Building your brand for women
Are you building your brand for a female audience? Some companies see this as a straightforward question with a formulaic answer. There’s even a term for female-focused brand strategy that might be one of the worst phrases in the English language.
Build your brand in two easy steps! Just “shrink it and pink it.”
Shrink the product so it’ll fit into the small and delicate hands of a woman — because we are not capable of holding regularly sized objects. Pink it so that it’ll appeal to a woman’s unique color perception — because we’re actually color blind to everything except pink (and some shades of purple).
If you think the above has any validity, I don’t blame you. You’ve probably been seeing tiny pink branded products for decades. But you’ve been duped like everybody else! Over the last few years it has been proven that women and the color pink don’t mix very well at all. In fact, they respond much more positively to gender-neutral branding.
If you dig back in time you’ll find an opposite color paradigm than the one we see today.
“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” — A trade publication from June 1918
Both versions of the gender binary as expressed through color are marketing myths with little basis in reality. It’s never a good idea to group a whole bunch of people into a superficial category and assume they’ll all respond to your branding the same way. Shrinking it and pinking it might be the brand strategy most frequently used to try to catch a lady’s eye, but it doesn’t mean the eyes are looking with admiration.
Besides, when it comes building your brand: the road most traveled is least likely to take you where you want to go.
I’ll be collecting more real world examples of “Pink it and shrink it” over on our Tumblr so we can all continue to marvel at tasteless pink product branding.
