Brands that overlook women consumers are surrendering a competitive advantage, Ken Ihedioha, who argues that the person who pays is not always the person who decides.
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A woman walks into a neighbourhood market in Lagos with a carefully calculated budget. She must buy foodstuff, detergent, toiletries and perhaps provisions for the children. At the same time she is weighing prices, comparing quantities, recalling which brand disappointed her last month, and deciding which seller deserves her patronage. By the time she leaves, she has made several commercial decisions – some for herself, others for an entire household.
Now consider the irony: the brands competing for her money may have spent millions on advertising without ever adequately understanding her. This is not an argument for another gender-equality crusade. It is a business argument. If women exercise substantial influence over household and consumer spending, any brand that fails to understand women consumers is voluntarily surrendering a competitive advantage.
The frequently repeated claim that women influence 80 per cent of consumer purchasing decisions should be treated as an indicative marketing statistic, not a universal law. Entrepreneur’s Jana Matthews, for example, puts women’s share of consumer spending at 70 to 80 per cent, but the exact proportion varies by market, product category and how influence is measured. The widely quoted Harvard Business Review analysis by BCGu2019s Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, as Chief Executive reported, estimated that women control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending worldwide. The underlying commercial reality is compelling: across food, household products, healthcare, education, personal care, financial services and more, women are central to the decisions that determine what is bought, used, recommended or abandoned. For Nigerian businesses, that influence is too significant to leave to guesswork.
The Woman Behind the Shopping Basket: Why Women Consumers Matter
Think of the mother deciding which school her child should attend. The father may pay the fees, but she is often the one researching schools, comparing standards, consulting other parents and making the final recommendation. Consider a couple shopping for a refrigerator: one partner may focus on the purchase price, while the other is more concerned about electricity consumption, durability, servicing and whether the appliance can survive Nigeria’s unpredictable power supply.
Neither pattern applies to every household. That is precisely the point. Businesses need to understand who influences each decision rather than assume that the person holding the money necessarily makes the choice.
In many Nigerian homes, women consumers play a major role in determining what enters the kitchen, which toiletries the family uses, what provisions are purchased and how household resources are stretched. Their influence can extend beyond the till to the family WhatsApp group, the church fellowship, the office conversation and the market association. A satisfied customer may recommend a brand to a friend. A disappointed one may warn ten others before the company has even noticed the complaint. That is not merely purchasing power. It is the power to shape reputation.
The Danger of Marketing by Assumption
For too long, some marketing strategies have treated the consumer as an abstract, undifferentiated individual. The result is advertising that speaks to a supposedly universal customer while overlooking the realities of the people who buy, use, recommend and reject the product.
Gender can be a useful segmentation variable, but it is not a magic formula. Women consumers are not a single tribe. A 25-year-old professional in Victoria Island, a market trader in Onitsha, a farmer in Benue and a retired teacher in Enugu may share certain experiences as women while having very different incomes, priorities, tastes and purchasing constraints. Age, income, household responsibilities, culture, location, occupation and personal preference all matter. Good segmentation of women consumers recognises these intersections. Lazy segmentation simply paints a product pink and calls it a strategy.
Research into consumer behaviour identifies patterns in how people process information and respond to marketing, but the evidence does not support reducing all women consumers to one biological or psychological template. Social roles, culture and individual circumstances matter alongside any biological factors. The commercial lesson is clear: understand the customer in front of you, not the stereotype in your marketing manual.
When the Customer Experience Gets it Wrong
Imagine a woman buying a small pack of milk for her children. She notices that the price has increased, the pack size has changed, or the product is not what she expected. She asks a retailer for clarification and receives a shrug. She contacts the manufacturer’s customer-care channel and gets an automated response that leads nowhere. The pressure on household budgets behind that moment is explored in BrandiQ’s report on Nigerian consumers rethinking brand loyalty.
The monetary value of that single transaction may be small. The reputational cost need not be.
If she concludes that the brand is unreliable, she may switch products, advise her relatives to do the same, or share her experience. A company that meticulously tracks sales volumes but ignores these everyday interactions may discover the damage only when market share begins to slip.
The same applies to banks, telecommunications companies, hospitals, supermarkets, online retailers and schools. A woman who struggles to resolve a disputed bank charge or obtain a clear answer about a child’s school fees is not asking for special treatment. She is asking for competent service. When businesses fail to deliver, the issue is not that women are inherently more sensitive. It is that every customer has expectations, and the consequences of disappointing an influential buyer can travel far beyond the original transaction. The same theme runs through BrandiQ’s coverage of customer satisfaction across sectors.
From Visibility to Genuine Understanding
There is also a communications challenge. Brands frequently celebrate women in advertising while failing to reflect their real lives. Campaigns may feature glamorous mothers, immaculate kitchens and effortless shopping, while ignoring the financial pressures, work demands and practical trade-offs many women navigate daily. Merely putting women in an advert is not the same as understanding them. Authenticity requires listening, representing diversity, and designing products and services around actual needs.
Nigerian brands should therefore ask better questions. Who initiates the purchase? Who pays? Who uses the product? Who recommends it? Who handles complaints? What makes customers return – or quietly defect to a competitor? The answers should inform product development, packaging, pricing, retail execution, customer service and communications.
The Commercial Imperative of Understanding Women Consumers
The opportunity is not to privilege women over men. It is to stop overlooking women consumers, a major part of the market. Businesses that understand women consumers, the people influencing household decisions, can create more relevant products, communicate more credibly and deliver better experiences. Those that rely on stereotypes risk wasting advertising budgets and alienating the very customers they need to retain.
Women consumers do not need brands to flatter them. They need brands to understand them, respect their intelligence, honour their time and deliver on their promises.
The next time a company reviews its marketing strategy, it should look beyond the person signing the cheque and ask who shaped the decision to write it.
Because in marketing, the person who pays is not always the person who decides – and the brand that fails to understand that distinction may end up paying for its mistake.
