Happy Birthday, Charlie Darwin - The ConsumHERist

Posted on | February 11, 2009 |

by Delia Passi

Today Charles Darwin would have turned 200. Charlie is credited with being the first to develop a theory of natural selection, or evolution, which continues to be a source of great controversy.

According to a new Gallup survey, only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution.” 24% say they don’t believe in it, and a huge and unbelievable 36% say they have no opinion. How is it possible to not have an opinion on evolution? I could argue how difficult it is to believe that anyone could miss the obvious truth of evolution. To me it is a matter of fact just as undeniable as the fact that the earth is round. Even the Vatican is softening its views on the subject.

But that’s not why I am celebrating Charlie’s 200^th birthday. Actually, it is not evolution that I think is so pertinent to marketing and selling to women so much as the lack of evolution or, more precisely, the speed of evolution.

Women and men evolved to serve different purposes for the family in primitive times, but it’s only been about 8,000 years since we came out of the Stone Age. That isn’t enough time to evolve as a species to the point that our primitive roles would fade out of our DNA. Men still have pretty much the same hunter instincts that they had as cavemen, and women still have the same family-oriented instincts that served them so well only eight millennia ago.

We have to remain at least somewhat conscious of those primitive instincts when we develop modern marketing, selling and advertising programs to appeal specifically to one gender or the other. Intellectual development may make it possible to sometimes resist the primitive instincts that influence our behavior, but those instincts are unlikely to disappear for a long, long time.

Delia Passi, Founder of WomenCertified® and author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women is a regular columnist on ReachingWomenDaily. Delia can be reached at delia@medelia.com.