Designing Posters That Target Women Without Alienating Men

Wrap your heads around this idea, women account for as much as 80% of sales of all consumer goods. If you want to maintain a competitive edge, design your 27x39 poster printing to actively and effectively seek out women without alienating men.



Assumptions about what women buy and the decisions they are influenced with is outdated. Women are buying cars, shampoos, electronic drills, weights and other items that are previously thought to be male dominated markets.



The good thing about advertising to women though, is that you tend to hit two (or more birds with one stone). When you tweak your ads to cater to women’s needs, emotions or intellect, it can work just as well as it does when advertising to men.



Look beyond aesthetics.



Changing your marketing materials to be pink and floral is a ridiculous oversimplification and needless to say ineffective. Overly feminine color schemes in advertising alienate men and many women who have long outgrown the gender stereotype. Painting your marketing a certain color also makes them suspicious and doubtful.



Marketing to women involves looking at their unique needs and context. Realign the attitudes and themes of your posters to cater to women. Remove the sexual innuendos and machismo. What you need to do is take a look at your message and realign it to be inclusive of women’s voice and values.



When advertising, it is best to appear neutral or transparent. Just show how your products or services have unique benefits without being gender biased. When marketing to women, you can still design your posters to look masculine. Masculine colors are commonly treated as neutral.



Talk quality to women instead of numbers.



Men centered advertising tends to focus on discussing product specifications in terms of quantifiable measures –horsepower, disk space, mileage. Women focus on qualitative and intangible characteristics, such as comfort, usability, styles. It’s not to say that all women read magazines, while all men read manuals, but such can be said in general.



Advertising with numbers and specs tend to alienate women, while discussing benefits first and including specs in fine print can work for men. Think of how you explain a digital camera to your wife, or mother, or sister, it is often in high picture quality (instead of megapixels), user friendliness (automatic mode) or the size of the screen (LCD).



You can also place your products in context acceptable to both men and women. Instead of placing the SUV in the wild-wild west, try showing a picture of a family on a road trip, with two satisfied kids watching on a portable DVD. You can include the product specifications in small print. It appeals to women, without alienating men.



As the purchasing power of women rise, so does their marketability. Women are more than just becoming lucrative as a market they are becoming the major market force. Women constitute half of the population and they account for a larger percent of the sales of consumer products. In addition, being more vocal than men, they influence more purchasing decisions through word-of-mouth. This being said, make sure your 27x39 poster printing takes women into account in advertising.