What Pain Points Are Motivating Women as Consumers, and How Can Wellness Brands Step Up?

As a consumer demographic, women and their shopping motivations deserve more attention in marketing for wellness products, including cannabis. While some brands have been making progress on this front, there's still a lot of untapped opportunity in these sectors. And success starts with knowing one essential fact: women want to see their values reflected in brands. 

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Similarly, women also want their very real pain points acknowledged by brands, even if indirectly. It’s worth acknowledging that many women might feel invisible when it comes to ads, but they often feel all too visible when it comes to stigma. 

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To be a woman is, all too often, to feel near-constant scrutiny. A 2019 study found that women who drink alcohol are judged more harshly than men, for example. Other research has shown that women are more likely than men to feel ashamed of being lonely—although when women use online dating apps, 28% reported being called offensive names and 19% of younger women (age 18-34) said they received threats of physical harm. 

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It’s not just social behaviors that frequently elicit criticism—women’s most basic biological functions are fraught, too. Around 50% of women say they’ve felt embarrassment or been shamed about their periods, for instance. 

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In one survey, only 19% of women reported that they were satisfied with their bodies, while 41% of women who have been pregnant said they felt bad about their bodies postpartum. 60% of mothers of children under age 5 say their parenting skills have been criticized, including by members of their own family. And 25% of Black women said opinions about their hair texture contributed to negative job interview outcomes.

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Brands message to those very real pain points all the time in ways both subtle and obvious. Supplement and natural products brands, for example, frequently position self-care as an alternative to pharmaceuticals and the medical establishment. It’s a powerful and effective response to the medical gaslighting and barriers to medical care that women—especially BIPOC women, fat women and queer or trans women—frequently encounter.

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Studies also show that women—particularly young women—favor organic food over mainstream alternatives. That’s partly because women seek out messaging that speaks to their personal beliefs such as campaigns that emphasize sustainability or nutritional value, while men respond more to marketing that makes organic food feel like a cool, widely accepted choice. 

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However, many marketing campaigns in the natural foods sector also hinge on the tendency for domestic tasks to fall predominantly on women, even in supposedly egalitarian households. With the knowledge that women are making regular purchasing decisions like taking on the weekly grocery shop, many brands message on maternal instincts, such as advertising their products as best and safest for baby.

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What Women-Centric Marketing Has In Common With Hidden Disability Marketing

Some of the best ads of 2023 addressed these pain points head on through campaigns like #BlackHairIsProfessional and SheSays, which focused on the mental health struggles of women and nonbinary professionals. But this type of messaging is often limited to Women’s History Month or International Women’s Day, rather than spread throughout the year.

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The challenge for many brands is to find a way to speak directly to women’s emotional, intellectual and functional needs in a way that doesn’t alienate male consumers. That’s a problem marketers have faced for other demographics that remain marginalized despite their sheer size and scale.

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Consider the way that many products designed with disabled consumers in mind are often marketed in ads that never actually depict, say, wheelchair users or people with mobility or dexterity limitations. Instead, these “as seen on TV” inventions are typically demonstrated by able-bodied characters who are portrayed as comically incompetent in their attempts to carry on with daily tasks like putting on their socks, changing a light bulb or slicing fruit. 

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Although over a quarter of the American population lives with some form of visible or invisible disability, Nielsen found that just 1% of ads include disability representation. The reason why is similar to why many companies shy away from overtly feminine branding—it’s assumed that able bodied consumers will be turned off by marketing that directly acknowledges the “niche” market of disabled consumers. 

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How Does Diversity in Marketing Jobs Contribute to Diversity in Advertising Messaging?

Another layer to the question of how to market to women is the question of who is developing that marketing messaging to begin with. ​​Communications professions were once predominantly male, but marketing, advertising and PR have found greater parity in recent decades. Today, around 60% of these jobs are filled by women. Less than 20% of advertising employees, however, are BIPOC—around the same percentage of non-white journalists who fill high-level editorial positions. 

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It makes sense that brands in consumer product categories like beauty, personal care and wellness that are more likely to be run by women and marketed to women would invest in more inclusive and empowering ads than categories long favored by men, like whiskey and motorcycles. But that also reveals why industries like tech and cannabis, where gender parity remains slack and where are less likely to address women directly in their marketing. 

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Ultimately, marketing strategies are made by people who exist in the same cultural, psychological and advertorial soup as the demographics they’re marketing to. It’s been well documented that advertising both reflects and shapes culture. Just look at the rise and fall of corporate Pride marketing around the mainstreaming of the gay rights movement and increasing political and cultural influence from the alt-right.

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Similarly, brands will embrace women-focused marketing as long as it’s profitable. As some of the biggest trends and headlines in 2023 show, women are eager to spend with brands that truly see and listen to them.

The first step to tapping that economic and cultural powder keg is to work with a marketing and PR partner that practices the core tenets of journalism—asking who, what, when, where and why to get to the heart of the matter, and in this case, the hearts of women.