Beyoncé said it loud and clear: “Who run the world? Girls.” In 2023, three women have dominated the economy: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Barbie. Together, they’ve shown how much financial gain there is in properly targeting the female consumer. Female purchasing power is having a moment, though women have long held the purse strings.
Women influence or control 85% of consumer spending, according to Forbes. But in business, the female consumer is widely underestimated. How can companies capitalize on the market without falling into the “make it pink” mindset?
Straight Arrow News spoke with Abby Davisson, author of “Money and Love” and founder and CEO of the Money and Love Institute. Davisson is a former executive at the Gap Foundation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Abby, everything Taylor Swift touches turns to gold. She even has more women watching NFL games. In the Chiefs-Bears game a few weeks back, Roku said female viewership ages 18 to 49, that perfect advertising target, was up 63% week over week. What is the takeaway for a business like the NFL, which clearly leans male in its marketing?
A: For so long, women have controlled purchasing decisions. Ford was marketing the Model T to women in the 1920s. But what’s different is those products were often marketed to women but not designed for women. They would shrink them and pink them, right? That was the way that they targeted women.
We can surmise that what’s driving that [NFL viewership] increase is the dating activity of one of the NFL players, right? Taylor Swift has been spotted, and women are interested in Taylor. We saw so much activity over the summer with The Eras Tour and now with the movie out. This is an entrepreneur who is driving her own experiences, driving the products that she creates, and she is a uniting force.
Q: So what should the NFL take away from this? I know this is about her personal life, but financially, there’s so much more here.
A: They have been missing a huge consumer by not incorporating women more into the NFL. Sure, there have been women who watch the NFL for a long time. But it’s been in spite of the marketing, not because of the marketing.
So if it takes something like a love interest to get more women to watch the NFL, then they should run with that. They should think about the angles that women are more interested in, think about the personal stories that they could tell about their players that they have been overlooking that could keep them there now that they’re watching.
Q: Let’s talk about the classic “make it pink” mindset, which some companies do to cater to women and charge more. Do female consumers fall for it?
A: I think for a long time those were the only products available for women so they had no choice. Everything from running shoes to investment accounts have been made by men and sold to women, but not because they were designed for women. They were sort of the same product but shrunk or turned pink or purple.
In last year, only 2% of venture capital funding went to all-women teams that were raising money for their companies. But some of those women have been successful in raising money. More and more women are starting their own companies and realizing, “Hey, we can actually make products that are designed for women.”
For example, Olympian Allyson Felix is designing a shoe on a woman’s foot for her company Saysh. There are so many examples of how when women are able to design the products, they are better suited to female customers and women respond.
Q: There’s an immense amount of opportunity in this space. What sort of companies do you think are best positioned to capitalize?
A: A huge opportunity is in health care. Women are certainly the bigger decision-makers when it comes to deciding on their family’s health care. And we have seen just how important health is over the last several years with the pandemic and with the rise of telehealth.
Women are the major telehealth consumers. I think companies that are thinking about women, thinking about how they can better serve families in the space of health care, will be successful.
Same with childcare, right? That was one of the things that we saw over the pandemic. Millions of women in the U.S. were forced to leave their jobs to care for their family members during COVID.
Those losses have now been erased as of the last quarter of 2022, so we’ve seen women come back in droves, but the childcare needs are still there. So companies that are innovating in the childcare and eldercare spaces are also poised to reap the benefits of additional spending.
Q: And it’s not just those areas that we think of as being more traditionally women, like childcare. Women purchased more than 50% of the products that are thought to be more traditionally male: cars, home improvement and electronics. Are we seeing companies start to adjust to this reality and what are they missing if they aren’t?
A: I think there are some companies that are starting to adjust, but I think that a large number of companies don’t realize that women are the controllers of the spending. They’re the treasures of their families. I hope they can be more than treasurers. They can be the CFOs and be thinking big about what they want to see in the world and directing their funding, their investments and their spending that way.
Q: Do you see the success of Taylor, Beyoncé and Barbie as a sort of reckoning?
A: I think it’s helpful that people’s eyes have been opened to what can happen. I mentioned [women] left the economy in droves during COVID. Then, with the rise of remote work and other flexible arrangements, [they] were able to come back and then wanted to spend, wanted to have those memory-making moments.
So many women took their families to see Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to share the experience. And so I do think it’s an eye-opening moment. It really should be an eye-opening moment for companies who have not traditionally been thinking about women as purchasers and real powerhouses when it comes to driving the economy.
I mean, Taylor Swift changed the economies of cities, single-handedly, by bringing her concerts there. Justin Trudeau in Canada asked her to bring her tour to Canada for the economy and she’s doing that. So people are responding and I hope that happens with more frequency.
Q: It’s unbelievable the multibillion-dollar economic effect that Taylor Swift has had this year alone. But this has to be authentic, right? What are some of the common mistakes a company might make trying to tap into this growth market?
A: First of all, we have to have women leading those initiatives. I think it’s going to seem hollow or inauthentic if there are not women driving.
I think what is so authentic about Taylor is that she is the mastermind behind her empire. She designed The Eras Tour to encompass all of her eras, not to say there is one and we should only be paying attention to one, but to think about all of the things that makes her her.
And I hope that companies have women not only leading the teams but on the engineering teams powering the back-end of the products. Because when you have more diverse teams, not just women, but people of all genders, people of all races, then those products are better made. They are targeted toward a broader range of people and they don’t miss things that less diverse teams might miss.
Q: It reminds me of a scene in Barbie where Will Ferrell’s character is leading the Mattel powerhouse and it’s just a room full of men and they poke fun at exactly what you’re talking about, but it is what we see in the real world. We’ll see if there is a seismic shift to account for the 80% of consumer spending that women control.
Abby Davisson, author of “Money and Love,” thank you so much for your thoughts today.
A: Thank you. It was great to be here.
