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A few months ago Michael Silverstein, senior partner and managing director at , addressed an audience
of BCG consultants in Delhi. He recounts, ³I told them, µLook to your left and then to your right. A few
years from now one of you is going to be a woman¶. The boys looked at each other and shouted µNot
me!¶´ They got the point of the exercise. On that day, the topic of discussion was the female economy ²
women control $12 trillion in global spending and will drive a $5 trillion increase in earned income
globally. According to Silverstein the female economy will have a global economic impact greater than
Brazil, Russia, India and China. ³Women are beating men hands down,´ he says.

Silverstein, a former journalist, knows a thing or two about women. In fact he attempted to answer a
question that puzzled the good doctor from Vienna and perhaps all mankind. What does a woman really
want? The answer is shockingly simple; Time, money, love, pets, food and sex. Although the order might
baffle some, women all over the world have a lot more in common. BCG¶s global study, at a cost of about
$2 million, concluded that women across the globe are starved for time.

Now this piece of insight is fairly apparent, but Silverstein insists that the 12,000 women interviewed
during the course of the study shed light on new information about the woman consumer. For example,
when the modern woman decides to buy a product or service but needs a little assistance she turns to
her best friend. If that doesn¶t work she turns to a thousand sisters she can find online. And in Canada
more women than men buy and use Wii because of the time saving calorie burner Wii Fit.

To write the book µWomen Want More¶, Silverstein and co-author Kate Sayre mined data sourced from
the study about women and their spending and saving preferences, their work and home habits, and their
more personal satisfactions and more importantly dissatisfactions.

The

The opportunities for companies lie in the revolution of dissatisfaction. The study lists three categories
women are most dissatisfied with. They are financial services, healthcare and consumer durables.
Although women in India don¶t share strong global dissatisfaction with healthcare, for the Indian woman
the worst offenders are financial services, cars and apparel.

³The women we talked to told us in gory detail that institutions don¶t act like they respect them. Women
feel underserved and ignored by companies in these categories,´ says Silverstein. As a result certain
industries face a very real risk of alienating the world¶s largest and fastest growing economic force.
Consider the car companies. The majority of sales force in the automobile industry are trained to sell to
men not women. They don¶t know how to negotiate with women.

Unlike men, the woman¶s purchase decisions are not impulse oriented. What makes matters worse for
these companies is the fact that women make almost all the spending decisions in categories like
automobiles that have traditionally been considered the man¶s domain.

On the other hand, organisations like and the world¶s fourth largest white goods manufacturer Haier, have
successfully transitioned to the female economy. The maker of the iPhone and the iPod is a ³wanna
have´ brand for women interviewed across the globe. In the case of Haier, the chief made it her personal
crusade to redesign products to women dimensions. She redefined ergonomics of all appliances after
taking into consideration the average height difference of 5 inches between men and women.

Closer to home, is an apt example of a financial company that has recognised, researched, responded
and refined its products and services to thrive in the female economy. ³Companies must pay attention to
the four Rs. Women leading companies certainly help better manage the transition to the female
economy,´ says Silverstein. However, the same can¶t be said for many other firms trying to capture their
share of the world¶s largest and fastest growing market.
The power shopper

Despite similarities between women from Beijing to Ottawa, there are some critical differences between
shoppers from countries as close as India and China. Silverstein has regular trips to India and it still
amazes him to watch shoppers in India. Apart from a genetic link to bargaining and although Indian
shoppers are precision buyers, they enjoy shopping and shop in pairs. Whereas shoppers in China don¶t
think of the act of whipping out cash and cards to buy products and services as recreation. ³It¶s about a
gotta-fill-it-and-gotta-go attitude,´ says Silverstein.

But at the end of a long day, women buyers across the globe evaluate and purchase on three plains ² a
ladder of benefits ² technical, functional and emotional. Unfortunately for the women of the world, most
products and services are created by men on the technical and functional plain according to Silverstein.
³The winning brand looks at all three,´ he says.

Interestingly, the dissatisfaction women consumers experience is best summed up by a man. Leslie
Wexner, the 73-year-old founder and chairman of The Limited, parent company of Victoria¶s Secret and
Bath and Body Works, said ³You can¶t sell to women as if they¶re men wearing skirts.´
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