THERE’S A BIZARRE aspect in Marketing Communication that may make the difference.
We had our own inquiry about communication effectiveness. A marketing agency tried to understand the “picture” and asked me and other people (psychologists included) to deal with it. We asked 100 individuals to prepare a digital marketing copywriting-based article – (fifty-fifty distribution between women and men).
Well guess what, in many cases, gender makes a difference. For me, and in accordance to the company too, 2.0 and 3.0 communication techniques were the yardstick whereby we assessed the effectiveness of various articles on the copywriting front. Key words here are: Relation, Help, Give.
I would like to mention our conclusions.
Men tend to express, to call the Marketing Communication as a “Customer Management”, and generally speaking, they tend to interpret it as a way of managing, using, bearing fruit. From a psychological (perhaps even ancestral) point of view, they tend to dominate, to control.
Women tend to interpret it as a way of relating, communicating, giving. They tend to set relations. They tend to listen and to put themselves in other people’s shoes, which is the perspective of empathy and justice, if you will.
On the basis of our data, only17% of people who took survey, emphasized, talked about relations, communication, giving rather than taking. Women represent roughly 60% of this share.
Obviously, many times when you try to do research on data, it records complicated stories – it’s hard to find in the right data. So, there are also female professionals with a flair for management and male professionals with a flair for relations. But when we look at the pattern, however small this may be, one thing comes out very clearly: women are those who express a better communication.
This way of reasoning might appear somewhat strange, in a way, but open scientific literature identified many examples of communication difference between women and men. Why should we not have a difference as regard to Marketing Communication as well?
Of course there are other studies, for example regarding the ability of writing Ads, that tell us that women may not always exude confidence the way a male does. So there are differing views on that.
It goes without saying that when we work together for a common objective, with passion and determination we create outstanding teams and stunning results, no matter who or what, but the question is: would we, men, do well to soften our marketing communication techniques?
What do you think?
