SHEvuk Consulting Copy

How Danone sold more yogurt by listening to a maverik female exec

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 03:54:29 -0800

If you really want to sell more to women, and you are not a woman yourself, you've got to get women on your team.

If you want to sell to minorities, you've got to have people from that minority on your team.

Great case in point I heard the other day.

When Strauss (one of Israel's largest food companies) wanted to start marketing DANONE yogurt to the Israeli charedi (ultra-Orthodox) market, they went to Rachel Bolton, a charedi ad agency owner. She told them to forget flavoured and expensive yogurts. The budget-conscious charedi women would not buy that. Instead, she suggested adding Vitamin D to the recipe, since charedi women wear long clothes and don't get enough sun exposure, leading to deficiencies in this vitamin.

Strauss people balked. “What do you mean? It’s an international! They have the same recipe worldwide. There is no way DANONE headquarters will agree to change the recipe for one segment of an already small Israeli market.”

Being the maverik, out-of-the-box advertising executive that she is, Bolton persisted.

Strauss tentatively broached the concept with DANONE and the yogurt company loved the idea. Not so much because of the Israeli market, but primarily because it gave them an edge and a differentiator on the lucrative Saudi Arabia/Persian Gulf market, where women also wear long clothes and don’t get enough sun.

Strauss/DANONE added Vitamin D into the yogurt marketed to the charedi sector and Rachel Bolton got a marketing bonus.

Gender is the strongest lens that people use to interpret reality. And women influence or make 80% of all buying decisions. If you don't have senior women in your R&D, production, design, marketing, sales, and service teams, you are leaving money on the table. You need people who are using your product to be the people who are making and selling your...Read More

5 Ways to Attract Female Customers

Sun, 28 May 2017 05:33:44 -0700

In the US and Israel, women are responsible for 80-90% of consumer spending respectively. Yet many businesses, informed by decades of male corporate thinking, just don’t understand female shoppers. In recent years, even leading business-to-business multinationals, such as Deloitte and Phillips, have adjusted their sales training to sell better to women.

If you are in business, here’s what you can do to attract more female customers

Clean and safe

Women pay particular attention to hygiene and order. If your store is not clean enough or set up right, they may just pass you by. Likewise, women are acutely aware of personal safety and will not frequent establishments with poor lighting, questionable access, or unsafe surroundings.

Comfort for (and above) all

Many women will cut a shopping trip midway if it inconveniences family members. If her husband has nowhere to sit or the kids are fidgety, she will just leave. Recently, I suggested to one of my clients to install a small play area with coloring pages and toys, so moms can shop in peace. At a minimum, provide ample seating for anyone accompanying your customer.

Sell help

Women, especially mothers of large families, are extremely busy. That’s why they constantly look for services that provide help and save time and labor. Grouping errands or taking something off your customers’ hands will bring in business. For example, one gift store I know wraps and ships all gifts, eliminating the trip to the post office. A wig salon client of mine now offers door-to-door pick-up and delivery.

Show products in context

Ever wonder why IKEA sets up sample room displays? Since women usually think ahead to what it would be like to own the product, visualizing it in a setting helps them make the decision. One of my clients successfully attracted customers to her tableware store by...Read More

Women in tech aren't the main losers of inequality

Sun, 28 May 2017 05:20:51 -0700

Browsing through a bunch of event invitations that had made it onto my screen the other day, I couldn’t escape the sight of a gleaming hi-tech echo chamber, dominating the local startup landscape. One all-male panel is an act of omission, two showcase lack of awareness, but three, in as many weeks, suggest that there is something fundamentally skewed in how the startup folks operate around here.

Now before you conclude that this is another “women-in-tech” lamentation and move on, it’s not. The men in tech are the real losers here. Getting women on panels and conference podiums is not about feminism and political correctness. And it’s not about the optics, so no, a token female doesn’t help.

At a business conference earlier this year, Minister of Education (and former hi-tech CEO) Naftali Bennett quipped that he advances women not out of feminist ideology, but out of pure self-interest. Few men on the startup scene really care about getting more women into the industry. These are business ventures, not social justice NGOs. Yet, ironically, it is the start-up founders and the investors, who pay the price for continuing to sit in the echo chamber and actively or inactively exclude women.

Here’s why.

First, despite our stereotypes of scientists, women are simply wired for innovation. Real innovation thrives on interdisciplinary connectivity. Best business and technological solutions are born when people look outside their domain and incorporate strategies from other fields of knowledge.

Women excel in this kind of associative processing. Gender differences in brain anatomy, documented by MRI scans, make women more adept at combining and integrating disparate information. Besides giving women an edge in innovative solution-based thinking, it also accounts for women’s more developed social and communication (think marketing and PR) abilities, indispensable in our tech economy.

Secondly, the truism that women make most of the buying...Read More