Sully's Stuff

Women are from gmail, men are from e-trade...

Surprise! One finding of the Pew Internet and American Life Project is that women and men behave very differently on-line from men.

Women take advantage of the internet ability to communicate, reaching out to others to strengthen relationships and share experiences. Women value the internet as a source of information, but often see the vast information as an overwhelming glut, looking for opportunities to organize it and efficiently find what they are looking for.

Men look to the internet for transactions and as a recreational source of information and view the "glut" as a recreational endeavor, almost like a treasure hunt.

So let's imagine how a household would buy a television. Men would visit manufacturer and retailer websites looking for price and technical data. Search through content sites looking for product reviews. Women might e-mail friends looking for recommendations, use the chat features on retail websites, or look for message boards where the products are discussed. After the man makes the purchase and the television gets hung on the wall (don't they all these days), the woman tells her contacts about the quality of the product and the services from the retailer. To be a successful, internet marketers need to understand the buying process for their market -- and if their products tend to be household "joint" purchases, they should be careful to incorporate features that engage both communicative/collaborative buying and technical research oriented processes.

Link: For more interesting findings click on The Pew Internet and American Life Project

posted by Sully @ 12/29/2005