BUY ME! by Marshal Cohen

Author:Marshal Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2010-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Gender Bender

After the Bloomingdale’s store in Tysons Corner, Virginia, opened for business, I moved on from designing the department store’s sweater walls and began selling its men’s sportswear and tailored clothing. I was proud of my department and served my shoppers with the understanding that I was offering them the market’s best selection of merchandise, presented in an appealing way and at a fair price. But now that I think back to my time in that particular department, I realize that my team and I never really focused our attention on who was actually buying our menswear products. Sure, we paid a lot of attention to our weekly sales reports and would comb through them to identify which products sold best, which stores were running low on inventory, and the like. But nowhere in our weekly sales reports did we identify who the main purchasers of our products were. Being the inquisitive soul that I am, I decided to make it my business to find out.

I started to pay closer and closer attention to the types of consumers to whom I was selling Bloomingdale’s menswear. Then one day, after selling yet another piece of neckwear to a female shopper, who had purchased it for a man in her life, it hit me: could it be possible that women were shopping for men more often than men were shopping for themselves? I asked my fellow coworkers to join in on my field research and track how many of our menswear buyers—and not just shoppers, mind you, but buyers—were male versus how many of them were female. What we discovered was astonishing. As it turned out, my hunch that a disproportionate amount of women were shopping for men was more on point than I could have ever possibly imagined. On the day that my team took its tally, almost 75 percent of the menswear purchasers had been women! And this phenomenon is not just limited to Bloomingdale’s shoppers. In fact, female heads of households are the primary purchasers of all kinds of products, from men’s underwear to wallets to laundry detergent. The most important lesson that my team and I took away from the informal survey we took in the menswear department at Bloomingdale’s that month was that we had been marketing our products to the wrong shopper. We had spent so much time observing the male shopper, learning his likes and dislikes, and working with manufacturers and designers to create the perfect mix of men’s attire in our department that we had totally overlooked an entire demographic of consumers who were purchasing our products.

The knowledge that I gained as a young man while working and observing the consumers who browsed the menswear department at Bloomingdale’s has served me quite well throughout my career. For example, I recall reviewing Ralph Lauren’s upcoming clothing line one season and asking his designers if their menswear products would be available in any other colors. When they informed me that they wanted the look of

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