Women Sex and Shopping
The Women Sex and Shopping report (WSS) comprises a number of different elements that are provided to the client.
- The Main Report
- The Future of Women's Pleasure Goods Retail Stream
- 6 months Research analysis and verbatim extracts
- Analyst Access (By arrangement)
In addition there is a regular update of relevant 3rd party articles (with links)
Who should buy the report?
- Retailers
- Store Design specialists
- Luxury Brands
- Retail Landlords and developers
- Retail Analysts
- Investment Banks
- Pleasure Goods Manufactureres
- Hotel and Leisure Industry
- Airport Operators
Download the brochure here:
WSS_Report_Brochure_2012_v1.1.pdf
About Hewson Group
Hewson Group is a market analyst company founded in 1989. Hewson are acknowledged as one of the global founders of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) industry and the company was the author of many influential books and reports on sales and marketing issues in the 1990s. Hewson Group established Sistrum a Europe-wide customer management best practice club co-sponsored by Experian and the Sales Productivity Benchmarking Group (With PriceWaterhouseCoopers)
Hewson were also a key initiator of e-govt programmes in the UK and elsewhere and have been involved in the potential reform of corporate reporting standards. Since 2008 Hewson have specialised in the women’s retail sector and more broadly in the area of ‘customer onboarding’ and how companies should handle the initial relationship with new clients.
Hewson Group clients include most of the major players in the IT industry such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Symantec and SAP.
Women Sex and Shopping Research
Women Sex and Shopping (WSS) was established as research programme in 2008 by market analysts Hewson Group and looks at the Pleasure Goods market for women; producing insights about what products they like and where they want to shop. Since then, WSS has appeared in the Financial Times, Times, Telegraaf (NL), The Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Glamour, TV documentaries and many other media outlets across the world. WSS research is increasingly referenced in academic study internationally and has demonstrably influenced the marketing approach of a number of well known brands.
Women’s Retail is in need of a Revolution
The fact that women like shopping is, it might be said, a truth universally acknowledged. It is also a received wisdom that most women particularly love the acquisition of high heels, chocolate, lingerie and any manner of other luxury goods. Why is it then that so much of the retail environment aimed at women is more rooted in the 1950s rather than the 21st Century? Buying Pleasure Goods is - or should be - an emotive experience and should have an implicit recognition that many products have a strong inter-connection and need to be merchandised accordingly and with a thought through proximity. Far too many retail spaces are emotionally arid and lack any innovation regarding immersive experiences or excitement.
Retailers and women’s brands across the world have been slow to recognize that a very significant emancipation has been achieved by women in the way that they are self-determinant about their sexual lives and of how they value this - even compared to twenty years ago. Marketing people recognize the fact and advertising for fragrance, lingerie and beauty products is frequently edgy, erotic and fantasy feeding. These highly emotive messages are very often not reflected in the products and, even more often, are absent from the retail arena where the woman consumer too often searches in vain for immersion in fantasy. Sex Toys are an excellent example of misreading the change in the market. These items are frequently the subject of media hysteria or manufactured outrage but the reality is that over half the women in North America and Northern Europe own one - necessarily acquired from an almost universally unadapted supply side. But...not one single aspirational brand is involved in a market of real significance to hundreds of millions of women. The same observation can be made about personal lubricants where the default message of addressing ‘dysfunction’ sits oddly with real world demand.
The original research (in 2008) for Women Sex and Shopping was originally quite narrow in scope and in an area that no mainstream analyst had ever considered before. Hewson Group employed innovatory and probably unique research techniques to understand the true nature of the female consumer. We wanted to establish what causal connection there was between the goods women could buy and their enjoyment or perception of sex. At the same time, we wanted to know of it worked the other way round. Did behaviours and the way that women saw themselves affect what they might buy? The answers were clear and should always inform how we consider the market across a wide range of women’s goods. The customer is looking for emotive involvement and the bland will not prosper. Understanding this will be critical to attracting and retaining the female consumer of the future.
2011-12 Research Programme
An absolutely clear requirement for robust research data and analysis will be the collection of input from as broad a cross section of the female community as possible. Online data collection is useful and accessible but there is an element of self selection. We will further develop mechanisms to collect data from all age ranges and attitudinal groups.
Our aim is to collect data and views, internationally, from 10,000 + women during the year 2012.
We will also establish a feed from a male respondent base to deal with couples or men buying for women.
Our main platforms for research will be:
- The WSS website including a generic questionnaire
- Social Media connections (Hewson Womenshop has c1300 connections on Facebook)
- Media driven communications (using a variety of women’s magazines etc)
- Shop (selected) and Street based – handwritten – responses on the current model.
Other mechanisms will include:
- Speaking at conferences, to women’s groups, to the NHS (and equivalents).
- Co-operation with universities and specific academics
- Collection at exhibitions
All of the above offer the possibility – to some extent - of continuing the ‘handwritten’ answers approach which we have found to provide particularly honest and discursive input. It is of course, more difficult to analyse, but offers a good benchmark of accuracy on any given topic.
The research information will come in 3 main forms
- Responses to a generic question set
- Responses to issue specific question sets of which there may be a number and that these may vary from time to time
- Discursive emails that offers views on specific issues, behaviours, products, vendors and markets.
Geographies Covered
In the next year we want to continue to develop research in the the more mature markets of North America, Northern Europe and Australia. There will be a significant focus on the BRIC economies and also on S E Asia and Southern Europe – including France and Italy. The latter two countries may be very revealing as comparators to say the UK and Germany.
Buy the report
(With free updates for 6 months)
Main Report
Main Report
Table of Contents
Appendix A
Street Survey verbatim comments
Appendix B
Email responses to WSS
Appendix C
WSS Top 50 Pleasure Goods