What Do Women Really Want?
By Sanjana Parikh
In June 2019, when I joined Leo Burnett, a leading advertising agency in India, as a Strategy & Planning intern, one of the first projects assigned to me was: “figure out what new direction we can suggest one of our oldest clients”. The client in question’s target audience was women in India and I therefore set out to figure out what women in India really want.
My first step was to look at the client’s past marketing efforts and make a list of anything that was redundant. There was, in the past few years, the redundancy of feminist content. My immediate next step was to read, in depth, what women thought of such feminist content, what the overall marketing industry was doing when it targeted women, and how well or badly it was being perceived. But it was important to note what the other side thought too. In this case, the men, for they would also provide an interesting and a fresh perspective on the matter. It wasn’t easy to make a list of enough number of people that represented “women” and “men” in India, but I ended up interviewing over 70 millennials and GenZ from all over the country, to ensure that I had a large enough sample size that I could confidently refer to as the “women and men of India”.
After spending a considerable amount of time reading various articles and studies, I created a poster and put it everywhere on my social media, asking friends, and friends of friends to share it on theirs.
Below are images that I created that capture the essence of my question and the answers I received. Through strategic visuals and direct quotes from these in-depth interviews, I have shown how men and women in India perceive topics such as relationships, marriages, finances and pop culture. There are clear differences in how the two genders understand each topic, and may give an explanation to why more and more couples are not in step with each other today. These differences have been made clearly visible in the visuals. And finally, at the end, I have given my conclusion, and my strategic solution for the client to be incorporated in their next major campaign.
My strategy for the client was: Women don’t want to be hounded with feminist content all the time. It reminds them the fight is far from over. Let’s not give importance in advertisements on how the man is helping out in the kitchen because the woman is tired, and she’s happy he is doing so. You can show the same scene in a more effective way by normalizing the situation. Maybe the woman doesn’t have to be tired for the man to take over in the kitchen. He just does it, because there aren’t any gender-specific roles anymore.