Helping Brands Win With Women: Seed Strategy Launches The SheQ™ Test

As part of the month-long celebration of Women’s History, Seed Strategy is excited to announce the launch of a new women-focused insight and growth strategy initiative—The SheQ™ Test: Assessing Your Brand’s Readiness to Win With Women.

The goal of this initiative is to empower clients to better understand what matters most to women—and more importantly, how specific categories, brands and consumer experiences address (or don’t address) their needs.

Describing the shift in market dynamics that inspired The SheQ™ Test, EVP and Head of Growth, Cherri Prince says, “We’ve always known that women have a disproportionate influence on spending across categories, but several new factors are increasing this economic power to new heights. Women are more educated than ever before, they are choosing to remain single and without kids longer, and many—especially Boomer women—are receiving large inheritances from parents and spouses. All of this means that women now represent the largest and fastest-growing consumer segment on the planet. So, it’s no surprise that the categories and brands that innovate to grow their business with women are going to have a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

Corey Beilstein, SVP, Behavior and Research Design brings the proprietary foundational research behind The SheQ™ Test into perspective. “We asked ourselves, ‘as consumers, do women feel like categories understand what’s really important to them? Simply put, do women feel like brands truly get them?’”

To put the notion of “gets me” into a context, Seed fielded research with 1,000 women, asking each what she wants in order to achieve a successful life.

While the initial results weren’t surprising (83% of women said that “living with purpose” and “feeling fulfilled” were most important to achieving a successful life)—a deeper dive into the data revealed something far more interesting: a large disconnect between what women say is important and how they actually feel.

For example, while only 41% of women in the study say “financial security” is extremely important, our analysis of derived importance reveals that “financial security” is really the 3^rd most important driver of success for them.

The same is true for “feeling valued and appreciated.” While women ranked it lower in our list of success drivers, when we correlated the data to NOT feeling successful, “being valued and appreciated” was actually derived to be one of the most significant contributors to an overall feeling of success.

While all of this data is valuable on its own merit, the real magic of the SheQ™ Test comes from connecting these findings to consumer categories. In fact, when we asked women in the study to think about specific industries, like automotive, financial services and health care, fewer than 1 in 3 women said they felt well-understood as a customer.

By digging into the why behind these deficits, brands can unlock powerful and actionable direction. For example, going back to the success driver of “feeling valued and appreciated,” we asked women in the study, “Does category x make you feel valued and appreciated? In seven of the nine categories we researched, fewer than 50% of women surveyed say, “yes.”

Prince goes on to say, “These low scores illuminate huge growth opportunities for brands that act NOW to gain understanding about how they stack up with women—and then use that understanding to create a path to growth.” She concludes, “This is not about making a brand a ‘woman’s brand’ or defaulting to tired clichés like ‘pink it and shrink it.’ This is about harnessing the economic power and influence of women to become raving brand enthusiasts—to advocate your brands to other women AND men too.”

Interested in learning more about The SheQ™ Test? Please contact Cherri Prince for more information.

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