The Female Market

Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.

Marketing expert Martha Barletta presents a business case for why marketing professionals should focus their undivided attention on the largest untapped market in the world - women. She provides a detailed field guide for creating and executing a complete marketing plan that targets women.

The author of Why We Buy reports on the growing importance of women in everybody's marketplace--what makes a package, product, space, or service "female friendly." He offers a tour of the world's marketplace--with shrewd observations and practical applications to help everybody adapt to the new realities. Underhill examines how a woman's role as homemaker has evolved into homeowner; how the home gym and home office are linked to the women's health movement and home-based businesses; why the refrigerator has trumped the stove as the crucial appliance; why some malls are succeeding while others fail. "The point is," writes Underhill, "while men were busy doing other things, women were becoming a major social, cultural, and economic force." And, as he warns, no business can afford to ignore their power and presence--From publisher description.

In Women Want More, Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, two of the world’s leading authorities on the retail business, argue that women are the key to fixing the economy. Based on a groundbreaking study and offering tremendous insight into the purchasing habits and power of women, Women Want More doesn’t just offer a glimpse into consumer behavior; it reveals what consumer behavior says about human psychology and desire.

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Ben Thanh market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.

The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica. Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.

This handbook aims to provide concrete advice on how to communicate with and market to women. Advice is given on the following matters: identifying and targeting female audiences; understanding buying patterns; selecting appropriate media; using humour in marketing; and establishing a personal relationship with women customers. The author uses real examples and her own experience, both as a female customer and in her professional roles in advertising and direct marketing, to reveal what sells to women and what doesn't. This guide is aimed at professionals, students, academics and researchers in marketing, advertising, business and management on how to - and how not to - sell to women.

The cofounders of ReachWomen--a firm specializing in and advising clients on the behavior of women as consumer--help marketers see their brands through a woman's eyes, unlocking the secrets to developing products, services, and marketing strategies that truly resonate with female buyers.

This book addresses the challenges and subtleties behind marketing to women and confronts the idea that gender alone can be used as an indicator to target your market. Darroch provides practical insights into market segmentation and recommends a new approach that focuses on targeting human needs, not gender, in order to reach female customers.