Tapping the Women's Market
by Connie Wagner
Woman's Life Insurance Society
January 1999

As insurance agents, we often focus on a certain segment of the population based on our own experience and comfort level. When I first began my career as an insurance agent, I was a young married woman with two small children. Because of that, I tended to focus on people in the same situation -- young married couples with children. I felt I had a very good handle on the needs of those people. But over the course of the next five years, my life changed, as did the lives of my clients and friends. And, as a result, my sales focus changed to reflect that.

Several of my young clients were going through a divorce. Since I normally gained entry into the home through the woman, I found that she usually was willing to meet with me either during or after the divorce to see how we could salvage the families’ insurance program. We then could create some type of protection for her and the children. Usually the husband, or ex-husband, had already price-shopped elsewhere and was not interested in meeting with me to work out a conversion program.

Men are from Mars, Women from Venus
This is when I began noticing the big difference in the way men and women buy insurance and financial products. Even though I had spent the same amount of time with each spouse in the selling process, they came away from the experience with different interpretations of my product. For example, men understood the values and price structures of term versus universal life, but women understood the emotional side of the purchase. They understood the commitment involved with the purchase of life insurance -- commitment in purchasing protection for someone you love and someone who loves you. They understood the benefits and security a comprehensive insurance program offered them as part of a family unit. One of the biggest differences was that women also formed a trust relationship with me, the person who had introduced the program to their family. I was perceived by women as a seller of services, and by men as a seller of products.

An empathetic ear
A few years later, I also went through a divorce. What an emotional and economic shock! The statistics were there, 50% of first marriages fail and 75% of second marriages fail. So I became a statistic: female, head of the household with two children, facing many of the same problems many of my clients had gone through:

• Loss of higher household income post-divorce
• The need to regain credit in my name
• Re-balancing of household, child care and work duties

Thank goodness my son was old enough to mow the yard! At that point I could not handle one more thing.

I decided to begin using my hard-found knowledge to help other women in the same situation. Even my marketing to married couples began to take on a different focus. My motto became, "Hope for the best, but plan for the worst." I explained that any programs for insurance protection or retirement they set up individually would only enhance their joint programs as a couple.

A New Calling: Helping Women Gain Financial Freedom
That became the turning point in my career. I went to work for a fraternal benefit society that also has a focus on women’s needs to help enhance what I already knew and believed: the women’s market would be the fastest growing marketplace in the 90s.

I began gathering all the facts and statistics I could get my hands on to collaborate and educate others about the needs of the women around me. Then, a very good friend lost her husband of several years when he suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack at age 40. She was able to establish her own business from the proceeds of his insurance programs, pay off her home and set aside money for emergencies.

Although we were very good friends, I knew her husband had his own financial advisor and I never approached her about planning with me because I felt that, as her friend, she would naturally approach me if she had questions. Wrong! Over lunch one day she jokingly said that I was always studying women’s needs and helping other women plan. Why hadn’t I bothered to help her?

I was stunned. Even though she was joking, I knew she was really questioning why I had not offered to help her plan. She confessed that even though she had a very successful business and was doing well, when it came to insurance and retirement programs, she was in over her head. She also was embarrassed to go to her late husband’s planner because she did not want to appear stupid. She knew the value of life insurance from her husband’s death, but did not know what to do about her own. So instead of making the wrong decision, she had chosen not to make any decision at all. Needless to say, we scheduled an appointment to meet for something other than lunch.

After that experience, I made it a point to contact all my close friends and was pleasantly surprised at their response. I stopped waiting for them to approach me.

Knowledge and Understanding are Key
Increasingly, women are gaining control of financial assets due to death and divorce, and also the professional advancement of women. Yet few women were raised expecting to manage their own financial concerns. Traditionally those decisions are left up to the husband, father, brother or, even in some cases, a boyfriend.

If you want to market to women, your gender doesn’t matter, but knowledge about the vast concerns women have and their buying patterns are the key to successfully marketing to women.

As Niki Jay and Susan Kane-Benson so appropriately put it in Selling is a Woman’s Game, "All superheroes wear pantyhose."

In the Women’s Millennium, Tom Peters points out that women purchase more than 50 percent of the following goods:

• Vacations 92%
• Homes 91%
  
• New Bank Accounts 89%
  
• Medical Insurance 88%
  
• Cars 65%
  
• Tires 51%

Largest consumer group; fastest growing
American women constitute an economy that is approximately 25% larger than the Japanese economy as a whole. Consider the following:

• 43% of Americans with assets over $500,000 are women
  
• 20% of working wives, or 10.2 million women, earn more than their husbands do
  
• Currently, nearly 8 million businesses are owned by women
  
• Businesses owned by women post $2.3 trillion in sales annually
  
• Business owned by women employ over 18 million people
  
• 95% of women make financial decisions for their families
  
• 57.8 million of the U.S. workforce are women

For the first time in many decades, women have money and are making decisions about how and where they spend their money. Whether you and the company you represent profit from the women’s market depends on two things:

1. Women as consumers of insurance and financial products have some very special needs that must be understood and addressed.

2. Even though many women have the disposable funds to purchase our products, they may lack the knowledge needed to make the proper decision and, like my friend, may choose to make no decision at all.

Specialize in Serving Women’s Needs
You must educate yourself as to the unique needs of women and then become a specialist in meeting their insurance and financial needs. Women face some unique challenges:

• The average age of widowhood is 56
  
• Women live an average of five to seven years long than men
  
• 80 percent of women will spend all or part of retirement alone due death of a spouse or divorce
  
• Women make up 60 percent of the aging population and out number men two to one in the over 75 age group, where health care costs are highest
  
• By the year 2000, there will be over 19 million older women with one thing in common: they failed to plan for the realities of long term care
  
• Over 80 percent of women will either provide care to a child and/or a disabled relative during some part of their lifetime, thereby exhausting sources of retirement savings
  
• When today’s average 25-year-old working woman retires, she will receive little more than the same Social Security benefit as her mother, who may never have earned wages or paid social security taxes

These are just a few of the challenges facing women which impact their purchase of insurance and financial products. The vast need for our products is definitely there and has not been addressed properly in the past. By providing women with the knowledge needed to make a proper decision about insurance and retirement programs, you can gain their confidence as an advisor, as well as their trust for future sales and referrals. After you gain entry into the market, you need to understand that the sales process is vastly different between men and women.

Bottom Line vs. Commitment
Many men will only look at the bottom line when shopping for an insurance or financial product. They do not want excess facts and figures, nor are they as concerned about the extra "benefits" some products may feature. And, they have no thought in mind of forming a "relationship" with the sales representative.

Women, on the other hand, will want to compare all the features of the product, so more information is always better. Make sure to explain all the special features of your product and how it can specifically meet her needs. A woman will want to mentally "try the product on for size," so the decision process will take a little longer.

Women also tend to buy insurance and retirement programs in steps or stages. So, do not be concerned if everything you present is not accepted on the first proposal. She will also be very concerned as to whether the representative has her best interest in mind and is not just trying to make a sale or fill a quota. In other words, they look for whether they can form a "trust relationship" in the transaction.

By understanding the differences between men and women in the buying process, you will realize that a female client is not trying to stall the sale but is analyzing all the facts and deciding on the commitment. Commitment to the product and it’s features, the company, and, most of all, to you as the representative. This commitment can translate into future sales and referrals. Women are natural networkers, and if they find someone who can take the time to impart information in a manner they understand and can relate to their specific needs, they will tell all their friends about you and the company you represent. Andy, they will buy from you again.

It Takes More Than Changing The Label

Is the company you represent part of the problem or is it part of the solution? Company focus is only a part of the approach. Nike discovered this when, after it noticed a lot of women wearing competitors’ products, it tried to apply the same "in-your-face" marketing campaign that had been so successful with men, to target the women’s market.

They got women’s attention all right, but it wasn’t the kind they had hoped for. Nike’s phone rang off the hook with angry reactions, forcing Nike to drop the approach within two short weeks. Nike representatives told members of the Women’s Millennium team that focus groups were necessary after that to come up with some clear understanding of the messages they wanted to send. "And that was sort of the genesis of what we eventually called our ‘dialogue campaign,’ where we developed this one-on-one dialogue with women consumers. The emerging campaign would speak to women from all walks of life, reflecting their hopes, dreams and convictions."

A pretty, new cover on the same old product will not guarantee entry into the market consisting of over 51% of the population and 57% of the workforce. Your financial and insurance products must have the flexibility to cover the various and special needs of the largest market of the next millennium ... Women.