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Comment by dmarinoc | Hacker News Reader

They do not only have money. They have a strong influence (and almost always the last word) in most of end-consumer buying decisions.

It's strange so little companies focus on them

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They do, it's just not what you'd expect. For example, here in the UK, Volvo are big sponsors of the Twilight franchise. How does that make any sort of sense!? Well of course it does, because Twilight's core readers aren't teenagers at all, they're 30-something women. Same demographic that're buying all the Kindles.

Any ad you see that you don't understand, any product you think is irrelevant, someone must be buying it or it wouldn't exist. So, pause for a second and think, this is not for me, who is it for?

  > someone must be buying it or it wouldn't exist

That's assuming that no product is ever a failure.

Very few products are not bought by anyone, ever!

People are taught to focus on a market they understand, specifically themselves if nothing else. Women, on the other hand, are hard to understand, even to other women.

really?

http://www.neosprockets.com/index.php/2010/01/chick-flick-ge...

If that worked, then movie studios would just churn out chick movies with guaranteed profits aplenty.

(actually this does seem to work in the Harlequin romance corner of publishing - if you can apply this to a startup, more power to you)

They pretty much do, it's just that women aren't the only target demographic that you can do this with. Think comic book movies, etc. They're all aiming at a very specific subset of the population and tailoring films to that group.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19012_5-hollywood-secrets-tha...

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