Women Want More: How to Recognize and Respond to Their True Needs and Aspirations

An exhaustive analysis of the 2008 Boston Consultive Group Global Inquiry into Women and Consumerism, which surveyed 12,000 women from all walks of life about their spending habits. In painstaking detail, and employing every available scrap of corporate history, the authors describe how to reach the group which controls the spending in most categories of consumer goods, but who are sometimes misunderstood by the companies that seek to serve them. Through many examples of the women interviewed for the survey, we see pictures of the modern woman globe-wide—struggling between roles of caregiver, wife, and mother, stressed out, saddled with men who don't help with the housework, pressed for time, over-concerned with expensive beauty products, frustrated with condescending financial advisors and determined to do good with their dollars. The scope of the survey itself is interesting, but the repetitive detail makes the book more useful as a doorstop than a business guide, and there's a disconcerting bemused tone to the analysis—as if the authors were observing exotic zoo animals rather than a powerful consumer group. Others have done it better—and far more succinctly. (Sept.)