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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Marketers held a conference to find out what women do online. The answer: everything except the one crucial thing -- look for cleaning products.
May 5, 2004 | Nine women perch on a row of stools arrayed in front of a theatrical black curtain.
Flat-screen monitors mounted behind their heads flash screenshots from sites including Friendster and the Wedding Channel, syncopated to a blasting loop of the B-52's song "Roam."
"Roam if you want to. Roam around the world. Roam if you want tooooo..."
The setup has the slightly giddy feel of a retro game show. Ladies, start your engines!
But these women aren't contestants. They already have all the answers. It's the marketing strategists from Procter & Gamble and General Motors and other brand-name corporations who are playing a game. They're blitzing the women with questions, struggling to peg them according to one of eight cutesy Internet types: the "digital diva," an online luxury-goods maven; the "digital socialite," an Evite-happy queen bee who uses the Net to organize her busy schedule; the "digital voyeur," who searches the Web to keep tabs on her ex and lurks in chat rooms. And so on.
Rachel, who gives her age as "almost 23," is a recent transplant to San Francisco from Chicago. She is dressed in jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, a zip-up hoodie and a belt decorated with pink flamingos and palm trees. She gamely tries to explain to the suits clustered around her exactly what it is that she does on the Internet.
The short answer: Um, everything.
A habitué of Craigslist, Rachel says she has used the Net to find a roommate, find her apartment in Hayes Valley, and find her part-time job. If she gets lost and doesn't have Net access, she'll call a friend who does and ask her to go to MapQuest and get directions. She pays all her bills online and reads the news on S.F. Gate and N.Y. Times.com, two sites she doesn't even bother to refer to by the names of the newspapers they represent. She's selling a car online right now.
One exec asks Rachel, who first logged on in 1994, when she was 12, "What percentage of your life is influenced by the Internet?" Her answer: 100 percent.
And what would she miss most if the Internet was taken away? "E-mail," Rachel replies. Barely suppressing the implied "duh," she adds more delicately: "It's kind of obvious."
