CES vendors: forget the pink

I was taking a quick break from the chaos of CES, and happened to spot Seth Weintraub's blog about the appointment of Andrea Jung to the board at Apple. He notes that there is not only a dearth of women in the upper management of many tech companies, but that many of these companies haven't the faintest idea how to market to women. CES is a moving testament to that. In fact, when I read Seth's blog, my first reaction was: That explains all the pink.

You see, as I wander the aisles of CES, I have come to the conclusion that many manufacturers of consumer electronics today seem to think that the way to a woman's heart -- or, at least, the way to get her to buy their products -- it to make it pink. Bright pink. And if that doesn't work, you can always put cute pictures on it, or maybe flowers.

Now, I've got nothing against the color pink. Some of my favorite 12-year-olds are very fond of pink. But pink is not going to make me choose one device over the other any more than designing an external hard drive in the shape of a Ferrari is going to make a guy buy that hard drive -- if the drive isn't fast.

Of course, if the drive is both fast and snazzy looking, it will appeal. The same with hardware designed for women. In a corner of its substantial booth, SanDisk was showing a set of well designed necklaces which encased USB drives, 2GB and up. "Thank you for not making them pink," I mentioned to the SanDisk rep. He nodded. "Yeah -- I've been getting a lot of that," he said. (So I'm not the only one.)

One thing that can really attract female consumers is practicality. For example, my new Asus EEE notebook has been getting a lot of attention. Why? Because it's lightweight, which can be highly important to women who need to travel with a notebook, but who tend to be less comfortable adding another 6-8 pounds to their backpacks.

Phil McKinney, VP and CTO of the HP Personal Systems Group, said Monday at a press function that, in his experience, men and women approach tech differently. If a man buys a device, McKinney said, and it doesn't work, he'll fiddle with it and beat it into submission -- because he's not going to let it win. Women, on the other hand, work on the three strike method: If it doesn't work the first time; annoyance. Doesn't work the second time, it's moving off the list of useable items. Third time? It's out of the house.

While that is, of course, a vast generalization (I've been known to beat a few devices into submission in my time), it offers an interesting insight into what needs to be done in order to entice women who are not tech geeks into buying the type of products that are being shown at CES. You don't make it pink. You don't make it cute. You just make sure it does what it's supposed to do in a reasonably straightforward manner.

Come to think of it, perhaps this isn't about selling tech to women after all. Perhaps it's just about selling to people.

For more CES coverage, check out Computerworld's News from CES 2008.