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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

> women as a whole are swayed more by marketing then men are

Either you provide a scientific cite for that claim or that is a straight up sexist statement. In case you haven't heard there's a lot of stupid irrational purchasing behavior by guys too.

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I thought it was an interesting statement so I looked into it a little. I personally was less curious if there was a difference in the way men and women react to a constant advertisement, but I wanted to know the % of marketing dollars spent marketing towards women vs men. I did not find those exact numbers, but stumbled onto :http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women

There are a ton of crazy figures to digest on that page, again none addresses which sex is "swayed" more by a given advertisement. For example, "Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care"; "Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth"; and "Wealthy boomer women...make 95 percent of the purchase decisions for their households".

Assuming it is true, women making 85% of consumer purchases is kind of mind blowing. This does not necessarily mean women are swayed more by marketing, but I think it is safe to say women as a whole are targeted by marketing campaigns more than men - at least after reading these numbers that is how I would market a consumer product.

85% dollar-wise, or 85% of items purchased? Because I would argue that men tend to make fewer, but more expensive purchases, eg big tv, high end stereo, etc. I would still believe that things are skewed a bit since married women tend to make more of the purchasing decisions than their husbands (from what i understand), but 85% seems awfully high to me.

Check the link, it is extremely fascinating, but this is the relevant section:

>Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care: 91% of New Homes 66% PCs 92% Vacations 80% Healthcare 65% New Cars 89% Bank Accounts 93% Food 93 % OTC Pharmaceuticals American women spend about $5 trillion annually… Over half the U.S. GDP

The list must be referencing "items purchased" rather than "dollar-wise". It is by no means definitive of the answer who makes more expensive purchases, but if women are buying 9 out of every 10 new houses, 65% of new cars, and 80% of healthcare plans what big ticket items are left for men to buy to outspend women?

Now the part at the end about $5 trillion being 1/2 the US GDP, might not be an error but be more telling of when these statistics are from (US GDP currently closer to $15T). Nevertheless like in my OP, the numbers are mind blowing, consider the following:

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

1/2 GDP = women spending = (private consumption - women spending) + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

You would think so, but that's not the case. Advertising to men is more expensive than advertising to women, because more marketers are competing for those slots. I can't find any broad stats on this right now, but to use a random example, Cosmo and Maxim are both major magazines catering to otherwise similar demographics (age/income). Maxim claims 9mil readers while Cosmo claims 18mil. The cost for a four-color, full-page spread is ~230k for Maxim and ~289k for Cosmo. That's 62 readers for a dollar for Cosmo, or just 39 readers for a dollar for Maxim. [maximmediakit.com, cosmomediakit.com]

If you reread the page you posted, you can see the hints of that. People talking about how older women make up a demo that "no advertiser can afford to ignore" -- that's not something an advertiser would say unprompted about 18-35 year old males, for example, because the idea of advertisers ignoring 18-35 year old males would be absurd.

Yeah I think this would be a hard conclusion to jump to. There have been numerous papers on the benefits of market segmentation by gender to improve marketing effectiveness due to differences between genders.. But I don't know if any studies that can show with any confidence that one gender is more susceptible overall. It is always broken down by marketing approach (approach x effectiveness by gender). So, it is fair to call the spade a spade.

I'm not even sure how you would show this. Would you look at total spending by a gender? But that could reflect income-earning differences. Would you look at percentage spent on advertising by a industry targeting a particular gender? But advertising is an arms race which one must engage in as long as the marginal return is >0, and there are all sorts of things affecting this unrelated to gullibility. Would you look at marginal return on advertising dollar split by gender? But this ought to be ~0 for both genders regardless of effectiveness, per previous.

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