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Behind the Numbers: Men Versus Women Online
THE OLD STEREOTYPE THAT MEN are hunters and women are gatherers is actually an apt profile of online shopping behavior today. Online, men like to "dig," choosing a site and drilling down within it to hunt for information. Women, on the other hand, like to "scan" -- they are multitaskers who move through massive amounts of data quickly. These and other differences were uncovered in a recent report, "Gender on the Net: Why It Matters, Where It's Missing, How It Should Work," produced by interactive agency Resource Interactive and comScore Networks. The study tracked 326,000 online purchases over the course of a year, generated 250 hours of one-on-one engagement with 50 men and women, and incorporated custom data from 150,000 online households and a survey of 1,000 online participants.
The study found that men prefer sites chock full of product pictures and specs, while women prefer to see the product in a lifestyle context. "Women prefer flatness," says Nita Rollins, executive director of marketing at Resource Interactive. "They don't want to be tripped up by undue amounts of product detail, whereas men prefer the detail."
full OMMA online media, marketing and advertising article here
Scientific American article on the differences between men and women here
posted by Unknown @ Monday, March 20, 2006,
