Positioning your brand for the affluent female buyer

Positioning for affluent women isn't as simple as it might seem

In top marketing circles, few dispute the importance of smart positioning to the success of a company or brand.

Effectively developing a desired position is all about differentiation: staking out a market space in the mind of your target market—one that isn't already taken by a firmly entrenched brand—and communicating it both clearly and consistently.  

Brand positioning helps customers quickly identify the product or brand with the most value to them. If you've read our fact sheet on the profitable affluent woman consumer, you know she's starved for time, so any shortcut—should it prove trustworthy—will be immensely appreciated by her.

That means accurately positioning your brand for the affluent female buyer won't just boost your company's success by earning more initial sales from affluent prospects. Once you've successfully met her needs with a product or service, you'll naturally come to mind the next time she needs another product or service in your market space.

But positioning for a target market of affluent women isn't as simple as it might appear. Every component of your desired position must not only be true to her preferences but align with each other; a single misstep can irrevocably cost you credibility with a consumer who is already highly skeptical. And even the largest Fortune 500 companies make highly public mistakes here.

Positioning your brand: focusing on the affluent female market

One of the most common mistakes—made by companies of all sizes—involves trying to be everything to everyone, or a variant thereof.

By definition, positioning means you can't be everything to everyone. If your company seeks to serve affluent women, striving publicly to also serve male gamers in their 20s won't just dilute your positioning, it will wipe it out.

The mass affluent and the affluent together make up 28% of US households... but they have more discretionary income than 68% of US households. On this website, we refer to this target market simply as affluent, as distinguished from the nation's few very wealthy households.

This is not to say that your product line cannot appeal to more than one category of buyers. It may well appeal to both affluent women and women in the middle class, for instance; with her more plentiful discretionary income, the affluent woman will be able to afford it, while the middle class woman may aspire to own it. Your product may be of a sufficiently high personal priority, too, that a segment of middle class women will sacrifice in other areas to purchase it. That's good news; you've found an unexpected customer, and she has added to your bottom line.

The temptation is to try to position your company to appeal to the affluent and the middle class at once, capturing sales from both audiences, and unless you have a product with truly broad appeal (an over-the-counter painkiller, for instance), that's where companies with product lines and costs suited to the affluent market run into trouble.

Consider: how successful would Whole Foods be if it had positioned itself to appeal to all comers? How likely would upscale retailers be to carry Estee Lauder if its makeup were first sold in corner drugstores? What makes them lucrative brands sought after by affluent women consumers is in large part their excellence at positioning; without this, they wouldn't be household names.

(For stories of positioning failures by two other major consumer-oriented corporations, see our expanded report on reaching affluent women.) 

Pairing your positioning with marketing consistent with the affluent [ Next page ]

We help companies successfully market to America's most profitable consumer group: women living in households earning $75,000 to $200,000 per year.

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