Female Tribes: A New Way of Looking at Women

MILAN — Brands looking for different ways to connect with women have a new tool at their disposal: Female Tribes, J. Walter Thompson’s proprietary insight study into what the advertising giant bills as “knowledge and research about the largest consumer category in the world: women.” This group, according to figures cited in the study, controls up to two-thirds of the $18 trillion in global consumer spending.

The basis for the study, which has been developed over four years, is that many women still feel that advertising and brands don’t understand them, Rachel Pashley, JWT’s group planning head in London, said.

Only 9 percent of women feel that marketers are reaching them effectively, according to the study. Female Tribes can help companies bridge this gap by teaching them to see women outside stereotypical boxes like “busy working mother” that resist change.

Pashley explains how the stimulus for Tribes was the “repeatedly inane descriptions of women on creative briefs,” like “the busy working mom. Tribes was not intended to segment women by putting them into discrete boxes, to suggest a binary relationship with a Tribe; it’s intended to explore the diversity of women, to suggest that women can be many things, encompass many motivations and embody many Tribes and that a simplistic ‘she’s a mother, therefore we know everything about her’ assumption is too reductive and unrepresentative. Increasingly you can predict less and less about a woman purely based on the understanding that she is a mother. I wanted to explore all the possibilities of being a woman, not just the parental responsibilities.”

Pashley uses examples of research insights to explain how Female Tribes can help create new ways to understand women consumers. “Women in Asia-Pacific — often lumped together as a homogenous region — actually reveal some profound differences. On the other hand, we also see some macro trends common to all: a more muscular, assertive definition of ‘femininity’ as a strength not a weakness, an almost universal existence of the ‘alpha female’ in various shapes and forms, and the pride in being a good provider.”

Among some (perhaps) surprising insights, it turns out that in China and India, among Generation X interviewees, women are the major breadwinners while in Saudi Arabia, nearly 80 percent of interviewed women cite starting their own business as important in life.

Skeptics might argue that, when you get down to it, Female Tribes, which classifies women into groups with names like Boompreneurs, Teen Activists, Tiger Mothers and Beauty Witches, among others, is really just another type of segmentation. “In some senses it is, but not as we know it,” Pashley said. “Each tribe in itself clusters a set of insights around female progress.” Take, for example, working mothers who have no kids: “The Not Moms tribe describes the increasing cohort of women embracing a life not as ‘childless’ but happily ‘child free,’” Pashley explained.

Pashley said the research could be useful in developing new products and services better suited to women’s needs, for example in financial services. “Our research highlights the scale for which women are increasingly the major breadwinner, and we have the rise of High Net Worth Women, who have very different investment priorities compared to their male peers.”

While Female Tribes is clearly a commercial tool, it isn’t just about helping brands sell more to women; it’s also about changing the way women see themselves and define their roles in society. “It’s my hope and ambition that in using Female Tribes to move beyond advertising stereotypes and to create more positive female role models we can in some small way start to impact on how the world works for women. Because if advertising is part of culture, we have permission if not a responsibility to try and shape it as a force for good.”