Liz Smith | 05/31/2009 11:00 pm
Liz Smith Has Been the 'Man of the House' for Years
The only males living with me there were dogs …
In response to: Should advertisers be acting differently in light of the latest figures on marketing to women?
Of course advertisers should revise drastically their male-oriented and youth-passion points of view. There are going to be more and more old people in America for the next 20 years and they need to be catered to. And more and more mature women will be making buying decisions.
But this has been going on a long time. Twenty years ago I answered the door of my vacation house in Vermont and a statistic taker demanded "the man of the house." I told him I was what passed for the man of the house because the only males living with me there were dogs.
I told him that in the year he was investigating, I had bought a $10,000 fence, a new truck, a new Mercedes sedan, a boat hitch, a wave rider, two new refrigerators, three TV sets, air-conditioning for the entire house, a chain saw, an installed swimming pool and a number of other boring inevitable important items. (I was making a lot of money in those days!) The statistician went away shaking his head, sorrowing. I don’t think he believed that I was the shape of things to come.
But this has been going on a long time. Twenty years ago I answered the door of my vacation house in Vermont and a statistic taker demanded "the man of the house." I told him I was what passed for the man of the house because the only males living with me there were dogs.
I told him that in the year he was investigating, I had bought a $10,000 fence, a new truck, a new Mercedes sedan, a boat hitch, a wave rider, two new refrigerators, three TV sets, air-conditioning for the entire house, a chain saw, an installed swimming pool and a number of other boring inevitable important items. (I was making a lot of money in those days!) The statistician went away shaking his head, sorrowing. I don’t think he believed that I was the shape of things to come.
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4 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
And that’s not all, Liz, most articles, media conversations, advertisements, limit the age of the women to which they are aimed to 60 at most. Now many more women are living past their 70s in good health; most women survive their husbands; most of those women have money to spend. Or is it that they think past 60 you’re dead to the world, to wants, to enjoyment? Bullpoo!
It works the other way too, Liz. At least it used to. Before the do-not-call list, I used to get calls for the “lady of the house”, or “the wife”. They wouldn’t even talk to me. Click. I wasn’t even married at the time, but some even went so far as to claim they had talked to “her”, or was calling back, or some other lie. Eventually, I got a bit surly about the calls. Funny how they would not leave a phone number when I started offering to take a message.
Ha! Ha! He was "sorrowing" because you were the one with all the purchasing power of a "man of the house," while he was the one working as a door-to-door statistics collector.
Cue the music: "The World Turned Upside Down."