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Middle-aged white guys have a lot to learn when it comes to designing hammers and homes for women

By Jennifer Campbell, The Ottawa Citizen, February 14, 2009

It’s Valentine’s Day and many men will be racking their brains trying to figure out if she really meant it when she said not to spend any money. Those who conclude she was fooling are wise. She wants all kinds of things: manicures, massages, chocolate, good wine, warm pyjamas (not trashy lingerie), a fit body, and another helping of chocolate.

This is Hallmark’s day for love, and the jammies and chocolate may be on the unspoken list, but unlock the secret to what a woman really wants the other 364 days a year, and you’ll be golden.

Here’s a hint: What women want, according to Joanne Thomas Yaccato, who has made a career out of studying what she calls “gender intelligent retailing,” is to be understood and taken seriously.

“Our research continually reveals that women consumers feel they’re not taken as seriously as men,” she notes. When companies do try to market to women, they tend to create an event –think pink ribbon breast cancer pushes or even Clinique Bonus time.

It’s not effective because the retailers are not seeing the world from the woman’s point of view, says Thomas Yaccato.

The way most businesses and stores are set up, the way products are developed and merchandised, she says, is through the bifocals of a MAWG (middle-aged white guy).

“Women feel they’re invisible in large part,” she says.

“That’s why marketing to women fails because it doesn’t address how products get designed and developed. Marketing to men is the de facto position.

“We’re not suggesting it’s about dumping men and focusing exclusively on women, but it’s about expanding consciously your world view to include women.”

In her book, The Gender Intelligent Retailer, Thomas Yaccato gives endless examples of how retailers can improve their bottom line by considering women’s feelings. Home Depot, for instance, stopped selling pink hammers and started selling hammers with smaller handles; it also started producing boutique-style vignettes in its stores so women can get an idea of how a finished room might look.

“Women are professional consumers, the uber consumer,” Thomas Yaccato says. “For sociological and biological reasons, that is so. Women notice stuff that flies by men. Women can walk into a store and within nanoseconds, they know whether this is a store they want to shop in or not. They have overwhelming intuition: Is it too hot, cold, lights too bright? Is it tidy? Is it organized? How heavy was the door? Men don’t notice those things. If you successfully meet the needs of women, you’ll exceed the expectations of men.”

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Calgary builder listens to women, earning design honours and sales. Ottawa builders are also paying attention

By Jennifer Campbell and Sheila Brady, The Ottawa Citizen, February 14, 2009

Five years ago, a 31-year-old Calgary housing executive sat up straighter and listened carefully as a marketing consultant told him he was missing a gold mine by not tapping into the buying power of women.

“Within the first five minutes, I knew I wanted her to come and speak to our sales team,” says Shane Wenzel, senior vice-president of sales and marketing for Shane Homes, a family-owned company in Calgary.

“We had very valuable lessons to learn and to apply to our business philosophy,” says the executive who had gender-retailing consultant Joanne Thomas Yaccato at his offices within 30 days, helping staff figure out what its female customers wanted.

Her research told them that more single women than single men buy homes (Ottawa realtors are anecdotally reporting the same thing). Women also tend to spend more time in the home so they have a stronger sense of how they’d like it to look and function.

After a day with Thomas Yaccato, Shane Homes spent eight months meeting with 10 women who had recently bought new homes. The builder incorporated their wish lists into two models, the Yaccato 1 and Yaccato 2; the second house won provincial design honours and five years later, is still part of the builder’s lineup of homes.

The builder also adopted key suggestions, including bigger windows, more storage, convenient computer areas off the family room and upgrade ensuite bathrooms, in many of its other homes.

“We learned a lot,” says Wenzel, who wishes he would have had Thomas Yaccato’s advice when designing his own Calgary home.

“I now know that women control 80 per cent of all the buying decisions and while, I held the chequebook, I had no say.

“Then again, I only cared about the garage and having enough storage, and making sure there was a big-screen television in the family room,” says the 36-year-old builder.

“My wife, Lana, wanted to make sure there was at least some storage around television so it wouldn’t look like a big black box.”

The first Yacatto house ran into money problems when it was introduced four years ago, admits Wenzel. The 1,700-square-foot home with no garage was about $30,000 too expensive for the market, he says. “The women had expensive tastes, but good ideas.”

The Yaccato 2, a 2,300-square-foot home with a double garage and a price tag of $580,000, which is slightly above the average Calgary price of $520,000 for a similar house, is a steady performer, says Wenzel.

The two Yaccato homes include such understated but oh-so-valuable gems as a large mudroom and adjoining pantry with a motion-sensored light that comes on when the door is opened.

There are cubbyholes and hooks for everything in the mudroom. The kitchen has a tilt-out drawer for SOS pads in front of the dead space that the sink basin takes up. It has extra cupboards and deep pot drawers, an awning over the window so it can be left open even in the rain, and a built-in desk where children can do their homework.

There’s a countertop across the front-loading washer and dryer for more work space. With the exception of the master, the bedrooms on the second floor are equal in size so there are no sibling spats.

The homes went on to win design awards, and the 10 women who helped design it are now on a permanent advisory board.

“Nine times out of 10, marketing to women turns into a press release. They didn’t do that. They actually went out and asked women what they wanted and then they built the sucker,” Thomas Yaccato says. “And they built it well.”

She laughs when she thinks about how Shane Homes has practically ruined her own home for her. “I’d love to get my hands on the absolute maniac who designed my house. We have two stepstools in the kitchen — that’s how high everything is.”

It seems Ottawa builders are learning the same lessons.

“The primary focus for women is the spacious kitchen,” says Margaret Gallo, owner of Sienna Homes. “They like light and openness and the open concept, with the kitchen, and great room and the dinette.”

They’ve also learned a Thomas Yaccato-inspired trick for the ensuite bathroom: Make it into a spa. It’s the one place women can go to relax. Use glass for the shower stall and as many windows as possible. “Women like natural finishes — they go for the Zen thing. A lot of our ladies are looking for luxury faucets,” says Gallo.

Her female customers are also big on the spacious mudroom and they like full closets near the entrances.

Carmen Fleguel, president of Holitzner Homes, sums it up quickly: “What women are looking for is organization and convenience.”

To that end, they include many cupboards and shelving in closets in their designs. In the bathrooms, their vanities have doors and drawers where makeup and jewelry can be easily organized.

In closets, they include two-tier shelving and they often offer two walk-in closets in the master bedroom. In the ensuite, there are deep roman bathtubs and moulded shower surrounds for easy cleaning.

Holitzner also gives four colours of paint for interiors, and five different types of doors — from traditional to modern — giving buyers more ways to express themselves.

Asked how they know what women want, Fleguel says it was simple: “You have two women (she and her sister, Heidi Laurysen) running a business.”

Thomas Yaccato would likely approve.

Visit www.shanehomes.com, hit value-added programs and then market research to find out more about the Yaccato homes.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

4 mai 2008 - 08h08
La Presse
Isabelle Laporte, collaboration spéciale

En Ontario, on a failli interdire aux marchands de faire payer les femmes davantage que les hommes pour les coupes de cheveux, les articles de toilette et le nettoyage à sec.

En 2005, un projet de loi allant en ce sens a été approuvé en deuxième lecture à l’Assemblée législative. Des médias du monde entier se sont intéressés à l’affaire. Puis plus rien.

Vérification faite, le projet de loi est mort au feuilleton en 2007. Un an auparavant, le Toronto Star avait révélé que Lavalife et Quest, deux sites de rencontres en ligne, avaient embauché un lobbyiste de renom pour empêcher la loi d’être promulguée.

Ironiquement, leurs services n’étaient pas plus chers pour les femmes. Au contraire, leurs services de rencontres par téléphone sont gratuits pour elles, et payants pour les hommes. Mais ce modèle d’affaires aurait été mis en péril par une loi empêchant de pratiquer des prix différents sur la seule base du sexe.

Plusieurs juridictions, notamment des États américains et la Ville de New York, ont édicté de telles lois. En octobre dernier, en Finlande, quatre salons de coiffure ont été menacés d’amendes.

«Ils facturaient plus aux femmes qu’aux hommes, peu importe le temps nécessaire pour rendre le service», note Minna Lundell-Kiuru, du bureau de l’ombudsman en matière d’équité.

À l’évidence, les femmes ont souvent les cheveux plus longs que les hommes, ce qui exige plus de temps pour faire la mise en plis. «Un commerçant peut tout à fait demander plus cher dans ce cas», souligne Mme Lundell-Kiuru.

En somme, une femme ne devrait pas payer plus qu’un homme pour obtenir exactement le même service, explique Frances C. Whittelsey, journaliste américaine, ancienne du NY Times et auteure de Women Pay More.

Dans les services, il y a bien plus de place pour l’arbitraire, remarque Joanne Thomas Yaccato, présidente de The Thomas Yaccato Group, une firme aidant les entreprises à comprendre les consommatrices.

Selon ses recherches, les femmes paient aussi plus cher pour une foule de produits, sans s’en rendre compte la plupart du temps.

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Joanne Thomas Yaccato
President and Founder
THE THOMAS YACCATO GROUP

As a result of my work in Africa with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, I can tell you African women consumers share the same complaints of their sisters around the globe—companies don’t take them as seriously as men. Case in point:

Muni Shonibare owns a successful, 150-employee furniture company in West Africa with considerable growth potential. Her clients include Shell, Texaco, the Abuja Hilton, and others. However, bankers in Lagos would not finance a woman-owned business with ambitious expansion plans. Enter Access Bank.

Access Bank is a member of the Gender Entre-preneurship Markets (GEM) program. GEM is an IFC-initiated program specifically designed to help businesswomen overcome gender barriers and grant them access to much-needed capital by working with local banks. With support from GEM, Access Bank gave her an $800,000 loan for her expansion plans.

Now that they have begun to take women seriously, Access Bank is being rewarded with customer loyalty and a referral network previously unimagined. Other African countries are now seeing the light in terms of new market opportunities and through GEM, banks in South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya are lining up.

View the entire report (pdf 3.8MB)

Noreen Rasbach
February 16, 2008

Years ago, I went to a consumer show for women to gather bags of free samples that used to be plentiful at those kind of shows.

I stopped at an insurance company’s booth and decided to take part in their promotion, which was to sit and talk insurance with a well-known local television anchor while being videotaped. I remember sitting under harsh white lights and having fun while a supremely well-coiffed man asked me some light and breezy questions.

Then came the stumper: He asked me whether I thought women had special insurance needs. I knew what the answer was supposed to be - “Why, yes, of course, women are so different from men!”- but I stumbled. Why should women be considered special or different? They had jobs and hobbies and money and families, just like men. I hemmed and hawed and finally said no. It clearly wasn’t the right answer. The interview ended shortly after.

I was reminded of that this week while doing some research into women and investing, looking into a study about how women fare better than men. To my amazement, when looking back, study after study from Canada, the United States and Britain over the past 10 years all reached this same conclusion.

One recent survey comes from the University of California at Davis, which looked at more than 35,000 discount brokerage customers between 1991 and 1997 and found that women’s portfolios earned 1.4 percentage points more than men each year. Economists attributed the difference to the fact that men shuffled their holdings more - about 45 per cent more - because of “overconfidence” and thus paid more dearly in fees.

When I decided to find out why, I learned there is a conventional wisdom about women and investing that also seems to be backed by those surveys: While women are less likely to invest than men, especially buying stocks directly, when they do they tend to be risk-averse, more patient and more likely to do their research.

Joanne Thomas Yaccato, a Toronto author who has written about investing and whose specialty is gender and business, agrees that there are “legitimate” gender differences when it comes to investing. Women, she says, tend to be value investors, looking to the long term, and usually seek out more information than their male counterparts.

“Education is the defining characteristic of a woman investor.”

But Ms. Yaccato takes issue with one key aspect of the female investor stereotype, saying the perception of women as risk-averse is “abjectly incorrect.” Give women the same advice and information and they will be as likely as men to make high-risk investments, she says. She has put this idea to thousands of financial planners and bankers over her 15 years of working with the financial services industry, and not one single person has disagreed.

I’m not big on stereotypes, particularly the men versus women variety, and especially the cutesy way they are often written about in the media - Mars and Venus, anybody? In my experience, smart and ballsy are adjectives that apply equally to men and women.

Ms. Yaccato believes the financial services industry has a stilted understanding of the female investor that becomes self-fulfilling: Women are being pitched - and sold - investments that are too conservative for their needs. That’s especially sad, she says, since women need to be more aggressive and take more risks in their investments to make up for the fact that they live longer and spend time out of the labour force to have children.

Ms. Yaccato has a good point about women living longer and jumping in and out of the labour force, one that should have been my answer to the insurance question that stumped me all those years ago. She also speaks to something I’ve seen over and over again with my friends: Women have a deep-seated fear of ending up poor and homeless. She believes it’s passed on from generation to generation. “Men are raised in the language of money - cars, money and fixing things - that’s just part of the culture. Somehow, women absorb this bag-lady fear. It’s very real out there.”

That fear will eventually drive women, though: They take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen to them.

As for the female investor stereotype, I have to accept that I once embodied the worst characteristic: Paying little attention to investing. I started too late.

Hopefully I’ll come to embrace the best: Getting better returns.

JAN WONG
May 3, 2007

To preserve the last shreds of his dignity, let’s call him “the Dad.” Last Saturday, his son was having a birthday party - something that involved driving considerable distances to pay money to walk across wires strung between trees. The Dad was carpooling three 11-year-old girls, none his own.

“We were driving along when we heard, zzzz, zzzz,” says Beatrice Hodgkins, who has blue eyes, freckles and a honey-blond ponytail.

Kate Thomas-McNeill looked out the window. “There’s this guy waving frantically. He was completely spazzy,” says Kate, who weighs 60 pounds and is also a blue-eyed blond.

She informed the Dad, who, thinking he was too slow, shifted lanes. Oddly, unlike the typical, irate Greater Toronto Area driver, the other guy kept jabbing his finger down, not up.

At which point, the Dad clued in as to why his teal-blue Toyota Camry had been bobbling along, making odd, thumping noises. A rear tire was flat.

Happily, they were across from a Canadian Tire outlet with lavish auto-repair facilities near Barrie, Ont. Unhappily, the wait was 45 minutes.

Click here to read the full article.

Olivia Ward - Foreign Affairs Writer
April 27, 2007

Pioneering GTA entrepreneur Joanne Thomas Yaccato takes on advisory role for World Bank subsidiary in Africa

In a recent survey, African businessmen were asked what they thought of women as entrepreneurs.

All very well and good, said one puzzled responder. “But how can property own property?”

That’s the kind of prejudice Joanne Thomas Yaccato is locking horns with, as the pioneering GTA entrepreneur takes on a new role with the World Bank’s private-sector arm to revolutionize the way African banks view business women.

As a consultant to the International Finance Corporation, which will distribute $40 million in international funds, her goal is to empower African women - providing the money and confidence they need to raise themselves, and the impoverished continent, from a life-and-death struggle to economic security.

Although new to Africa, Thomas Yaccato, 50, has spent decades dissolving the stereotypes that keep women beneath the “glass ceiling” of business success and prevent banks and other corporations from understanding how to satisfy them as clients.

Click here to read the full article