Consider Life Stages to Understand the Female Consumer

Editor's note: This is the second in a series, entitled "The Decision Maker."

Without a thorough understanding of the female consumer, you won't be able to personalize and tailor the experience you provide in your dealership. 

So how do you go about understanding The Decision Maker?

To truly understand The Decision Maker; the woman, you will want to create female consumer persona's. 

Creating a consumer persona is a great exercise to do as a team. Not only will it provide a greater understanding of the "Chief Purchasing Officer" – remember, that’s the female in the household - but it will allow your team to be part of the solution. It’s important to remember when creating a persona for the female consumer that she wants to be understood first as a woman and second as a consumer. 

You are probably thinking, “How do I create a persona for the female consumer?” The three steps below will give you a head start. 

Step one: Separate your female consumers into Life Stages

Age is no longer an adequate way to segment your consumers. 40 is the new 30, and 30 is the new 20. Women are getting married later in life are having kids into their late 40s. By looking at your female consumers through their life stage, you will have a better understanding of her wants and needs at that moment in her life. And remember, the female consumer wants to be understood as a woman first and a consumer second. 

Harbinger has created six life stages for the female consumer, which is a great place to start when building female consumer personas. That, when paired with your dealerships demographic and geographic information, will prove to be very valuable in understanding the female consumer.

Step two: Define the goals and challenges she has in each life stage

Once you have your female customer broken down into life stages, the second step is to define the goals she has and the challenges she faces at each life stage.  You will now be able to determine how your dealership and its vehicles can help her fulfill her dreams and resolve her challenges.  It’s also great to define the objections she’ll have when shopping for a car or bringing her car in for service.

Step three: Get personal!

Don’t stop there. Take your female consumer persona one step further by uncovering some personal details about her too. I like to use acronyms to help teams do this. For this, I am going to use WOMAN as my acronym.
•    Wants
•    Occupation
•    More (dreams, family)
•    Activities
•    Needs

Uncovering these details will allow your team to have a holistic view of your female consumer persona at each life stage. 

*This is also a great exercise to complete for the male consumer- he also has some say in the vehicle purchase!

What's next?

Once you have developed your female consumer personas, put them to work! Create a training document that each existing and new team member is required to know. You can train your team through daily huddles, group or department meetings and on-the-fly coaching.

Katie Mares CTDP, MCATD, CPSA, CSP is available to train your organization and brings her expertise to the automotive industry. She is a dynamic speaker at Women in Automotive and Digital Dealer Conferences. Among her offerings:

- Program Development
- Brand Standards
- Leadership Development
- Coaching Sessions
- Retail Workshops
- In-Dealership Implementation
- Ongoing Support