There’s an old German proverb that states, “If I knew what women wanted, I’d have a million dollars (of course, they’d say Deutschmark).” One common misconception is that there’s a very specific way to market porn to women. It’s not about marketing specifically to women; it’s about simple rules of marketing and branding that can appeal to a broad audience. However, we use women as the bright-line test to see how we should present ourselves.
I will agree that in the past decade there’s been a big difference in how physical commercial product sites like WantedList.com market to people and how content-based membership sites do it. Unlike content sites, our members don’t necessarily join because they want instant gratification. They know it will take up to two days before they receive their movie. Content sites can go a lot more hardcore with their imagery and racy with their color schemes to market themselves, but like any other website out there, we have to maintain a sense of sexiness and professionalism. We treat our website like a physical store. We keep it clean, brightly lit, and stocked with goods people want and an interface that acts like a real salesperson.
Here are some general rules I’ve learned through WantedList.com about women and marketing porn to them.
Do not betray her trust. If you tell her you’re not going to share her email with anyone else, don’t do it. Like your wife, if you betray her, she will write a letter to a lawyer and tell the world how much of an asshole you are. Our customers, especially our female customers, have reiterated how important their confidentiality is. In return, we let them know as often as possible how we enforce our privacy policies.
Before you can even talk about betrayal, you first need to earn her trust—with money. According to the Seattle Digital Research Institute, women tend to gravitate toward areas of security when surfing commercial websites. Be that big, warm guy women can wrap their sense of trust around and show off your security measures.
Women need more information than men. You know when a dude’s relating a hookup story to his friends. The entire description can be summed up in 10 syllables. However, when a woman tells her friends about the same conquest, it can span the time between the summer and winter Olympics. Combine the best of both worlds. For your products, show basic teaser pictures with some words that describe everything for him, but also offer detailed product descriptions and in-depth reviews for her.
She knows what her vagina looks like, so stop throwing it in her face at every opportunity. Unless you run a content site that’s pushing for instant gratification, don’t make your site look like a brothel. Think Cosmopolitan magazine meets Red Light District videos.
Furthermore, there’s nothing more important to a woman than listening. Keep your lines of communications open. WantedList has multiple places where we connect with our users. The perception that you’re listening will win them over—but if you actually listen and respond to suggestions, you’ve got a customer for life.
If she can’t find it, she won’t buy it. According to Christine Perfetti, instruction director for User Interface Engineering, “In all our usability testing, the No. 1 factor that creates a strong impression of online branding is whether a user can find what they are looking for.” Your site should be able to interact with her and help her find things. At WantedList, we found that a lot of people weren’t able to find porn because they didn’t know what they were searching for or who they were searching for. We did two things to remedy that: First, we created the “Pornotron 6900,” which is an advanced search engine that allows users to input genres of movies they like and have it spit out results based on their preferences; second, we remedied the problem of misspelled performers’ names by building both a controlled vocabulary lookup table and a phonetic search algorithm. In concert, what these two things do is provide responses like “Did you mean ‘Jenna Jameson’ and not ‘Jinna Jameson?’” when users misspell words.
The lessons seem simple enough, but they definitely hold true—especially in the adult world. Learn them and adapt them to your commercial sites, and maybe you’ll have a million dollars…or more.
