he closes on a house, he posts a picture with his clients standing next to him. The clients always hold a sign that says some version of “My Realtor is a rock star!” I once visited a hotel in Los Angeles that had a red carpet and a large banner at the entrance. I assumed there was a special occasion happening there that night and asked the valet what it was. The answer was that there was no special occasion. The banner and red carpet were there to make every guest feel like a celebrity—and, of course, provide an irresistible backdrop for pictures to post on social media.
Our propensity to tell visual stories has led to the creation of new “mini milestones” that women document to share even the smallest of life’s moments. These, too, provide an opportunity for you to get creative. For example, we’re all accustomed to seeing photos about traditional life milestones, such as the purchase of a new house, the first day of school, a new baby, a new marriage, a new car. But there is a whole swath of “mini” milestones that are now catalysts for visual storytelling, such as baby gender reveals, weekly and monthly “birthday” pictures of new babies, filmed and photographed marriage proposals, completion of a home décor or craft project, the finish line of a 5K run, and so many more. A quick scroll through your social network feeds would likely produce dozens of other examples. How can your business or brand be a part of your customers’ mini milestones, or help them create new ones?
Domino’s Pizza offers a great example: the company has an online baby registry (a baby registry!) that promotes the idea of sending pizzas to new and expecting parents, to help them celebrate mini milestones with funny and engaging messages, such as “Sleeping Through the Night—Trust us. It’s a reason to celebrate”; “The Gender Reveal—Either is worth a celebration”; and “Hormonal and Hangry—The struggle is real.”7 In your own business, how can you be a part of women’s visual storytelling and get in the picture for big milestones, mini milestones, and their purchases of your product?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• We have become a world of visual storytellers, shooting the documentaries of our own lives. Our tool is the smartphone; our medium is the social network.8
• No life milestone is too small to film, photograph, or post. This is often true for purchases too, which presents an opportunity for every brand and business.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Brainstorm creative ways to inspire customers to include you, your products, or your services in their social media posts.
• How can you be a part of the new wave of mini milestones in our culture?
TREND #4: HEALTH AND WELLNESS AS A LIFESTYLE
“Is it good for me or bad for me?”
That’s the kind of question that was once reserved for buying food and pharmaceuticals. Not anymore. Wellness has gone mainstream. It’s emerged as a key component for consumer decision-making across industry categories,9 whether we’re talking about allergy-friendly paints, vegan shampoos, or SPF-infused swim shirts. The emphasis on wellness has particular relevance to women, who make 80 percent of health-care decisions for their families and are the consumer force driving the health and wellness revolution.10
Broadly speaking, wellness is a concept that encompasses everything from health and fitness to spirituality, eco-friendliness, and mind and body enrichment. Given the enormity of this macro trend, it’s worth asking: Are there untapped attributes of health and wellness in your own business? Bringing them to life could mean added sales, market share, and reasons to buy. It certainly has for Westin Hotels, and there are many insights from the brand’s innovation in this category that can serve as inspiration for yours.
Wellness at Westin
The launch of the Westin Heavenly Bed in 1999 made an entire generation rethink their lodging choices. Westin Hotels & Resorts, one of Marriott International’s marquee brands, has anchored its brand in wellness since that iconic marketing moment. The bed was a revolutionary move obvious only in retrospect: differentiate a hotel chain by promising a great night’s sleep. The legacy of the Heavenly Bed—and the bed itself—endures as a testament to the customer-experience transformation of the modern hotel industry.
Legacy #1: Heavenly Beds were launched with white duvet covers, a bold move in an industry that had long relied on dark, patterned blankets to hide stains. White linens signaled to guests that they could have supreme confidence in the beds’ cleanliness. The entire industry followed suit: white linens are now standard in upscale hotels.
Legacy #2: Westin was happy to sell you the bed if you liked it, down to the pillows and sheets. This was an extraordinary concept at the time. To this day, you can buy the Heavenly Bed and other signature items from Westin hotels, including the soothing scent of its lobbies.
The idea of sleeping well was the start of a broader commitment by Westin to wellness in all forms. The brand’s guest experience is now founded on six pillars of well-being that have high appeal to modern consumers—especially women. The Six Pillars are:
• Sleep Well
• Eat Well
• Move Well
• Feel Well
• Work Well
• Play Well
“Our goal is to help guests leave the hotel feeling better than when they arrived,” says Brian Povinelli, senior vice president and global brand leader for Westin.
Helping Travelers Stay on Their Fitness Routines
Let’s say you’ve forgotten your workout gear while you’re traveling or couldn’t squeeze it into a bag without checking it. Westin features a program in which you can borrow New Balance clothes, shoes, and new socks—in sizes for both women and men—for a nominal fee, and you get to keep the socks. No more stuffing those bulky sneakers into a small suitcase.
“We started that program right around the time the airlines were starting to charge for checked baggage,” says Povinelli. “We noticed that a lot of people were leaving their workout gear behind. So we partnered with New Balance and came up with a solution.” As a bonus, guests don’t have to pack dirty, sweaty clothes to bring home.
Now let’s say you’ve put on those New Balance loaner sneakers and want to head out for a run but don’t know where to go. After all, you live out of town. Westin created the position of “run concierge” in many of its locations (two hundred concierges and growing) to lead group runs for guests. If you’re the type of person who prefers to run solo, you can simply follow one of the running routes that Westin and New Balance have mapped out for each one of the hotel’s locations.
Inside the hotels, there’s been an emphasis on the design and expansion of gyms. “Historically, hotel fitness centers were often repurposed guest rooms—dark rooms with carpets and low ceilings,” says Povinelli. “We’ve been a leader in shifting the paradigm: our Westin Workout Studios have more of the feel of a third-party gym. All of them feature TRX equipment, and many of our hotels feature Peloton bikes that guests can reserve in advance.”
Fitness is just one aspect of the wellness platform. Westin also offers a “super foods” menu created in partnership with SuperFoodsRx, workspaces and meeting rooms designed to enhance productivity, and even a “Sleep Well Lavender Balm” that guests can rub onto their temples or wrists before bedtime to help ease them into a sound slumber. The list is long.
“We’re offering five to fifteen programs under each pillar,” says Povinelli. Because your idea of wellness may differ from mine, Westin caters to a wide variety of needs.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Health and wellness are powerful motivators for women’s decision-making, across industries.
• There are a vast number of ways to bring health and wellness to life, because “wellness” can be defined so broadly.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Identify the health and wellness trends influencing your customers right now. Are there any latent health and wellness qualities you can tap into within your own business?
• In what ways can you demonstrate that your product or service is “good for you”? Write down as many as possible.
TREND #5: SIXTY IS THE NEW FORTY
My friend Gina loves to joke that she’ll receive her AARP card while her kids are still in elementary school. For those of you unfamiliar with AARP, it’s the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons; its membership cards are infamous for showing up in US mailboxes on or around someone’s fiftieth birthday. Gina gave birth in her late thirties and early forties. She’s fifty now and laughs at the thought of getting retirement messages at a life stage when she’s still hosting action hero–themed birthday parties and saving for her kids’ college tuitions.11
Gina is a perfect example of how relying on age to define someone’s lifestyle and spending patterns can be misleading, especially when it comes to women. Life stage is a much greater predictor of a woman’s wants and needs than the date on her birth certificate. That fifty-something woman down the street could be an empty nester with grown-up kids, or the mother of an elementary-school child, or she could have no children at all. With increased single-hood, “gray divorce,” later marriages, delayed childbirth, delayed household formation, and the phenomenon of multiple acts in our careers and personal lives, the old rules about what characterizes a sixty-year-old, for example, no longer apply.
But stereotypes die hard, so let’s try to debunk some right here: people ages fifty and older, which includes members of Generation X, hold a whopping 83 percent of US household wealth.12 They dominate all consumer spending in the United States,13 in categories including nondurable goods, durable goods, utilities, motor vehicles and parts, financial services, health care, and household goods.14 Women drive consumer spending in this age group as they do in all other groups, though you’d never know it by the images we see in campaigns.
Culturally, we know that men with gray at the temples are often viewed as “distinguished,” while many older women are not viewed at all. Literally. Based on my research, and the research of many others, women fifty-five and older often describe themselves as feeling largely invisible in the marketplace. Mature women report that they often receive little eye contact and even less attention as customers. Not taking these women seriously is a big mistake.
When it comes to mature women in the consumer marketplace, the empty-nesting phase is a time when many feel they can finally put their own needs first. I call women in this life stage the “make your own darn dinner” generation. It can be an exciting time of life. In my interviews, I routinely hear women say things like, “I’ve taken my son Tommy’s old bedroom and turned it into my office.” “I’m planning the kind of vacations I’ve always wanted to have.” “I’m getting rid of my junky living room furniture and getting something nice.” I’ve met many women in this age group who travel frequently with girlfriends because their husbands aren’t interested. They don’t let that stop them.
And, yet, few businesses approach this market as if maturity is an exciting period in people’s lives. Pay attention long enough, and you get the impression that marketing and selling to older audiences consists almost entirely of somber—and often patronizing—pitches for health care, adult diapers, supplements, and financial services.15 There’s little acknowledgment that an enormous part of the over-fifty-five market is youthful, active, and engaged, and becoming entrepreneurs at virtually the same rate as millennials.16 There’s a gap for products and services delivered with style, coolness, and enthusiasm for the future.
And who has stepped in to fill that gap? None other than Jimmy Buffett.
Yes, you read that right: Jimmy Buffett, the singer and business tycoon famous for building an empire on the fantasy of escaping to the tropics with a margarita in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. His company opened the first Margaritaville-themed retirement community for people aged “55 and better” in 2018.
Reimaging This Stage of Life as Margaritaville
The official name of the retirement community created by Buffett’s company is Latitude: Margaritaville, and it’s a place where people can “grow older but not up,” as one of Buffett’s song lyrics goes. The initiative is a partnership between Margarita Holdings, LLC (the restaurant, hotel, and leisure company in which Buffett is the majority stakeholder) and Minto Communities USA, a homebuilder with more than sixty years in the business. Call it cheeseburgers—and aging—in paradise. As of this writing, there are two locations under development: Daytona Beach, Florida, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. A third location is being planned for Watersound, Florida, in the state’s panhandle region.
The communities promise a tropical lifestyle filled with beach cabanas, thatched-roof bars, and live music every day. There’s even an interactive dog park and pet-grooming spa called Barkaritaville. With the announcement of Latitude: Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett and company suddenly made it cool to be in a retirement community, a feat that (arguably) no one else has accomplished. That’s because they’re not just selling a place to live: they’re selling a state of mind.
“We’re turning the active-adult segment on its ear,” says William Bullock, senior vice president of Minto Communities USA, and the lead executive overseeing the development. “The idea that older people want the early-bird special, go to bed at 6:00 p.m., and are in heaven’s waiting room—none of that is true. It’s the opposite of what we’re experiencing with this buyer group. These people want to socialize, have fun, and continue to enrich themselves through education. They’re energetic, they’re social, they’re focused on wellness and fitness, and they like to travel.”
As this book went to press, more than 120,000 people had registered to get updates on the Latitude: Margaritaville project. And not all of these people are “Parrotheads”—the term for serious Jimmy Buffett fans. In fact, the company’s internal research shows that 75 percent of people in the database have never been on the corporate Margaritaville website, a popular destination for Buffett fans. What this means is that Latitude: Margaritaville has tapped into a much broader market. The community’s leasing office in Daytona Beach is so popular it’s become a kind of tourist attraction.
It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere
When I heard about Latitude: Margaritaville, I had to see it with my own eyes. So off I went to Daytona Beach, just a few weeks after the community’s first residents moved in. The community is in the heart of golf country here, and as Bullock drove me down LPGA Boulevard the first thing I saw was a lifeguard tower—the symbol of Daytona Beach—marking the entrance to the community. We pulled into a charming neighborhood of pastel-colored homes in beach-cottage styles. Construction crews were everywhere. As we got out of the car, I heard music from the Beach Boys being piped throughout the community on Sirius XM’s Radio Margaritaville stream, setting the mood for prospective buyers. Model home tours start under a thatched-roof structure at the top of a street. The sensory engagement and brand infusion in this community is evident in every detail. Here are a few examples of how the brand is brought to life in the experience:
Street Names
• Flip Flop Court
• St. Somewhere Drive
• Tiki Terrace
• Island Breeze Avenue
Home Model Names
• Aruba
• Bimini
• St. Bart
• Nevis
Amenities
• Fins Up! Fitness Center
• Barkaritaville
• Last Mango theater
• Latitude Town Square
• Paradise Pool
• 5 O’Clock Somewhere Bar
With sixty-nine hundred homes (in the Daytona Beach project), a grocery store, medical office, roads, traffic, sewers, restaurants, and retail, Bullock and team are basically building a branded, Margaritaville town. Bullock recognizes the challenge. “We have to meet customer expectations in three dimensions,” he says. To help make the Latitude: Margaritaville vision a reality, he tells me the company hired a veteran of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company to join the team, to help develop customer-experience standards and protocols. It’s just the beginning of a new way of speaking and catering to the older generation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Toss out old stereotypes about the over-fifty-five segment of the population. Being sixty-five or seventy years old doesn’t mean the same thing it did even a generation ago. People are staying active, social, and youthful more than ever before—especially women. This is also the age group that has most of the money.
• There is a “coolness” and style gap for products and services targeted to this age group, especially for women.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Determine how well you are engaging this group of potential customers. Is your approach in tune with the reality of their lives? What ways might you be able to promote opportunities for “reinvention” and experiences to this customer market?
• Baby boomer women are a loyal source of referrals for the people and businesses that serve them well. Be conscious of giving the same high standard of attentive service to all your customers, no matter what their age.
TREND #6: PERSONALIZATION—“I AM MY OWN BRAND”
Funeral director Tasha Parker once had a fairly predictable job: she worked at a funeral home. Day in and day out, she helped families organize services that hadn’t changed much in years: a casket viewing followed by a church service followed by a cemetery burial. People who wanted cremations received their loved one’s ashes in an urn, held a memorial service, and drove home.
That was then.
Now, Parker works for Everest Funeral Concierge, the first funeral concierge service in North America. “Things are so different,” says Parker. “People are putting their cremated remains on rockets. They’re having memorial services in parks. They’re making jewelry out of cremated remains. They’re releasing balloons with cremated remains inside. Our motto is, as long as it’s legal and achievable, we’ll get it done for you.”
As Parker’s experience shows, we’re living in the age of personalization, a societal shift I call “I am my own brand.” Typically, we hear about personalization in the context of technology, e-commerce, and services like Netflix, but the desire for it goes far beyond that and into services of all kinds—even funerals. Looking at how one company achieves personalization in the funeral industry gives us a vivid example of how deeply it can drive emotional engagement in any business.
At this point you may be thinking, Wait; back up. What’s a funeral concierge service? Am I supposed to know?
Everest created the funeral-concierge category: it’s a Houston-based company that disrupted the funeral industry by providing independent, on-demand, personalized funeral planning. The company’s services can be used with any funeral home in the world, and are typically included as part of a life-insurance plan: 25 million people in the United States and Canada have Everest as part of their life-insurance policies, either through their employer or through their individual policy. Everest filled a marketplace need for guidance on navigating what is often the third-largest expense in someone’s life, behind the purchases of a home and an automobile.17
“You have six months to plan a wedding and you get six hours to plan a funeral,” says Mark Duffey, Everest founder and CEO. “The process is opaque, and most people have little-to-no experience planning one. Jamming all that lack of information into a short, decision-making window is not acceptable for today’s consumers, so we built a business model around becoming the consumers’ independent advocate. The majority of our clients are women, so Everest was designed to meet their needs.” This female focus was what first brought me to Everest, which I work with as a client of my firm.
Here’s how it works. An Everest advisor works with a customer to determine what the family would like to do for their loved one. A traditional funeral? A cremation? A special event in a place that meant something to the deceased? Once a decision has been made, Everest will contact funeral homes on the customers’ behalf and negotiate a competitive price. From there, Everest advisors work with the funeral home to coordinate all the service elements, including the creation of personalized materials such as obituaries, slideshows, videos, and playlists. If a customer wants skydivers and bagpipes or a catered lunch at a favorite restaurant with printed napkins and a commemorative drink, the advisor will coordinate those activities too. An important differentiator for Everest is that its insurance carrier partners dispatch a check to cover funeral costs within two days, instead of the more standard time frame of one month, which helps eliminate one enormous source of funeral stress: the money.
Many people are now forgoing traditional funerals and hosting celebrations of life that uniquely reflect the interests and passions of their loved ones. This is a sign of the times. People want to be able to design their own experiences, in life as well as in death. It’s as true in B2B services as it is in the consumer marketplace, and it’s especially true for women. We are still in the early stages of the personalization trend, and it’s growing exponentially. How can your business be a part of it?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Personalization drives emotional engagement. The ability to deliver it can disrupt industries, as Everest has done in the funeral business.
• Personalization has high consumer appeal, particularly for women, who are Everest’s primary customers.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• Determine where personalized options could fit into your product or service portfolio, and the kinds of resources that would be required to bring these options to market.
• Examine whether it would be appropriate or feasible for your business to provide tiered levels of service or a concierge-style, on-demand offering.
Now that we’ve covered six of the biggest trends impacting women’s purchasing decisions, you have all the pieces in place to create strategies that will be relevant to your customers and prospects. Let’s recap them here:
1. Double Duty, Half the Time
2. The Mini-Me Effect
3. Visual Storytelling
4. Health and Wellness as a Lifestyle
5. Sixty Is the New Forty
6. Personalization—“I Am My Own Brand”
It’s time to bring together everything we’ve covered to start planning and executing your new strategies for growing your business. We’ll close out our time together with a Monday morning action plan.