MEDIA: CBC News Network Weekend Business Panel (February, 2024)

It’s Super Bowl Weekend on the CBC News Network Weekend Business Panel, alongside Jeanhy Shim, Christian Bravo, and Marianne Dimain talking another round of layoffs at Bell Media, Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, coming to Canada, and, of course, those commercials that Canadians won’t be seeing during the big game on Sunday.  You can watch the Weekend Business Panel on Saturday mornings at around 10:15 AM ET on CBC News Network.

This week’s Business Advisor Highlight:

The importance of the female consumer demographic has long been known as highly lucrative, in that women have significant influence in a wide range of buying decisions, including in the areas of housing, vehicles, travel, consumer goods, groceries, anything and everything related to children, and more.  Not only do women have significant influence in this regard within a family unit, single women are also a very powerful demographic.  Over the years, numerous consumer research studies have reported these findings.

Which makes it more than a little ironic that it took a well known celebrity attending a handful of football games for some brands to decide to advertise during the Super Bowl (you guessed it), targeting women.  This, in concert with obvious efforts on the part of the NFL and its broadcast partners to utilize Taylor Swift’s attendance to increase viewership numbers (anyone who has watched sports for a long period of time will understand why this is so evident).

Millions of women have watched football for decades (myself included), however, it took the attendance of one popular female celebrity for this large audience to be of relevance.  Really?  And, yes, women do buy more than makeup!

Brands need to ensure that they understand their target market, in various respects, including size, trends, and the key aspects of decision making and influence in order to develop strategies to reach potential consumers.  From what we’ve seen here, it appears that the lucrative female football-viewing market has been poorly recognized until now.

Thanks for watching, and see you next time!

Jenifer Bartman
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