Individual report assignment: «girl power» marketing.

This report will be the opportunity for me to study the specificities of marketing aimed to women:
- Which brands target woman and/or girls?
- How do they try to seduce them?
- Which are the most successful ones and of do they manage to create brand loyalty from women?
- Are there any new specific trends?
- What are the specificities of advertisting campagns and communication in general when it deals with women?
- Eventually, can we say that marketing to women/girls is close to tribal marketing, and if yes, why?

I choosed this subject because I realized that women are always associated with shopping, as if it was a hobbie which can sometimes turn into a disease (most of the “shopping fever” cases concern women). However, do marketers really know what’s in the head of a woman during a shopping trip? Furthermore, as more and more women work, their purchasing power is growing, because they have now their own money (and not only the budget given by the husband in order to provide to the family’s needs). That’s why companies have to find a way to attract them.

In an article from the Wall Street Journal Girl Power as Boy Bashing: Evaluating The Latest Twist in the War of the Sexes, the author underlines a new trend in marketing for teenage girls: some brands like David & Goliath attract girls with childish slogans on their clothes, like “Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them!”
This is one aspect of the development of a marketing specific to girls and woman, trying to bring back to life the famous War of the Sexes. It is a way to exalt women and girls self-confidence and to assert all the feminist values. The times where women were considered as inferiors to men is not so far, and these brands have understood that; now they try to let girls think that this injusticed should be reversed, and boys should be bashed!

Of course, brands have developed very various strategies to talk to women, from L’Oreal (“Because you’re worth it”) to Givenchy (“Very you”) or Vogue ("Vogue – for the overwhelming minority”).
In several cases, they try to create a link not only between the woman and the brand, but also between women themselves. That is why the marketing campains can sometimes look like tribal marketing campaigns.

The brands are now experiencing the same deviation than feminism: as they try to compensate the unbalance between men and women, and to underline that being a woman is a real blessing, some of them end up saying than women are better. That is what happens with this “Boy bashing” trend, as a young teenage girl explains in the article: "Girls used to try to be equal to boys, now they're trying to be better”.