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"I really feel I listen to women more than other people do," says Mary Lou Quinlan. "I can help interpret what they're saying so that companies can understand them better as customers or employees. And I have lots of ideas for how to listen to them."
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Indeed she does. And she arrived at those ideas in a most unusual way. Mary Lou Quinlan conceived "Just Ask A Woman," a company dedicated to marketing with women, while on a five-week sabbatical from her lofty post as CEO of N.W. Ayer, America's oldest ad agency.
Mary Lou's rise to the top of the advertising mountain was nothing less than storied. Her decision to scale a very different peak -- who knows -- maybe someday it will qualify as legendary. We'll see.
She started out, innocently enough, in Philadelphia. Her first job after college was in public relations and fundraising for her college, St. Joseph's University. Then Mary Lou got engaged, went to New York, and spent ten years with Avon Products. Mary Lou moved up from the personnel department to promotions and incentives. Then she ran all of Avon's sales meetings around the country.
During her last three years at Avon she was a director of advertising, which became the bridge to the next ten years of her life -- at three different ad agencies, all of them big. They were all senior account management jobs, running new business. Mary Lou was just about always about the youngest as well as one of the only females on the senior management team.
In 1994 she was offered the presidency of NW Ayer, which had been the agency for her former employer, Avon. It was exactly what she had been wishing for! She had wanted to put her imprint on the culture of a company. She wanted something she could mold.
I have this picture of me, the executive. Ta-da-da! Maybe I'll change again. I think we all keep changing. But this feels right now, for me.
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The dream grew bigger still about a year later, when Mary Lou was promoted to CEO. But then her dreamboat hit the wrong note. Mary Lou realized she often wasn't doing the things she loved doing -- the very things that got her to the top in the first place. She was more involved in administrative issues than in coming up with ideas. She really missed coming up with ideas. She also wanted something that was not just marketing, but something that would have "good intent" behind it.
She persuaded Ayer to let her take five weeks off in November of 1998 -- while she was still the CEO. Unheard of! But she did it. And she came back with an idea for a company dedicated to women, called Just Ask A Woman and backed by Ayer's parent company The MacManus Group.
One of the ways we do our research is through the creation of a talk show on the company's product or situation. It's great. We have twenty women for two hours, who really open up. It's just amazing to me. Every time we do it, the insights are better and better. The ideas we're getting for clients are phenomenal. And the women love it. They hug you goodbye, give you their business cards and tell how much they loved it. This does not happen in focus groups! In focus groups, they run for the door like it's the last days of Pompeii. In this situation, they're like, "Oh, can I come to the next one?"
The idea actually was born when I was at Ayer. As many things are, the idea was born out of necessity. How do you talk to a whole bunch of women at the same time really quickly, but in a way that would seem normal? We thought, well, if we didn't have them around a table, we'd put them in chairs and we'd film them like it's like a talk show. So we experimented with that. Now I've developed it into something that's very facile. We've done the shows all over the country now.
When I'm in charge of something I'm a lion. I really care more about all the cubs than anything else.
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Part of the reason it works is that television has taught us all about instant fame. Many people have that urge to express themselves. And they see television as a very personal, emotional way to do it. Television talk shows are places where people spill their feelings. And so we're playing into a very natural understanding the media has given so many people.
When you put a microphone into someone's hand, it's kind of a tribute, in a way. I look at it that way. Everybody wants to hear what you have to say. I find that the women are more thoughtful in their responses. As if they can tell that I care more, and it's more serious.
This doesn't look anything like a focus group. They're sitting there with two cameras, a whole crew. They look at it, they accept it, and they don't even look at it after that. They just talk. Usually people cry, they tell me very personal stories that relate to the product, to the category. So I love doing them. I'm so happy. I'm just on my feet hustling around.
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Women progress through their thoughts in a very contextual way. They're not linear. So, I'll ask a question, like, "Who influenced you most in terms of what is fashionable?" A lot of people won't raise their hands and say, "I'm fashionable." But they'll refer to friends who are fashionable and that helps us understand what they think is fashionable.
So it's this friend, that sister, or this skinny girl. One woman said it was her mother. We had a huge discussion about the influence of mothers. One woman took it to a place where she said, "Every day I walk out of the house and I hear my mother's voice saying, 'you're not going to wear THAT are you?'" Another woman did a beautiful tribute to her mother and what she taught her about fashion and quality. She said, "I miss her so much." Her mother had died. She said, "Thank you for the chance to say this here today."
Things like that happen, and when it happens, all of the women in the group are no longer just people or attendees of a session. They're friends. And they'll say things like, "Sarah's story about her mother made me think." It's a wonderful, human experience. And I think bringing that kind of humanity to a company that is trying to crack consumer code is extremely valuable.
We use another format called "Conversations" when we need to get at something that doesn't require two hours because it might be a little more either personal or just so simple that we don't need a two hour event to get through it all. So we'll go into a hotel and set it up with a very living room feel with about five or six women. We do eight of these in a day. Every 35 minutes or so, we switch groups of women. They're just informal. They feel like a conversation. They don't feel like a focus group. We're just getting their thoughts.
A Green Beret wrote me that he agreed with my philosophy of management! I thought, uh-oh, what does that say about me?
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One thing that makes it feel more like a conversation is that whatever question I ask, I answer personally first. So, if I'm asking about a health situation - which I did recently in one group - I talked about my own experience with this health situation before I went around the room. Researchers usually don't do that. They purposely don't do that. They purposely remove themselves and they observe.
It's so different because maybe I've asked them an embarrassing question, or a hard question. I put myself out there first and answer it. And I answer it truly. They can see that. And it has the effect of relaxing them. They ask me things like, "where did you get your shoes?" This one group was really aggressive. This one woman was hitting me on the butt to get my attention! I'm like, "Wait a minute! We're not this close!" But that's what happens. We break every boundary we can between them and us so that it's just women getting at answers.
We keep going back to the question of how women reveal themselves. When do they relax, when do they share, and when do they come up with quick-thinking answers? Sometimes we'll do drinks with a few women, or around a table at lunch over the course of an hour. Our real fantasy is to do dressing rooms, or ladies rooms. Huge conversations happen in ladies' rooms, although I have heard that men don't talk in men's rooms!
Our"Expert Salons" are different. When we're trying to help a client project where their business is going, we bring together a huge pool of experts in all kinds of fields. We do the sessions usually in New York at my apartment. We've also done them in a beauty salon. For about two hours we bring together a group that will include surprising people. If the subject is fashion-related, they won't all be from the fashion industry. One or two will be journalists or something like that. But we've had producers from television, we've had a dancer, we've had stylists.
There's a poem by Austin Clarke. It is about a woman who walked into a room and time stopped for everybody. The last line of the poem was: "She was the Sunday in our every week."
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We're about to do one on health. I have a trainer there, a doctor, an anthropologist, and a journalist. These are people who approach a problem from a broader perspective, so they have intelligence about the industry but they are creative thinkers. For two hours it's like hiring a group of experts who are just going to worry about your business and where it's going. Out of it come some really interesting concepts and hypotheses, which we can then crystallize creatively and take to consumers.
The biggest difference is that we listen differently, and we really hear. We're listening so that we can go back to the client and say, "here's what we heard." And then we add creative and strategic value to that. Much of that comes from me -- twenty years of marketing and communications leadership. I listen as a CEO and as a creative person, so that what I give back, sticks. We don't just give pie in the sky ideas. We listen and create ideas that really stick. The reason they stick isn't just because they are interesting or fun or competitive. They stick because we make them stick.
We've also been conducting sessions within companies to help train them so they can better understand the strategy and communicate it to the rest of their groups. We also help them understand how the information we deliver translates into their strategic plan. So, we're moving into the facilitation of the execution itself, within the company.
Helping brands build business with women means that women know that we are serious about their input and regarding them as individuals. That has to happen from the second they're contacted to when they walk into that room, the kind of food that we offer, the kindnesses, the respect. It makes all the difference in the kind of input that they give us. Women are keen observers of the specifics of being treated well or not. Everybody is looking for respect. Women are just very good at context, they're very good at body language, the little, quick eyerolls. That kind of stuff.
To be "the Sunday in our every week" is just a gorgeous, wonderful aspiration. I just think of Sunday as a light, happy, day. Peace. Energy. I wish I could have that line on my tombstone.
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I've been in millions of focus groups in the back rooms and it's appalling. I don't see that many clients and companies really behaving with respect toward consumers. I think there's too much laughing behind the focus group mirror. There are too many myths that they believe, prejudices about consumers, of one kind or another. And they're looking to have their point proven. We don't go in that way. And I think it shows in the results we give.
Sensitive advertising rarely gets awards. I'm not saying women only like sensitive advertising. They like funny advertising. They just don't like stupid-funny advertising. Women are funny, women are neat and women are different. But if you have -- to use a pun -- broad stroke opinions of them, then you relegate them to stupid roles.
It's not that advertising to women is bad. Advertising to women is in disguise. It's underground. It isn't overtly offensive. In general, it's like wallpaper to me. It's flat and it isn't insightful. It's not fresh and it's not surprising. It's just okay. And I don't think okay is good enough in this environment, with that being your customer.
Advertising agency creative departments are not well represented by women at the top. If you look at the percentages of men and women across the board in agencies at the top levels, you're going to find many more men. Look at a group of people who judge creative award shows. Eighteen out of twenty will be men.
Now, I'm not saying men can't write great copy for women. But if they're going to write it, they better study women and listen to them. And when you hold a bar up to what is great, then the creative people in the agency aspire to create that kind of advertising.
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It's not the goal of our company to be an advertising agency. When we come back with recommendations, usually the client will have a problem they're trying to solve. It could be naming a product. We don't think of ourselves as a naming agency, but we have named several products. But then women tell us so much more than that. Where do they expect to buy it, and how would they like us to introduce it to them? Competitively, where it could be stronger or weaker in terms of the packaging? They tell us so much.
So our presentations back to clients are very comprehensive in that they cover the entire marketing picture for that client, with specific ideas. Our goal is to solve problems, creatively, in a style that's flexible and fun.
Many of our projects start by interviewing people on from inside the company to get their perceptions of strengths and weaknesses of the brand. They usually know the answer. They just haven't been listened to. Many times employees will say, "you're the first person who asked me what I thought of that."
And so that information feeds into what we share with consumers or listen to from consumers. Often our work gets to the point of saying, "Here's what you stand for in the eyes of your employees or your consumers. And here's where the world is going. And here's what consumers wish you would be. And here's what it looks like, so here's what you need to be." It's usually something to do with a brand renovation, but it doesn't always start out that way.
People need to do business with people whose behavior and character they understand or are interested in. So I don't think of companies as companies. I think of companies as specific people. I really believe in speaking as an individual, and bringing my best -- and for all of us in this company -- our best selves, our full selves to the job.
I guess the thing that I'm after is the truth. If I were to close my eyes and open them five years from now and look at the work that we did these companies, I'd like to see that they had become more successful because they behaved in a truthful way toward their female customers and female employees. If we could do that and say, "Wow, look at that brand! They get it. They get women. They're honest, they're straight, they're true, they come through." I would be thrilled that we had contributed that to them.
When I started Just Ask A Woman about a year ago a lot of people said, "Why would you put yourself in a niche like that?" What I'm finding, month by month, is amazing change. Companies would surprise you, in terms of the ones that are calling that are more curious and more open and more willing to listen. I don't know what happened with the year 2000. Maybe there's something in the water. But it's great for me, it's great for women. And we want to be the ones who get it right.  |
