New York - Clotaire Rapaille, a French-born psychiatrist-turned-marketer, has a theory about what women want in cars. In focus groups, Rapaille uses Jungian psychoanalysis to probe consumers until they reveal the unconscious “archetypes” that supposedly reside in their “reptilian” brains, steering them toward certain purchases.
It was the soft gruntings of subjects’ reptilian brains, Rapaille says, that clued him in to the fact that women are obsessed with cup holders. Cup holders signify coffee, he says, and coffee signifies safety, and safety is what women want most in cars.
“The coffee archetype: You’re home, you’re safe, mother is preparing breakfast,” Rapaille told me when I interviewed him from one of his six homes, in Palm Beach, Florida. Apparently women love cup holders so much, they’ll want as many as four in front, and more in back. (Hey, the kids need a place for those juice boxes!)
Rapaille presented this cup holder thing as perfectly reasonable when we spoke, but I noticed he spun it differently to Malcolm Gladwell some years back: “It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cup holders it has.”
COMPLICATED CONTRAPTIONS
Maybe he and Gladwell were talking man to man? Maybe he felt I couldn’t handle the truth? Either way, one gets the distinct impression that Rapaille believes women don’t really grasp these complicated contraptions known as cars, or, for that matter, their own minds.
This simplistic diagnosis of the female brain turns out to be a theme in the car industry’s historical view of women.
Rapaille, who did a lot of work with Chrysler in the ’90s, and has also worked with Ford and GM, is admittedly an extreme. He told me women care about car interiors because they’re “programmed to create life” inside their wombs – the sort of thing few savvy carmakers would voice these days.
But if blatant sexism is harder to find, the industry still falls short by failing to realise how many of its consumers are women – a broad swath that, as it turns out, isn’t a monolith of put-upon, coffee-and-juice-box toting housewives.
Which is too bad for them, since a new study shows female drivers in the US now outnumber male drivers for the first time. And those female drivers operate pretty much the opposite of how Rapaille and the rest of the industry have historically viewed them.
MORE RATIONAL THAN MEN? YOU BET
Rather than being swayed by frivolous details, they are, in fact, serious researchers who tend to be less impulsive in their purchases and less interested in aesthetics and styling – more rational, in the words of one enlightened Honda executive – than men.
The idea that women’s interest in cars is a lark, more style than substance, has its roots in the earliest automotive advertising.
During the first decade of the 1900s, carmakers pitched petrol cars to men and electric cars to women, on the theory that electric cars – quieter and slower, too heavy to climb hills and with shorter range – were more appropriate for feminine sensibilities.
Anderson Electric Car Company’s Detroit Model may not have run so well, but as the company told its male consumers, it was ideal for the “well-bred” wife, helping her “preserve her toilet immaculate, her coiffure intact”.
This idea that women needed dumbed-down technology persisted even as electric cars fell by the wayside and petrol cars took off.
For instance, historian Virginia Scharff writes that when car-makers came up with self-starter devices, which replaced the practice of laboriously cranking engines, they billed the improvement as an act of chivalry for helpless women drivers. “A girl can work it,” one ad promised, rather than daring to suggest that men, too, might appreciate the innovation.
In later decades, women featured in car ads were adornment, standing in ball gowns or draped in bikinis across hoods, reinforcing the message that cars (and women) were men’s spoils.
When carmakers did appeal directly to women, they seesawed between portraying them as responsible, capable drivers and condescending to their supposed preoccupation with frivolities.
MATCHING THE HANDBAG
In the ’50s Ford came out with Motor Mates, a line of coats and handbags meant to match certain Ford vehicles. (The handbags were made of “actual Ford Victoria nylon upholstery fabric”.)
Chrysler developed the Dodge La Femme, “By appointment to her majesty... the American Woman”, a pink and white car with rosebud upholstery that came with matching handbag, raincoat, rain hat and umbrella. It didn’t sell.
Same stuff in the ’60s. Ford and a cosmetics company teamed up on a sweepstakes offering pink Mustangs as prizes – “Wear a Mustang to match your lipstick,” the ad said.
A 1964 Studebaker driver’s manual archly advised women what to do in case of a flat: “Put on some fresh lipstick, fluff up your hairdo... look helpless and feminine.”
Well into the ’70s and ’80s, observes historian Margaret Walsh, American carmakers were slow to recognise the tens of millions of working women eager to buy their own cars – declining, in some cases, to offer women credit.
Nowadays when carmakers fail, it’s much more subtle, a matter of the men who predominate in most companies failing to anticipate the needs of female consumers.
A story from Automotive News chronicles how, about 10 years ago, GM had 100 of its male employees attempt to get into a full-sized SUV while wearing heels, fake nails, and plastic bag skirts, and carrying handbags and babies. Upon reaching the driver’s seat, one engineer had a revelation that has occurred to virtually every woman: “I thought, ‘Well, shoot, I would want my handbag at arm’s reach’.”
He wound up designing a console to store it.
But sometimes, the disconnect is more serious. Marketers I spoke to mentioned high-up boots that make it difficult for women to hoist heavy luggage, and non-adjustable pedals, which force shorter women (and men) to crunch up close to steering wheels and potentially explosive airbags. In 2011 researchers at the University of Virginia found that women drivers are 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured in crashes, in great part because cars are designed to protect men’s larger bodies.
ADVERTISING FALLS SHORT
The advertising falls short, too. Men get adventures in their car ads. But advertisers seem to think women have no need for fantasy and instead, we get downtrodden realities – a mom dutifully carting the kids to soccer practice, a bunch of self-identified “housewives” fist-bumping because their kids finally think their car is “cool.”
The Detroit car show still poses scantily clad women around its cars like Christmas ornaments.
Ninety-five percent of new car dealerships belonging to the National Automobile Dealers Association are owned by men, which may be why as a woman you’d still “rather put out your eyes with steel needles than go buy a car”, says Jean Jennings, editor-in-chief of Automobile magazine.
Last year, Jennings launched a website, JeanKnowsCars.com, dedicated to demystifying the car industry, and many of her readers are women. It’s telling that such a site is still necessary, and that it comes from a journalist, rather than from the industry itself.
We need more myth-busters like Jennings, because many of the basic historical assumptions about women drivers are wrong.
Contrary to theories about cup holders and pink upholstery, the data shows that compared to men, women are at least as educated in their purchases, less emotional in making them, and less concerned with aesthetics when they do.
For buyers under 35, women are more inclined to buy for reasons like reliability and fuel economy, whereas men are more drawn by exterior styling and an ineffable “fun to drive” quality, says Vicki Poponi, who heads product planning for Honda in the US.
Data from consumers taking over previously leased cars shows women are more likely to request inspections, while men are more likely to ask about the way a car looks. “Men are more emotionally driven,” Poponi says. “Women are more rational.”
Marti Barletta, a consultant in marketing to women, told me one of the reasons women have gained a reputation for caring about frivolous details is because they do so much research.
By the time they arrive at dealerships, they’ve already logged countless hours online finding cars that satisfy their main criteria. Now, they’re picking through minutiae – what, precisely, makes the Nissan Maxima better than the Toyota Camry? (Could it be the number of cup holders?)
These questions, Barletta says, contribute to an impression among salesmen that women care mostly about the little stuff.
All of which is why Chevrolet’s recent union with designer Isaac Mizrahi felt so awkward. Last year, Mizrahi designed a limited edition collection of clothing and accessories “inspired” by the 2013 Chevy Malibu. The idea was that Mizrahi’s skinny jeans and driving moccasins were somehow akin to the Malibu; heck, one might even wear them to drive said car.
In videos promoting the effort, Mizrahi examined the cupboards of smart, stylish women, after which he took them for a spin in his Malibu, while praising its “gorgeous colour” and the “red piping” on its leather seats.
I get it: Chevy wants to remake its staid image in hopes of becoming the choice of hip young consumers. But all that focus on upholstery winds up feeling retrograde. For an industry that talked down to so many of its consumers for decades, emphasising fashion to women seems lazy, not fresh or fun.
Maybe it’s time for car companies to wake up and smell the coffee.
–Slate / The Washington Post News Service