What Women Want

I did a bad, bad thing.

Last week's memo ended too abruptly. “Yes, selling to men can be very easy. But how does one sell to women? Ah. That is a different question. – Roy H. Williams” The phrase, “sell to women?” was hyperlinked to additional information. Judging from the record number who clicked that link, What Women Really Want remains one of the great, unsolved mysteries of man.

The hyperlinked phrase, of course, took you to the course description for Michele Miller's class on marketing to women. Those who clicked her free, streaming video found the answer. But for rest of you, my cliffhanging question remains unanswered.

Allow me to rectify.

Women want connectedness.

John Donne wrote in 1624, “No man is an island.” But I disagree. Men are very often islands – voluntarily solitary. But I would agree that no woman is an island. Women are the connected ones, the glue, the binding agents in every family, whether a family by genetics or a family by choice. Women are the bringers of Together.

“Men use language to establish status. Their measurements are up and down. 'What do you think of me now that I've said this? Am I up or down? Up or down?' But women use language to establish bonds of connection, near and far. 'How close are we now that I've said this?'” – Dr. Nick Grant, adjunct faculty, Wizard Academy

“What a woman wants is someone who will listen to her.” – Donna Pinciotti, on That 70's Show, explaining why a beautiful girl canceled her date with Kelso to go out with Fez instead.

In the world of women, what is romance but a thousand points of connectedness? Listen, men, and learn.

My mother taught me all this when I was thirteen. She probably didn't think I was listening at the time, but it was one of those moments when that strange camera in my brain went “click.” “What a woman wants,” she told me, “is to know in her heart that someone considers her the most important thing in the world.”

Study aberrant human behavior and you'll find that mass murderers are always men. Crazy women don't kill strangers. They have no connectedness with strangers. Crazy women kill their children.

The cognoscenti will recall my comments on brain lateralization: “In Myers-Briggs terminology, the left-brain preferences are E,S,T, and J. The right-brain preferences are I, N, F, and P.” The left-brain is considered to be the masculine hemisphere; deductive reasoning, up or down. The right-brain is the feminine, intuitive hemisphere; pattern recognition, points of connectedness.

Aha.

Roy H. Williams