January 12, 2009 7:33AM  |
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It’s important to remember that we’re discussing only marketing skills. Just as I hope to have made a persuasive argument that women’s brains make them better marketers, it would be just as easy to suggest than men’s brains, with their respective differences, would make them better finance people or logistics analysts. It’s a matter of fit.
 When I teach the brand management elective to MBA students, we explore case studies of companies getting it right and wrong. One of the most common observations that keeps coming up has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with gender. In a remarkable number of case studies, female marketers seem to outperform their male counterparts. It has become almost a running joke in some of my classes: senior male marketer produces an average or horrible marketing result; female marketer repeatedly seems to deliver a superior approach. It might be something you have noticed, too.Chances are that the most senior and best-paid member of your marketing team is a man, but it’s equally likely that the best marketer in your team is actually a woman. If I list the top 10 marketers that I have been lucky enough to work with in the past 10 years of my consulting career, women outnumber men, even though the vast majority of my clients were male.Why are women apparently the superior marketing sex? It’s easy to use the offensive stereotypical explanations: women like softer subjects such as marketing and are good at design and packaging. Fortunately, recent advances in our knowledge of the differences between male and female brain functions now provide a far more robust explanation for their superiority in this arena. To put it bluntly, women have a massive genetic advantage when it comes to marketing: their brains are better designed for it.
Imagine walking into a laboratory — in front of you are two human brains, one male, one female. It would not be hard to identify which is which. The male brain on the table is about 10 percent larger than the female brain and has 5 percent more brain cells. That sounds like good news for men, but in terms of pound-for-pound processing, the female brain more than makes up for its disparity in size in other ways. For starters, women’s brains are the default for all of us. For the first eight weeks of our existence in the womb, we all have a female brain. Then genes and sex hormones take over. In the case of boys, a huge surge in fetal testosterone results in the destruction of cells in the communication centers of the brain and the growth of cells in the sex and aggression centers. Meanwhile, the female fetus, devoid of the surge in male hormones, continues to grow unaltered. © 2009 Marketing under contract with YellowBrix. All rights reserved. |
