Gender and Marketing

There are fundamental differences between the male and female brain. They’re both structural and behavorial, they’re formed at birth, they last throughout life, and they affect many different aspects of our attitudes and behaviors. Some of the most important differences:

Women’s brains have more distributed functions than men, especially for language and memory. Women’s brains have stronger connections between the two hemispheres.

Women have a larger hippocampus, a major area of the brain that is involved in memory function. Women rely more heavily on brain areas that contain mirror neurons during empathic interaction. Mirror neurons enable a person to feel what they see another person is feeling.

What are the practical implications of these facts? Women have better memory for detailed information than do men. In terms of evolution, this may be related to female competition: females compete with other females in more subtle ways that may rely more on processing finer details; for example, of social cues. Women have a greater capacity to empathize, enhanced language ability, and stronger emotional memory. Men tend to have superior spatial ability, and the ability to build systems. These hard-wired brain differences are revealed in infancy: female babies make more eye contact with caregivers than baby boys. On the other hand, male infants prefer to look at machines or puzzles.

Dr. Robert Knight, one of the world’s top neuroscientists puts it, ‘the brain makes behavior.’ Our neurological research reveals that women respond significantly more strongly to certain styles of packaging designs, advertising messages, and store layouts. We also know already, from our library of neurological ‘best practices’, that women respond to language and imagery differently than men.

The message for marketers? Get your product design, packaging, pricing, branding, messaging, in-store presentation and more in sync with how the female subconscious mind receives and processes information, and directs behavior, and your chances of marketplace success rise accordingly.