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Like a lot of people around the world,
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earlier this summer
my friends and I were obsessed
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with the Women's World Cup held in France.
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Here we are, watching
these incredible athletes,
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the goals were amazing,
the games were clean and engaging,
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and at the same time, outside the field,
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these women are talking about equal pay,
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and in the case of some countries,
any pay at all for their sport.
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So because we were mildly obsessed,
we wanted to watch the games live,
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and we decided that one of
the Spanish-speaking networks in the US
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was the best place for us to start,
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and it wasn't until a few games
into the tournament
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that a friend of mine
talks to me and says,
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"Why does it feel like
everything I'm seeing
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is commercials for makeup and
household cleaning products and diets?"
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It did feel a little bit too obvious,
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and I don't know if
we were sensitive about it
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or the fact that we were watching
with men and boys in our lives,
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but it did feel a little bit too obvious
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that we're being targeted for being women.
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And to be honest there's nothing
necessarily wrong with that.
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Someone sat down and looked
at the tournament and said,
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"Well, this thing is likely
to be seen by more women,
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these women are Hispanic
because they're watching in Spanish,
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and this is women content.
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Therefore, this is a great place for me
to place all these commercials
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that are female-centric
and maybe not other things."
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If I think about it as a marketer,
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I know that I absolutely
should not be annoyed about it,
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because this is what marketers
are tasked with doing.
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Marketers are tasked with building brands
with very limited budget,
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so there's a little bit of an incentive
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to categorize people in buckets
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so they can reach their target faster.
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So if you think about this,
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it's kind of like a shortcut.
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They're using gender as a shortcut
to get to their target consumer.
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The issue is that as logical
as that argument seems,
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gender as a shortcut
is actually not great.
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In this day and age, if you still
blindly use a gender view
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for your marketing activities,
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actually it's just plain bad business.
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I'm not talking even about the backlash
on stereotypes in advertising,
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which is a very real thing
that has to be addressed.
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I'm saying it's bad business because
you're leaving money on the table
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for your brands and your products.
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Because gender is such an easy thing
to find in the market
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and to target and to talk about,
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it actually distracts you
from the fun things
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that could be driving growth
from your brands,
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and, at the same time,
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it continues to create
separation around genders
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and perpetuating stereotypes.
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So at the same time this activity
is bad for your business
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and bad for society, so double whammy.
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And gender is one of those things
like other demographics
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that have historically been
good marketing shortcuts.
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At some point, however,
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we forgot that at the core
we were targeting needs
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around cooking and cleaning
and personal care and driving and sports
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and we just made it all a bucket and
we said, "Men and women are different."
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We got used to it and
we never challenged it again,
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and it's fascinating to me
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and by fascinating I mean
a little bit insane
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that we still talk about this as a segment
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when it's most likely carryover bias.
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In fact, I don't come
to this conclusion lightly.
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We have enough data to suggest
that gender is not the best place
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to start for you to design
and target your brands.
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And I would even go one step further:
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unless you are working in
a very gender-specific product category,
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probably anything else
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you're hypothesizing about
your consumer right now
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is going to be more useful than gender.
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We did not set up to draw
this conclusion specifically.
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We found it.
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As consultants, our job
is to go with our clients
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and understand their business
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and try to help them find spaces
for their brands to grow,
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and it is our belief that if you want
to find disruptive growth in the market,
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you have to go to the consumer
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and take a very agnostic view
of the consumer.
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You have to go and look
at them from scratch,
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remove yourself from biases and segments
that you thought were important,
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just take a look to see
where the growth is.
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And we built ourselves
an algorithm precisely for that.
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So imagine that we have a person
and we know a person
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is making a choice
about a product or service,
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and from this person, I can know
their gender, of course,
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other demographics, where they live,
their income, other things.
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I know the context where
this person is making a decision,
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where they are, who they're with,
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the energy, anything,
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and I can also put
other things in the mix.
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I can know their attitudes,
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how they feel about the category,
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their behaviors.
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So if you imagine this kind of blob
of big data about a person,
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I'm going to oversimplify the science here
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but we basically built an algorithm
for statistical tournaments.
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So a statistical tournament
is like asking this big thing of data,
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"So, data, from everything
you know about consumers at this point,
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what is the most
useful thing I need to know
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that tells me more
about what consumers need?
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So the tournament is going
to have winners and losers.
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The winners are those variables,
those dimensions,
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that actually teach you
a lot about your consumer,
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that if you know that,
you know what they need,
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and there's losing variables
that are just not that practical,
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and this matters because
in a world of limited resources,
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you don't want to waste it on people
that actually have the same needs.
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So why treat them differently?
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So at this point, I know,
suspense is not killing you,
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because I told you what the output is,
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but what we found over time
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is, after 200 projects around the world,
this is covering 20 countries or more,
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in essence we ran about
a hundred thousand of these tournaments,
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and, no surprise, gender was very rarely
the most predictive thing
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to understand consumer needs.
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From a hundred thousand tournaments,
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gender only came out
as the winning variable
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in about five percent of them.
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This is true around the world, by the way.
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We did this in places where
traditional gender roles
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are little more pronounced,
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and the conclusions were exactly the same.
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It was a little bit more important,
gender, than five percent,
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but not material.
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So let's let that sink in for a second.
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No matter how you're looking
at a consumer,
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most likely anything else is going
to be more interesting to you than gender.
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There's probably something very important
you need to know about them,
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and you're getting distracted because
you're doing everything based on gender.
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And that's why I say you're leaving
money on the table.
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Gender is easy.
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It's easy to design advertising
based on gender,
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it's easy to target people online
and on TV based on gender.
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But at the end, that's not where
the exciting growth will come from.
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If you're a food company, for example,
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it's actually much more interesting to you
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to know where people are eating,
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who they are eating with,
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are they very nutritionally oriented.
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All of those things are actually
significantly more powerful and useful
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than knowing if a person
is a man or a woman.
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And that matters, of course,
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because then if you're putting
your limited budget into action,
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then you're better off creating
solutions for different occasions
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than trying to target women
versus young men.
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Another example if alcoholic beverages.
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Thirty-five percent to 40 percent
of consumption in alcoholic beverages
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around the world actually
happens with women,
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but, you know, "women don't drink beer."
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Those are the things
that we typically hear.
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But actually, when a man and a woman are,
for the most part, in the same location,
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the emotional and functional needs
they have at that moment
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are very similar.
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There's only one exception, by the way,
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and the exceptions exist,
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where if you have a man and a woman
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on a date,
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the man is trying to impress the woman
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and the woman is trying
to connect with the man,
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so there's going to be
a little bit of tension,
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but that's important to know.
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We'll take a few dates.
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Financial institutions:
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that's something where we've heard
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a lot about the difference
between men and women,
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but actually talking about
men and women as different
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actually is distracting you
from the thing that is underneath.
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We made it so simple
as "women don't like to invest,"
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"women hate managing their money,"
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"men are great and aggressive
and risk-takers,"
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but at the end it's not
about men and women.
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It is actually a different narrative.
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It is about, there are people
that are excited and energized
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and educated to manage their finances
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versus people that are not.
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So if you change the conversation
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from men and women
to actually what's underneath
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then probably you'll stop being
so condescending to women
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and you may start serving some men
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that are actually shy
about managing their finances.
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I'll leave one more example.
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If I go back to the women
that were playing sport at the beginning,
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one of the fascinating things we found
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over different countries
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exploring sportswear
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that if a person is a competitive person
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and they are in the moment of action,
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the needs are not different
between a man and a woman.
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An athlete is an athlete.
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It doesn't matter for men and women,
it doesn't matter for old and young,
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you are an athlete,
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and in the moment of action
and extreme competition,
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you need this gear to work for you.
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So these soccer-playing women have
a lot in common with their counterparts.
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Out of the field, it doesn't matter.
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Out of the field, they may be
into fashion, into other things,
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but on the field,
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the needs are not different.
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So these are just a few examples
on categories where we found
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that gender was not the best place to go,
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and actually the argument is that
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at this point it's not even
a feminist push,
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it's just we got used it.
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We got used to using gender,
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and it's important for us
to start finding ways
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to measure other things about consumers
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so that we don't revert back to gender.
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I am not naïve,
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and I know there's still
going to be appetite
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and certain ease around using gender,
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but at least this warrants conversation.
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In your business, you have to inquire,
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is this really the best lens
for me to grow.
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So, if you are, like me,
a person that is in business
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that I am constantly worried
about what is my role
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in the broader societal discussions,
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if you're listening to your business
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and you hear things like,
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"Oh, my target are women,
my target are men,
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this goes to young girls, young boys,"
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when it's that gender conversation,
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unless you are working, again,
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in a very specific,
gender-specific product category,
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take this as a warning sign,
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because if you keep
having these conversations,
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you will keep perpetuating
stereotypes of people
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and making people think
that men and women are different.
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But because this is business,
and we're running a business
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and we want to grow it,
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at least kind of challenge
your own instinct to use gender,
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because statistics say that you're
probably not choosing the best variable
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to target your product or service.
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Growth is not easy at all.
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What makes you think
that growth is going to come
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from going into market
with such an outdated lens like gender?
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So let's stop doing what's easy
and go for what's right.
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At this point, it's not just
for your business, it's for society.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)