Kevin O’Brian has written an interesting article on how women are the new traget of electronics makers. This is based on the fact that women influence most decisions to buy a consumer electronic product but consumer electronic producers just started to see them as viable customers. Kevin argues that women prefer stylish products and has some interesting examples of how consumer electronic producers try to sell to women.

While I was in Germany recently, I noticed a campaign by Saturn, a retailer specialising in technology, called ‘We love technology! We hate expensive!’. This alludes to that technology bought at Saturn is allegedly cheaper.

What I found particularly intriguing is that they selected a female cyborg – a mixture of human and technology not unlike Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager – for their campaign. This character is a naked, slender and conventionally attractive woman technicised through lines on her body.

Saturn offers Screensavers for this female cyborg on its website entitled ‘you love her too’. The ‘her’ can grammatically refer to technology in German but also to the female character.

The musical elements to the TV spot come from Goldfrapp’s Ooh La La song but only the section ‘Turn me up’ of the lyrics is audible, followed by the slogan ‘We love technology! And We hate expensive!’.

One could assume that such a campaign for technology speaks more to men than to women but I would be interested in how other people read this campaign.

The Lady Geek seminar in Finland got excellent press coverage, once again highlighting the universality of the challenge for tech companies when targeting women. The two major business papers wrote a 2-3 pages story on the subject (and yes as you can see took a dreadful photo of me) and the press release by the Finnish News Agency was quoted in most of the Finnish newspapers, radio and web with over 2000 hits with the Google search term “naiskuluttajaa ei houkutella teknopornolla” “Tech Porn does not attract female consumer”

‘There’s a real opportunity here for brands and retailers in the consumer electronics sector to target women. They told us loud and clear that they do not want diamante encrusted mobile phones and baby pink DAB radios. Our aim is to get clients to think differently about how they develop, distribute and market products to women.’

Here is the full press release..

Two of my academic articles appeared in the last week.

 The first one looks at how the new soft skills in information communication technology work are gendered. It argued that even though women are said to bring the soft skills needed to ICT work, they rarely get credit for displaying them as they are seen as just natural in women.

The full reference is:
 

Kelan, E.K. 2008. Emotions in a Rational Profession: The Gendering of Skills in ICT work. Gender, Work & Organization, 15(1): 49-71. 

The original article is available here.

The second article is about how ICT worker talk about the scarcity of women in ICT work. I show that gender is indeed something that is confusing for people. They have no easy explanations to account for the scarcity of women in ICT work as the problem is much more complex than that.

The full reference is:
 

Kelan, E. K. 2007. ‘I don’t know why’ – Accounting for the Scarcity of Women in ICT Work. Women’s Studies International Forum, 30: 499-511.

The original article can be downloaded here.

Earlier versions of the two article can also be downloaded from my university website (under Elisabeth Kelan and publications).

The Spectator highlights my Lady Geek findings this week.  Its a good article written by a talented journalist Amelia Torode.   Amelia talks of what women want from technology: style and simplicity.    I totally agree that women have little desire to to spend time working out technology.  We just want the damn thing to work.  Men have much more of a battle with technology.  Whilst my husband can spend hours tinkering with our new PVR (which is VERY complicated in my view- bring back TIVO) and telling me about all the great features it has, I just want to know if its recorded Ugly Betty.   Lets hope the men listen up to Amelia’s advice.

I read an interesting article in this week’s International Herald Tribune about the growing purchasing and influencing power of women:

The Consumer Electronics Association in the US estimates that this year women will make 40% of consumer electronics purchases in what is a $200 billion industry. Indirectly , as spouses, girlfriends, significant others, daughters and mothers, they will influence another 21% of purchases, making their total involvement a whopping 61%, up from 57% in 2004.

That is a lot of buying power considering the average US household has 25 electronic devices. Many of the highest ticket items will reside in the living room such as the HDTV, PVR, Console, stereo and this is in the most part the terrain of the women. As the design of electronics gets better and better, women are more interesting in choosing the electronics and styling is a big part of this. I say part, as many of the electronics fall into the ‘colour’ or ‘fashion’ trap by thinking design=colour=pink and that women have no interest in performance and software.

And as Elizabeth Kelan, co-author of this blog, discusses the retail experience in the IHT article “…Walking into an electronics store is like walking into a men’s locker room. But slowly, progress is being made.”

Sony, despite being late into the flat panel market, is doing some ground-breaking stuff that goes beyond the superficial. They have clearly identified the financial gains to be made if executed well and have set up a gender steering committee of its’ top European executives to revamp product lines and better connect with women.

The new Bravia’s remote contol (on the left) has been designed to enhance a living room coffee table. The TVs have a single cable for all electronic communication. Not only that, they are redesigning their retail outlets in Switzerland to include couches and offer child care services (that would be heaven for me and most mums) and their staff are being trained to ask about interior design tastes and wishes. As Nichola Hinton puts it, “The Bravia is essentially a piece of furniture.” Where women largely control the home, in particular the living room, and what goes into it, this is a very wise strategy.

After hearing that Sony Playstation 3 is set to spend a whopping £4million on its first Christmas TV campaign, I was intrigued to see what they had produced – would this campaign be effective in helping Sony attract a broader audience? Could they reach beyond the teenage and twentysomething audience they have traditionally been very good at reaching?

I wanted to find out if the ads would connect with women, who make up a large growing proportion of the casual gaming audience and whom in the main, with the exception of Nintendo’s activity, have been neglected or patronised up until now.

Their strategic positioning of ‘entertainment super computer’ was not particularly inspiring. I expected that the campaign would focus on the exceptional computing features of the campaign: i.e processing power, gigabytes and they would fail to sell me the overall benefit of how the Sony Playstation would enhance my life. However I was pleasantly intrigued when I watched the Dr Beautiful ad which is based on the idea of the world being a stage and Sony being the entertainers. Its designed to showcase the wealth of entertainment available on PS3. The commercial will run in 17 territories in Europe and Australia.

Executionally, this is a visual treat; using old fashioned theatrical music which contrasts to the state of the art technology. The message was benefit led, emotional and humanazied the technology and got me excited about the possibility of some of the exciting features of the console. And it certainly was unique.

My only critique would be that it feels like a teaser ad- it has the power to seduce and intrigue but the PS3 has been out now for 8 over months. The role of the advertising now needs to help a broader audience understand how its going to enhance their life, how its better than the Wii & Xbox, and how its so much more than a pure gaming platform.

I spoke to my panel of Lady Geek experts and got their visceral reaction to the ad. They felt in the main, whilst visually spectacular, it still wasn’t enticing them towards to the console and didn’t improve their understanding of why they should spend all that money. They think of the Playstation as sleek, fast, with the best games and newest technology (vs. nintendo-easy, cartoony and fun for all) (x-box, multi-player, graphics). They weren’t quite sure of this positioning. They wanted to see more of the social aspect of gaming, the PS3 as the catalyst for bringing the fun factor to their families, friends.

That’s a big job for one ad. Its a fully integrated campaign so I look forward to seeing what else Dr Beautiful has in store for us…

 

In the recent article Would the ‘real’ girl gamer please stand up? Gender, LAN cafés and the reformulation of the ‘girl’ gamer, which appeared in Gender and Education, Catherine Beavis and Claire Charles look at girl gamers in a cyber LAN café in Australia. Earlier research in the field has suggested that gaming is seen as something that boys and men do. Women and girls just do not play. This article highlights how girl gamers construct their identities.

 

What is interesting is that these girl gamers often claim to have started gaming due to their boyfriends or other male friends. This is very similar to what I found in my research on IT workers. While men regularly claimed to have a natural interest in technology, women claimed to have become interested in technology though fathers, uncles, brothers or boyfriends. I have analyzed this in my PhD thesis as a way in which gender norms are reenacted in society. Whereas it is normal for men to be interested in technology, women somehow need an excuse to be fascinated by technology.

 

The article on girl gamers argues that these young women create new ways in which being a woman is performed in society. In the long run it might then be seen as less ‘odd’ that women have a genuine interest in technology and they might finally been seen as a target group for technology that is taken seriously.