Dont Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy -- and How to Increase Your Share of This Crucial Market

ESPN is all well and good, as an example of transparent marketing, but you're thinking, "Seriously, it's a multimedia empireand a much more creative endeavorso of course their tactics can be much more transparent." So, to give you an example of a more traditionally run industry that needed help developing transparency to reach women, let's look at the home improvement category.

Prior to the industry's awakening, if you will, a customer would enter a big boxy warehouse store with row upon row of ceiling-high shelving. Plumbing was a separate section, as was electrical and wood. The typical salesperson could mostly handle only questions about the section where he or she had been planted. If you didn't know there were several types of pipes and tubing used in plumbing projects, you might leave the store with the totally wrong item.

Fade to the present. There are updated versions of Ace Hardware; and Home Depot and Lowe's both deliver more modern home improvement shopping experiences. Having woken up to the fact that women are now a major portion of their core customer demographic, home improvement stores are innovating each year.

Whether it's because more people these days are do-it-yourself (DIY) types, or whether there's a nesting trend, you can't help but notice that women as well as men are flocking to home improvement and hardware stores. How did the industry change its marketing, and how did the stores respond, in order to attract the attention and loyalty of so many women?

Let's look at the same transparent principals we examined in the ESPN case study.