Lady Geek

Lady Geek: A lesson in fearlessness with Eileen Gittins

2010-08-25T10:52:00Z

The Blurb CEO shows gender makes no difference when it comes to business.

The minute I meet Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb, I liked her. She's warm, direct and funny. She's one of those women who you know would give you a straight answer if you asked her a direct question. I want to know more about her story. How did she get from being ‘an artist at heart’ to one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in San Francisco generating $45million in revenue in 2009 and shipping 1.2 million books to more than 60 countries?

And how did she manage to get VC funding of over $1million when just 5.7 per cent out of a total of more than $20 billion of VC funding in North America goes to companies with female bosses? What is about Eileen that makes her just successful?

I ask Eileen about how she started the business. She talks about the ‘kitchen cabinets’ she held, where she would group her friends and share her ideas. The more people she told about her business, the more she became confident in her ideas. This openness and exchange of ideas is something she says is fundamental to Blurb today.

The thing that most struck me is when I ask her about whether it was a struggle getting funding she looks perplexed. Its almost as if it never entered her mind that her gender would be an issue despite the facts showing how difficult women can find it. She laugh and tells me;

‘VC’s don’t care if you are a horse, as long as they can make money from you.’

Eileen is not intimidated in a room of men ‘thinking they know best.’ She knows she knows best. She says she learned two valuable lessons in getting VC funding: the first was be crystal clear about what you do - you can’t expect anyone to invest in you if they don’t understand what you do. The second lesson was to have a big vision. Blurb’s vision is to democratise publishing and give everyone in the world a voice- far more impressive than trying to ‘encourage people to self-publish.’ This is already becoming a reality with Blurb for Good, which allows philanthropists and nonprofits to create and use books as a mean to generate awareness for social causes.

I can’t help feeling that there is an even bigger lesson to learn from Eileen, one we don’t speak about in our interview. A lesson every woman should adhere to: the art of being fearless. Not caring about or even noticing we are pitching our business to men or women. Not caring if we get rejected. Not needing to be reassured at every level. Culturally women, are still taught to be ‘obedient’ and the word ‘ambition’ is still used in a derogatory way when associated with women. Eileen turns these outdated notions upside down.

Ask forgiveness not permission. The most useful lesson to each and every female entrepreneur.

Lady Geek: Dell wakes up to what women want

2010-05-13T15:05:00Z

Dell's never been very good at marketing its products to women. But times are changing.

'I listen to a customer call every day. Every single day.'
Dell Global Chief Marketing Officer, Paul-Henri Ferrand.

I am impressed: I have met hundreds of heads of marketing, and never has any of them told me they devote this much time to actual customer contact. Most marketing directors I meet speak of their customers as an abstract quantity, or perhaps an undiscovered exotic species. This probably explains why most heads of marketing have a disproportionate reckoning of the importance of their brand in their customer's life.

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Not Paul-Henri from Dell. He seems different. He is French and charismatic (which helps). But it's more than that - he talks with conviction and ambition about the transition towards a 'new Dell.' The old Dell, as I remember it, is a commodity box-shifting business which was sales-focused and masculine. If they had a motto, it would have been 'pile em high and sell 'em cheap'.

The new Dell that Paul-Henri envisions is a company that puts customers at the heart of the business. The new Dell strives to be more of a product advisor than a vending machine. Dell should guide customers through the tyranny of overwhelming choice. This company should provide personalised devices, but without making you feel like you are building your own computer from scratch. This re-invented company strives to understand what women want and 'helps women achieve their objectives and their dreams'.

Sounds good. But has Dell really changed, or is this just the same old Dell dressed up in blingy crystals? Does Dell really communicate what women want from technology, other than laptops in a pink or red shell? And why does the Lady Geek/The Times Survey show that only 6% of women think they speak the female language?

I asked the Lady Geek Panel what they thought of Dell's understanding of women. Here are a few quotes;

'When I think of Dell as a brand, I always think that you will get a decent quality spec netbooks, good value for money but I don't like the way they position technology as a fashion accessory - it's not as if I am 15 years old. The sorts of women buying these products are professional educated women.'

'Dell's marketing still doesn't reflect what they are truly trying to achieve here, and still dumbs down the technology when talking to women. I look forward to the day when their advertising agency truly understand what the business is trying to do with personalised technology.'

I firmly buy into Paul-Henri's vision of a company that is trying to understand what women want. Are they there yet? By no means. Do they need more insight into women? Absolutely. However, no-one can dispute that Dell has clearly changed. One look at their product pipeline shows that like Apple, Dell are trying to re-define product categories, and are looking to women as an audience for these product categories.

For example, the Dell Mini 5 aims to bridge the gap between tablet and smart-phone. This is intended to be a portable, always-on Internet device which is small enough (unlike the iPad) to fit into a hand-bag, and yet big enough to offer a PC like browsing experience.

It may seem like a small thing, but it's refreshing to see Dell trying out new form-factors at a time when the rest of the industry is converging on specifications that were previously invented by Apple. Dell recognise that women and men want different things from technology.

And with Paul-Henri leading the ship, I am confident the best is yet to come.

Lady Geek: Gaming grandmas are the new geeks

2010-04-27T10:24:00Z

Women over 55 are getting into technology in a big way. So why is the industry ignoring them?

My mum is scared of technology. Clammy hands terrified. To the point where she gets a rash when we talk to her about getting a new computer. Anyone would think I was proposing she install a gargoyle with snakes for hair as the new centrepiece in the front room. When all I want to do is upgrade her noisy, chunky and ugly computer with a new quiet and slim-line ASUS or Dell PC. In other words, swap her outsized, outmoded monstrosity with a sleek addition that is more of an architectural fitting than an eyesore.

courtesy of kindergraph & queenzbaby

Years of trying to bring my mum, kicking and screaming, into something vaguely resembling the modern era has meant that I thought all older women were intimidated by technology. I had assumed it was a 'generational' thing, and had written off the idea of getting her to be excited by technology as a lost cause. And that’s before we get onto the stress of having to step into the role of IT support if she ever did “upgrade” from Windows 98. I could picture the scene: I am in a business meeting and my mum calls to explain that she has 'lost' the gmail icon or was innocently browsing the Internet when she inadvertently 'stumbled on' a porn site.

However, the latest research I have done with YouGov proved me utterly wrong. There is a group of women over 55+ who are becoming liberated by technology and not just using their phones for texting and calling. When it comes to downloading apps on their smart-phones, one in five women stated that their favourite app was a gaming app. This compares to one in fifteen men in the same age band.

These older women are 'snacking' on games such as Bejeweled, Scrabble and Solitaire, and when they aren’t gaming, they are updating their Facebook status and sharing photos of their new grandchildren with friends. 39% of women over 55+ have downloaded one or more app on their smart-phone. This trend is similar in the US. Facebook's own statistics show that there are almost twice as many women over 55 on Facebook as there are men of the same age. Perhaps most surprising of all, there are now more women over 55 on Facebook than there are teenagers. (Source: Inside Facebook Feb 2009)

Yet despite these stats, the industry is guilty of writing off this huge potential section of the market. In all my years in tech advertising, not once did a creative director or client ask me about what motivates an older woman. We are so obsessed with youth and yummy mummies in this country that we forget this group of women. Who knows, I may even be wrong about my mum...

With a third of the UK population over 50, we can no longer afford to forget this important group of women.

For this report, Lady Geek (http://ladygeek.org.uk) in conjunction with YouGov SixthSense (http://sixthsense.yougov.com), ran an online survey a sample of 16,810 smart-phone owners in Feb 2010. The number of men and women over-55s was 1,639.

For more information, please contact belinda@ladygeek.org.uk

Lady Geek: The Top 5 Gadgets To Buy for Mother's Day

2010-03-11T09:35:00Z

Rather than limp flowers, buy your Mum a netbook, a camera, a picture sharer, a radio or a PC...

On Mother's Day, I expect to be disappointed with the paltry effort my family makes, despite the prods, nudges and heavy hints weeks before. The men and children we love often misunderstand what technology their wives and mothers want. We don't want technology with hearts, flowers and shades of fuchsia - but a well-considered tech gift makes a change from the limp petrol station flowers or the guilt-ridden chocolates.

1. Eee PC 1008P (Seashell Karim Rashid Collection)
Price: From £320, from many online retailers

My first choice is the new ASUS eee netbook. It's proof that Apple does not own a monopoly on beautiful design. I've been an ASUS fan since they invented the e-series Netbook, but this is the best one they have ever produced. It has a slim build (only 1-inch thick), a sturdy keyboard and a textured shell that feels good to touch. It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and a removable battery. I like the chocolate-brown edition. I am always asked about my netbook: it's the best thing I ever bought. It's lightweight, good value for money and I can fit it in my handbag! For more info go to www.techinstyle.tv.

2. Pentax Optio H90 (in orange & silver)
Price: £149 from Expansys.co.uk

I found choosing a digital compact really hard, simply because there's an overwhelming choice of nearly identical point-and-shoot cameras. I just want something that I can use for pictures of my kids, and upload my work photos without having to spend precious minutes locating wires and ports. Everybody agrees that the Canon G11 is the best-featured compact on the market, but it's too big for general use - that's why I've gone for the retro-styled Pentax Optio H90. Its simplicity of design owes something to the age before digital cameras. I really appreciate the de-cluttered look of the new wave of compacts.

3. Eye-Fi Share
Price: £69 from many online retailers

The only thing that says 'I love you' more than a brand-new digital camera is one equipped with an Eye-Fi Share. This nifty device looks just like a ordinary SD memory card that you might insert into a camera, but it does far more than just store your pictures. This memory card has built-in WiFi, which it uses to upload the photos you take to your favourite photo-sharing services such as Flickr or Picasa. This is great for people like me who love taking photos but find themselves without the time to do anything with all the images that accumulate on their camera.

4. PURE Evoke Mio
Price: £149.95 from John Lewis

While I rarely have time to read books these days, I always love to wake up to the radio. And the latest addition to my house is the Pure EVOKE Mio, a fifties-style DAB radio that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Mad-Men. In addition to the improved styling, every Mio includes Pure's Charge-Pak: this charges up any time you leave the device plugged in, but can power it for more than 24 hours if you want to roam around the house and garden. I always loved the classic wooden panels of the Evoke series, but prefer the newer chilli and chocolate editions of the Mio.

5. Dell Inspiron Zino HD
Price: From £279 from Dell.co.uk

My first PC was a noisy ugly clunky beige-coloured box that sounded something like a hair-dryer and produced twice as as much heat. It did not fit into my home and was certainly not welcome in my living room. But the new Dell Inspiron Zino HD is. It's a well-designed tiny box that's built for the bedroom or the living room. You might want to connect it to your TV so it has an HDMI port and comes as standard with a wireless keyboard and mouse (who wants wires trailing across their living room?). It packs a 64bit AMD Athlon X2 chip and runs a full edition Microsoft's Windows 7, which was also pretty impressive. Unlike the PCs of old, this one comes in a range of colours other than beige or 'think-different' grey.

Lady Geek: Technology can help you keep your identity

2010-01-20T11:15:00Z

Picture of me and my daughter, Rocca

A quiet revolution is happening.

Not a revolution of dissidents. Not an underground revolution of rebels. But a revolution that is transforming how 51% of the population are living their lives. A technological revolution that is changing the economic and political structure of the country we live in. There are now more women than men on sites such as MySpace and Twitter. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is made up of women between the ages of 35-55, many of whom have children. 78% of all mums are now online and Mumsnet has become a growing political force currently being courted by all 3 political leaders.

But more interesting than the statistics is to understand why this revolution is happening. What is technology enabling mums to do that they could not do before? How are mums using technology to enhance and empower their life? And as companies begin to realise the political and financial opportunities that mums represent, how can they start engaging them about what they care about and going beyond subjects such as nappies, childcare and maternity pay?

I had worked most of my life and at the age of 32, I had my first child. I had always been confident at work and had enough (maybe too much) self belief to think I would always feel the same. After my son was born, I took 6 months off and although I loved it I felt pretty isolated. After a while, I got sick of the relentless lunches and talking about my son’s bowel movements and pretending I was interested in other people’s children whom I barely knew. So I went back to work with a mix of both anticipation and trepidation. I had been away so long, and had had almost no contact with anyone from work so I wasn’t even sure my brain was still up to the job. This resulted in me losing confidence and feeling conscious about myself and, for the first time in my life, doubting my working abilities. I returned a very different person. I had lost a part of my identity. I had grown into a mother, wife, housekeeper and nurturer but at the same time, I had lost a part of me.

Fast forward two years to the birth of my daughter and my second maternity leave. This time round Twitter, Facebook and Blackberrys are very much a part of my life. I do not feel the same sense of isolation as I am constantly connected to my personal and working world. Social networks enable me to re-inforce my identity (albeit a slightly different one). They give me an instant audience for my ideas and thoughts. They allow me to amplify my voice. But most importantly they give me a sense of status.

I have strengthened bonds with colleagues and friends which in turn has enabled me to strengthen my own sense of identity and status. If companies want to connect with mums and be part of this revolution, they must start to understand and engage them in the things that women care about, not what they think women care about - nappies and maternity leave.

Companies must understand the sense of isolation and lack of identity that women can feel when they have children. And the different life-stages that women go through.

A revolution is a call for change. Companies must act differently in this new world.

Vive la révolution.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek, helping technology companies understand and sell to women. You can follow Belinda Parmar on twitter at www.twitter.com/belindaparmar.

Lady Geek: Condemned By Choice

2010-01-17T20:37:00Z

I am in the market for a digital camera. This should be an exciting buying decision. I look online and browse at PC World and Comet. I am overwhelmed by choice. Sony Cyber, Panasonic Lumix, Nikon CoolPix... One with Super CCD, another with vibration reduction. I want to scream.

There are over 300 point-and-shoot cameras on the market. I understand that manufacturers want to offer a range of gadgets at every price point, but the fact remains: I don't want 300 cameras. I want one. One excellent camera. A camera that can take decent pictures to accompany the pieces I write and easily upload and share them, possibly edit them.

We grow up with the idea that choice is good. In a free market, choice reduces cost as there is always a surplus, and this feeds competition and drives down prices. Furthermore, more choice is supposed to equal more quality and freedom. Improved quality and freedom equals more happiness. And happiness is what we (supposedly) all strive for.

But are we not actually witnessing a 'choice paralysis' with technology? Have technology manufacturers and retailers taken choice too far? Have we reached the stage where choice is no longer a benefit to women but more of a curse? And who is to blame?

My latest research with the Lady Geek panel highlights that women feel overwhelmed and confused by the amount of choice in the technology industry. Forrester found that over half of all women in the UK walk out of technology shops because they cannot find what they are looking for. More than 75 per cent of women think that there is too much choice out there. Companies such as Apple keep telling us that they have over 10,000 applications when the typical maximum number of applications women use is only five. Orange is always waffling on about its racoon and dolphin packages, but who on earth understands or cares about a racoon 300 plus? Technology companies and retailers are only fuelling the overwhelming bewilderment that many women have about technology.

Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist, argues that there is too much choice in society as a whole. His studies suggest that consumers are more likely to buy a product when there is less choice, whereas an excess of choice leads to indecision and inaction. The key here lies in understanding who is to blame for all this unnecessary choice.

Retailers, with shelves upon shelves of nigh-on identical products from varying manufacturers, and scant guidance to help women make their choice, must be the biggest culprit. Ultimately it's a question of lack of conviction: many retailers are reluctant to edit, prune and trim the endless array of goods on offer, forcing people to take on a complicated selection process - people who often feel ill-equipped to decide between one of 20 identical, unremarkable products.

Let me be clear. Choice can be a good thing if managed appropriately. But if women feel overwhelmed by the choice, technology retailers are adding no value to women's lives. Retailers must help us make informed decisions. John Lewis had a brilliant campaign a few years ago highlighting the value that they offer by selecting the best in class of each product.

Women want retailers to adopt the role of a brutal but expert editor, taking a red pen to the swathes of clone-like products on offer in an attempt to navigate the tyranny of choice. And help find one product that is right for them.

Not hundreds.

Just one.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek helping technology companies understand and sell to women. You can follow Belinda Parmar on twitter.

Lady Geek: The 10 best gadgets to buy this Christmas

2009-12-01T13:47:00Z

No doubt this Christmas, technology companies will target men with tech babble (ram, gigs, specs etc), and then try to woo women by dressing up their products in glitzy, pinked up marketing bows. But this is a guide for men and women - for anyone who is less in love with technology and more interested by what technology can do for them. Here are my Top 10 gadget buys for Yuletide.

1. My newest and must have gadget this Christmas is the PURE Sensia Internet radio. This elegant device looks like something from a sci-fi writer's dream. It’s the first and last thing I touch each day. I can listen to all the programs I have missed during the day from anywhere around the world (a bit like Sky+ but for the radio). It comes with “Apps” or “Widgets” (the new currency of the tech world) meaning I can get Facebook and Twitter on the same screen which controls my audio. PURE Digital have promised that by early next year it will be able to display web-video such as YouTube.

2. My second choice is the incredibly practical Nokia BH-214 Bluetooth Stereo headset. Like all Bluetooth headsets, this device means I am able to do multiple things at once such as doing the dreaded Christmas shop whilst calling the relatives at the same time and making all the necessary arrangements for the Big Day. The great thing about this gadget is that Nokia have finally realized that people want all the flexibility of Bluetooth but with their own choice of headphones.

3. The iBores will hate me for saying this, but the iPhone's reign might be drawing to a swift end with the rise of cheap Android based (alternative to Microsoft and Apple’s mobile operating system) handsets. This year's must-have mobiles provide the Google experience in the palm of your hand but without a nasty contract to tie you in for two years. T-Mobile released their “Pulse” as the UK's first ever PAYG Android phone without any great fanfare - which is great if you decide it's not for you and want to upgrade within a few months.

4. Make no mistake, the Flip Mino HD is not your dad's camcorder. Unlike traditional camcorders which are strapped to your hand, the Mino looks and works like a “candybar” style camera-phone. The Mino's spec-sheet makes for short reading since it aims to do very few things, but it does them very well. This emphasis on simplicity is not just for people who have difficulty with conventional video cameras – it's for people who want a device which is instantly ready for capturing anything this Christmas from your nan snoring like a boar on the sofa to mum starting on the wine at 10am and getting slowly but surely drunk by lunchtime. Although personally, I am not sure I want to re-live Christmas day more than once.

5. Dell's new Adamo XPS is my most extravagant recommendation. It is apparently the thinnest laptop in the world at 9.9mm and weighs only 1.4 kilos. It's loaded with enough bling to make your Mac Pro-owning friends give it a second glance: I particularly love the sexy keyboard lock: You simply swipe your finger across a touch sensor and the mechanism opens for you. It is a joy to touch.

6. Even though I lust after the Adamo's style, my preference is for something handbag-size, and this is where the ASUS EEE Seashell Netbook comes into its own. You might dismiss this as yet another Macbook Air clone, if it weren’t for the price-tag, which means you can get one for under £300. While it might not have its rival's power or sophistication, at this price it only has to last a year for me to have obtained value for money. This laptop is light, tough and mine has survived regular bashings from my small children.

7. Nokia won no friends with the flawed release of their N97. After a disappointing experience I vowed to stay well away from Nokia. That was until I experienced Nokia's new N900, the first of a new generation of Linux-based handsets. It's got a qwerty keyboard, a great LED touchscreen and appears to be an intuitive device.

8. Many people will be looking forwards to receiving eBook readers from Santa. However, the most popular Kindle from Amazon is not exactly the most glamorous addition to your winter holiday suitcase. If you can wait until January you can get the oddly-named Nook by Barnes and Noble. This sleek-looking device has a dual touch-screen, and, unlike Amazon's miserly book-reader, B&N will allow you to lend up to 12 of your eBooks to other Nook readers. Great for kids too.

9. The iPod has dominated the music-player market for so long that it's easy to forget that other products exist. However, the French company Archos's Internet Media Tablet 5 claims the prize for being able to play every kind of video and audio file ever invented and makes for an easy distraction as more and more unwanted guests arrive on at your door on Christmas day.

10. Not every gadget lover's gift needs to involve hardware: This year the Swedish company Spotify launched a music service which anybody can use for free on their PCs as long as you don't mind the occasional ad. If you pay a modest monthly subscription you can get the “premium” service which allows you to listen ad-free on any device including PC, Mac, iPhone and Android. A welcome and surprising gift making a change from the usual socks, books and - in my case - big knickers.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek, which helps technology companies understand and sell to women. You can follow Belinda on Twitter: www.twitter.com/belindaparmar

Technology: Is it different for girls?

2009-11-16T14:30:00Z

I am frustrated. I am bored. I feel patronised. PC World is telling me My World is Pink (it has not been pink since I was 7) and I need a new laptop to match my outfit (it would never even occur to me to match my outfit with my technology). Samsung is asking me “What Colour is my Life?” (hello?) and Dell is telling me that technology is like candy (do me a favour).

I am a 35 year-old professional woman with my own home. I am educated, fairly tech literate and, most importantly, I have cash to spend. Plenty of cash to spend, on technology that will make my life easier, more creative and fun.

Out of every ten gadgets bought in the UK, four are now bought by women. And, before you ask, we are not talking about fridges and washing machines. No, these are high-end items such as HD TV's, games consoles and smart phones. And there are more games being played by women than men between the ages of 25-34.

I am not alone in feeling patronised or alienated by technology and consumer electronic brands.

I recently conducted some research for Forrester. This highlighted that one third of all British women do not feel connected to a single technology brand. Over half of all women walk out of shops because they cannot find what they are looking for.

This missed opportunity is calculated at £0.6 billion. The technology industry is where the automotive industry was 20 years ago- nervous boys at the school dance who do not quite know what to do or say to women. They end up leading with two left feet.

So why do technology companies think that pinking up and dumbing down their marketing is the way to get professional, well educated women to part with their cash? Why do they treat young girls and women alike - as an afterthought? Why are companies not researching “what women really want” and getting advice from expert consultants?

How can we help technology companies understand what women want?

Many technology brands believe that the way to a woman's purse is to make her feel “special”, and have aimed to achieve this by giving women their “own” space, site or product. Dell's disastrous Della website, which handed out technological advice alongside recipe tips and fashion articles, was shut down within weeks. Carphone Warehouse, Dixons and Comet (Comet Angels) have all had their share of “initiatives” and women's only days, all with the aim of helping women turn the telly on. All, one assumes, with a glass of Prosecco held in their manicured, nail-varnished hands.

No woman wants to be a target with an overt "female friendly" message. Being singled out as different is as off-putting today as it was when you were singled out at school. Nor do women want to be stereotyped or bamboozled by obscure jargon.

It is ironic, given its widespread reputation for untarnished machismo, but the BBC’s Top Gear has democratised cars. It might be a legacy to make Jeremy Clarkson flinch, but he has helped to make cars accessible to women.

Once purely the domain of men, the programme now has nearly as many female viewers as male, thanks largely to being both playful and light-hearted. It stands for unadulterated honesty and entertainment looking at how people in the real world think and relate to their cars.

In September this year, the Harvard Business Review stated that women now represent a bigger market opportunity than India and China combined. Technology brands must put an end to these clumsy marketing strategies and put money and time behind understanding how real women in the real world engage with technology.

Women are no longer the second sex. We are the more profitable sex.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek http://ladygeek.org.uk , which aims to help technology companies understand and sell to women. Belinda would love you to have your say on how technology companies are talking to women by filling out this short survey http://survey.ladygeek.org.uk/survey/detail/lady-geek-brand-survey. You can follow Belinda at www.twitter.com/belindaparmar.

Technology & Fashion: A match made in heaven or hell?

2009-10-27T09:27:00Z

Last week Dell hosted an event intended to unite the worlds of fashion and technology bloggers. Their goal was to discuss how technology could be re-positioned as fashion in order to sell it to women.

With Microsoft's research highlighting that technology is as important to women as fashion, should tech brands be positioning their wares as fashion accessories? Does it correlate that women love fashion and therefore if you position technology as fashion, women will want to buy it? Is a netbook the latest fashion accessory? Would women rather have the new Dell Adamo XPS rather than a pair of Jimmy Choos? It's not an original idea to try to sell technology as if it were a fashion accessory.

LG's Prada phone was the first time a major fashion brand put it's label on a phone. Despite it's modest capabilities it sold well, proving the allure and reach of the Prada brand. Few woman have a strong attachment to technology brands – in such a vaccum a strong brand like Prada can help shift products, even if it does seem out of place on the shelves of the Carphone Warehouse. I suspect that the Prada label puts off as many women as it attracts, since there is something frivolous about being seen to flaunt a label, especially on a something as conspicuous as a phone.

There's a big problem with the technology as fashion proposition:

Firstly, fashion is by nature short term. After a single season your old fashion is out of fashion. That's perfectly fine for a £20 top from Top-Shop, however it's not so fine when you are locked into a two year contract on a fashion-phone which is no longer a-la-mode. If the networks are going to sell a phone on a 2 year contract they need to continue to offer value over this period or risk alienating the customer.

Secondly, the reasons I buy technology are very different to why I buy clothes. Technology enhances my life, builds real and intimate connections with people. It gives me a voice. And amplifies my voice to those closest to me. Fashion is transitory. I get immediate gratification but its fleeting. Its fun but not meaningful. Brands risk trivializing themselves by positioniong themselves as fashion.

Lastly, every tech brand seems to take this approach to women. Samsung's Genio talks about it's exciting colours but does not mention what value it can add. Dell's “my colour is pink” tv-spot looks like a mid-90s' shoe advert. This is clearly not a way to generate sustainable difference.

As one Lady Geek said,

“What my phone and shoes do for me are very different. One connects me with the world and is about relationships. The other is solely just for me” To truly understand women, tech brands must research and understand how women engage with technology.

Fashion is about 'me,' technology is about 'we.'

Tech Retailers Add No Value

2009-10-19T08:30:00Z

When was the last time you saw an actual mobile phone on display in a mobile phone store?

If you've had the misfortune to wander into one of these places recently you will notice that the walls and shelves of these places are usually covered with "dummy" phones, empty shells in which the screen has been replaced by a sticker. Who could possibly think that a dead lump of plastic riveted to the wall gives an impression of the real thing?

Carphone Warehouse is an unpleasant shop: It's the only technology vendor I know that borrows it's design aesthetic from the Job-Centre. At the Liverpool St. branch I asked the bored-looking man behind the minuscule desk if I could try out HTC's newish "Hero". I found his reply quite astonishing: He explained that he couldn't let me try one because they did not have a demo unit and that I ought to look on the company's website which had an "interactive demo".

At the nearby Orange shop on Bishopsgate I asked to try out the new Motorola Dext. This time my assistant was able to locate a working handset but unfortunately he brought it to me without a SIM card - that meant that I could not try out the phone's killer feature: Social networking. So how was I supposed to experience this new product? He pointed me to a fuzzy screen near the entrance to the shop: Oh goody! Another interactive demo.

The previous examples are typical rather than exceptional: Conventional wisdom is that shops have one big advantage over online vendors: They allow you to experience the product. But if shops cannot get this very basic trick right then what value are they adding? And why, according to Jupiter, over half of all women walking out of stores because they cant find what they want?

We asked the Lady Geek panel about the kinds of retail experiences which they wanted: Virtually everybody said it was important to, touch, smell, engage with a product before buying.

Women are "reassurance addicts." Women feel at a relative disadvantage when shopping for technology.   They are much less likely to have done research about the product before they buy compared to men.   And they are much more likely to rely on the sales experience than men. Nearly half of all women have no idea what brand they are buying when they walk into a tech store.

The retail experience is akin to a "vending machine"- cold, unemotional and transactional. Not only that but as a woman, you feel like a bit of bait ready to be snapped up by a pushy sales guy.

Our research indicates a clear prescription for selling more phones to women:

    * Find a way to put a few real products on display - and into customer's hands.
    * End the hard-sell tactics and let good products sell themselves.
    * Stock a smaller range of more interesting products. Vendors should be brave experts and trust their opinion about what customers should want.
    * Employ women to help make women feel more comfortable and make the environment a place where women want to be.

With Best Buy entering the UK market, tech retailers have no choice but to add real value or die.