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Sex and shopping

By: Jeff James

Listed Under: Top Story

Published: Monday, November 08, 2010

Ensuring your store and website appeals to both sexes means understanding not only how each gender views sports merchandising, but also requires retailers to appreciate the psychology of shopping. Dave Howell reports



Take a look around your bricks and mortar store and website. Does the design, POS you use and overall merchandising ‘speak’ successfully to your customers?

The gender of your core customer base is vital to recognise if your store is to effectively sell to these groups. However, many retailers don’t have a detailed insight into what motivates their customers and what they expect from the stores they frequent.

“What we found in our research is that experience trumps gender,” says Dr David Lewis, a chartered psychologist and founder and director of research at the independent research consultancy Mindlab International. “For instance, experienced athletes such as runners tend to shop in a different way to the inexperienced athlete. When you look at new people entering a sport for the first time, gender does play a significant role.

“Male shoppers that are going into a sport for the first time will want to be seen to have everything they can buy to do with that sport. A triathlete friend of mine once commented: ‘all the gear, no idea’. Female shoppers, on the other hand, tend not to show this trait. Also, when buying sports equipment they will tend to look for items that are more feminine. Their motivation is to be healthy, but also feminine at the same time. With men, the buying of sports kit is very much a statement of machismo.”

MAJOR ROLE
Gender plays a major role in your customers’ buying decisions. “The majority of independent sports stores are led by sales where sports usage is the decision maker rather than leisure use, so they don’t tend to stock a large range of fashion inspired goods,” says Richard Mangan, account manager at NPD Sports Tracking Europe, a market research company. “On a total market volume scale, the female market is roughly half that of males. This is similar for products used for leisure, but with sport use the female sector is much larger.

“Our figures tend to suggest that because of price reductions females are more likely to trade up to the next best footwear model if they feel they are getting a good deal and will spend more on sports footwear than leisure footwear. Males will spend more on footwear than females, with the price gap larger in leisure wear. In apparel, however, the prices are much closer. There is a large scale of product mix, but often males will train in t-shirts and shorts, whereas females like to have the appropriate clothing for their chosen sport.”

Linking gender to merchandising is a complex equation, as Stuart Wood, global creative director at retail design specialist Fitch, explains: “When Nike launched Nike Goddess stores a few years back it received a very mixed response from customers. For every woman who applauded the move there was an equally vocal crowd that screamed that if Nike really were behind the NG business it would be the dominant presence at Niketown. A lot of women felt NG was an attempt by the brand to say: ‘Hey girls, here’s your pink store, now go down the street and shop there and stop bothering us, we have some basketball shoes to sell’.

“There is, however, some polarity when it comes to male and female brand marketing. Two successful brands in the US, Under Armour and Lululemon, both sell to the two genders, but each is heavily skewed in terms of marketing to the different genders. Under Armour is overwhelmingly male and Lululemon is overwhelmingly female. It is much harder for a big brand with an established method of operation to develop a niche target for one gender or another.”

ONLINE
Website design must speak to your target audience. Colour, navigation and even page layout all have an impact on the perceived value your site’s content has to both genders.

“The vast majority of websites are constructed using a single aesthetic paradigm,” says Gloria Moss, senior lecturer in human resources and visiting professor at the Ecole Superieure de Gestion, Paris. “This is very much mirrored on the male production aesthetic. This may sound surprising, but I found exactly the same when studying graphic and product design over a 10-year period. Just as in the case of web design, I found a massive tendency for design to be anchored in the male paradigm, and this was true even in sectors where the majority of consumers are women. It was true of the grocery, pharmaceutical, furniture and beauty sectors, as well as in the cars and small electrical goods sectors.

“Why does this matter? Firstly, it matters because tests I performed on graphic and product design, and more recently I performed with Dr Rod Gunn on web design, show that each sex has a massively strong tendency to prefer designs originated by their own gender. I have dubbed this phenomenon ‘own-sex preference’ and it holds true across all these design disciplines. Secondly, it matters because products perceived as pleasurable are preferred and used more often than products not perceived as pleasurable, leading to enhanced purchasing.”

Greg Huntoon, director of social media at BreakMedia, marketed as the internet’s premier entertainment community for men, explains: “Colours, fonts, and imagery - the visual components of a design - set the tone for anything we view on the web. Whether the site is filled with poor and disjointed colour choices, beautifully constructed or simply bare and institutional, we immediately construct a mood from the visuals presented. Since reactions to colour are quite subjective, there’s nothing to say that the designer’s intended reaction to a certain colour combination will be what was desired. Either way, the colours and other elements of any design set the stage.”

To appeal to your core audience means understanding not only the gender mix, but also appreciating how they perceive colour, layout, language and overall design. Research has indicated that many transactional sites are built for a male audience, with even those sites that purport to be for women ignoring the design rules that would make them even more attractive to their target market.

A team studying how men and women process colour discovered they react differently to the blue and red wavelengths of light. More telling is that a study has also revealed women’s affinity for pink and lilac shades. This in-built preference should be on your agenda when designing for a particular sex. With site design becoming increasingly focused on narrower consumer groups, understanding who your audience is and what their colour preference is likely to be is very important.

MIDDLE GROUND
Attempting to occupy the middle ground can be dangerous and financially unrewarding. Your store’s merchandise and POS should speak to the gender that makes up the majority of your customers. As Dr David Lewis explains, it may be necessary to lose some customers in order to focus your efforts on the consumers that are interested in your store:

“What some businesses fail to realise is that sometimes it pays to sack some customers. If you understand who your customers are, the small number of potential customers that don’t fit that profile and perhaps buy very little may be safely ignored by your window display and store layout. Most storeowners are working on such thin margins they may well be selling to them at a loss.”

Building gender profiling into your marketing strategy is a must. Product lines aimed at male or female consumers will always form part of your merchandising, but gender has a more integrated role to play in how your store services its customers.

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