It’s All About the Women! Ultimate Decision-Makers

Sorry men, I guess we don’t need you anymore!

Have you noticed lately that a vast majority of studies are coming out with the conclusion that “women are the ultimate decision-maker” for pretty much everything? In fact, I can’t think of any new study that has reached a different conclusion. Do you know of any?

Women in today’s market are king and men are often presented as incompetent or unable to make decisions. I find these results interesting and find myself questioning them.

Are decisions really being made any differently today than they were 30 or 50 years ago?

I can’t speak to the past, I was too young to form a valid assessment, but in listening to people talk—listening to their stories, many women had a say within their own house. Society may have placed constraints on them, but that wasn’t always the case in the home. Decisions are still made primarily based on how a product or service makes a person feel or the problem it relieves within the constraints of affordability. The difference today is it is a lot easier for the consumer to have their voice heard and a lot harder for companies to only hear what they want to hear.

Are surveys and market research conducted differently than they were in the past?

Surveys and market research were done primarily by men in the past as it was more prevalent for men to work and women to stay at home. So if men were doing the work, and they decided that male consumers were the primary decision makers—that would appear to be the norm right? Actually, I think that is called interpreting the results to see what you want to see. Interpretation is up to the person or people who established the criteria and are interpreting the data. Today though, the people have changed and the methods of gathering data have greatly improved so I guess it is fair to say yes interpretation is different today. Today, while it is common to see women in the workplace and in almost every industry and department, there are usually slightly more women in marketing because it is considered a “creative” thing and for men it’s not usually considered manly to be “creative”.

Are results of the surveys and market research interpreted differently than they were in the past?

I would love to see an organization do some research on this—are women more likely to respond to surveys and market research and how is this different from 30 or 50 years ago. I haven’t seen any studies along these lines so if you have, please share them with me. Most of what I am seeing has nothing to do with the customer market changing. Instead, what is changing is how companies are able to receive valuable data from the market in a reasonable timeframe and how they are expected to communicate with them. Marketing is no longer a one-way street!