Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World's Largest, Fastest-Growing Market Book

In our current economic crisis, companies everywhere will begin reexamining their strategies for finding new ways to target customers. With women responsible for 64% of household spending and accounting for an astonishing $12 trillion per year, companies that ignore them do so at their peril.

WHAT WOMEN WANT is a timely book based on the findings of a groundbreaking study (The Boston Consulting Group′s Global Inquiry into Women and Consumerism, which polled 12,000 women in 21 countries) that gets to the heart of women′s deepest desires, frustrations, and goals. The authors describe how this "invisible market" has grown in size, influence, and buying power, and they reveal the countless opportunities for companies who understand that meeting women′s needs is the key to repowering our crrent economy.

WHAT WOMEN WANT offers companies real strategies for growing their global markets by finding innovative ways to appeal to women′s needs and concerns through the results of their well-timed study. Business people should take note of the book′s many revelations. Among them:

Demands on time were cited as the number one challenge by 47 percent of our respondents.

48 percent said managing household finances was the top challenge.

The predominant sources of arguments between the respondent and her spouse or partner were:

- Money, 19 percent

- Chores, 15 percent

- Work schedule, 12 percent

- Children, 10 percent

- Sex, 10 percent

Some 68 percent of the respondents believe they are significantly or slightly higher than their ideal body weight

Only 25 percent of the women surveyed believe they are extremely or very attractive

44 percent say they rarely or never feel powerful

While the main audience is business readers, this book will appeal to a wide general audience, as well. Like Paco Underhill′s WHY WE BUY, WHAT WOMEN WANT doesn′t just offer a glimpse into consumer behavior, how to get their attention, and better serve their needs; it reveals what consumer behavior says about human psychology and desire.

Publishers Weekly

An exhaustive analysis of the 2008 Boston Consultive Group Global Inquiry into Women and Consumerism, which surveyed 12,000 women from all walks of life about their spending habits. In painstaking detail, and employing every available scrap of corporate history, the authors describe how to reach the group which controls the spending in most categories of consumer goods, but who are sometimes misunderstood by the companies that seek to serve them. Through many examples of the women interviewed for the survey, we see pictures of the modern woman globe-wide-struggling between roles of caregiver, wife, and mother, stressed out, saddled with men who don't help with the housework, pressed for time, over-concerned with expensive beauty products, frustrated with condescending financial advisors and determined to do good with their dollars. The scope of the survey itself is interesting, but the repetitive detail makes the book more useful as a doorstop than a business guide, and there's a disconcerting bemused tone to the analysis-as if the authors were observing exotic zoo animals rather than a powerful consumer group. Others have done it better-and far more succinctly. (Sept.)