By Jim McCarthy Jun 22, 2009 0 comments

Just Don’t Think Pink

We’ve talked recently about the perils of “targeting” a demographic for your shows, games or products.

It’s a very neat balancing act, as many of you pointed out, between reaching out to a group of people who tend (and ‘tend’ is really the operative word) to have some shared perspectives or interests and being a condescending and ineffectual loser.

The classic example of this is what consumer products (things like shaving cream, spaghetti sauce, and laundry detergent) marketers would traditionally do if they wanted to take a product that had been designed for men and sell it to women.

They’d make it pink.

And in their defense (sorta) in an era where TV advertising was all you needed to succeed and where consumers’ options were much more limited, it worked.

But no longer.  Now, consumers are constantly questioning your sincerity.  You say it’s “strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.”  Oh, yeah?  What do you mean by that?

So I found it particularly interesting a few weeks ago when the Los Angeles Dodgers, via its program called Women’s Initiatives Network (or WIN), began what it calls “Female-oriented broadcasts.”

Oh, yeah?  What do you mean by that?

For starters, ESPN reporter Jeanne Zelasko is going to be calling the play by play.  Over the last ten years, plenty of women have broken into the world of sports reporting as sideline reporters or even anchors on the big sports news shows, but a female play by play caller still seems to be pretty rare, as far as I know.

Beyond having a woman in the booth, Zelasko explains how else the broadcasts will be different:

“I like to look at our broadcast as we’re not afraid to explain something most people might take for granted,” Zelasko said.

One specific example occurred during a recent run through when Sweeney made references to the six hole, Zelasko said.

“I know what that is in the lineup, but I said to him, `Mark, tell people what you mean.’ It’s the sixth spot in the lineup,” Zelasko told City News Service.

Zelasko said that in their goal of educating fans, “we’re not going to talk down to people.”

“If we miss a pitch, its going to be OK if we’re educating people,” Zelasko said.

To satisfy their goal of being instructive, Zelasko said she and Sweeney will field questions e-mailed from viewers during the broadcast and post comments via the Twitter Web site.

All of which brings up an interesting point.  The women sports fans that I know are familiar with the game and don’t need help like this.  On the other hand, undoubtedly lots of men would benefit from this too, but perhaps not as many as a proportion.

So while I always applaud important innovations, isn’t this as much about reaching out to new fans as it is about reaching out to women?  By the way, that’s a great idea potentially too!

If women who are sports fans are reading me on this, what do you think?  How about women who are not sports fans but may be inclined to listen if the broadcasts were different somehow?

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