BlogHer, a large network of women bloggers, recently completed their 2011 Consumer Electronics Study, surveying about 13 hundred people inside their community and out (mostly, but not all, women), and have come to a number of interesting conclusions. Chief among them is the claim that when women look for information about a prospective technology purchase, they want to hear from a female voice.
I’m not entirely convinced that the conclusion is borne out by the statistics highlighted in their slideshow, but I might just be missing something. However, I think they definitely support the idea that women are almost always looking outside the “official marketing” sources for their tech information. Whether this is because women are just as much savvy consumers as men are, or because tech marketing is not generally pushed specifically at female audiences except in embarrassingly overt ways (Note their note: in the bottom three sources for technology info was ads “especially for women”) remains to be seen.
We recently saw another statistical analysis that showed that women are more interested in buying new technology items than men, so this is the kind of information and statistics that marketers really need to look at. The women that BlogHer’s surveyed were primarily interested in buying technology that could be used to bring several different uses into a single device, suggesting that perhaps women are seeking technology reviews from actual users to see how easy integrating the device into their lives will, straight out of the box, and how much its synergistic nature makes up for the time spent getting used to it.
See BlogHer’s post about their conclusions here, and their slide show of raw statistics here.
