It’s time for another look at the womenfolk and what makes them tick, technologically speaking. We return to this topic often on The Guidewire, most recently when Ask.com decided to paint their search engine pink and call it targeted. Women are a lucrative yet elusive demographic and the entrants in this space always seem to launch with the same messaging: We’re different! Women are complicated! We get that! In the end, though, the sites all seem pretty much the same – horoscopes, fashion tips, and recipes packaged in a magazine-style format that continues to look dated in the face of current design trends.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Deborah Piscione, CEO and founder of BettyConfidential, a destination site targeted to women. I’d been contemplating my post about that site when the news broke yesterday of Yahoo’s foray into the space, Shine. (More on BettyConfidential momentarily.) Shine comes equipped with all the obligatory “We’re different!” messaging. According to their site, Shine wants “…to avoid all of the common categories that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in.” Great, I’m on board. But perhaps you could better achieve that by emblazoning your homepage with a headline other than, “Fancy lingerie you can actually afford.”
Epicenter‘s Betsy Schiffman hit the nail on the head in her review:
Shine… will cover parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life and astrology — pretty much everything we hate about women’s magazines.
Amy Iorio, general manager of Lifestyles at Yahoo, misses the head, the nail, and the entire carpenter’s bench in an interview with CNET:
This is really a key audience for Yahoo. We’ve been calling them ‘chief household officers’ internally.
This is the problem. You’re trying to recreate Good Housekeeping online. It will work for women who read Good Housekeeping. But it will not work for the rest of us. Most of the women I know don’t like women’s magazines. They’re fluffy, condescending, and poorly written . (Lip gloss reviews, anyone?) So the logical solution would be to build a site that strays as far from the magazine path as possible. Yahoo obviously doesn’t agree with this, as they’ve loaded Shine with content and advisors from Conde Nast and Hearts publications. Read the rest of this entry »
