What do women want?

Cosmetics giant Lancome has recently completed months of research with a variety of focus groups, sociologists, psychologists, and journalists to get to the bottom of ‘what women want’.

It is a surprisingly late piece of market research, given that most current advertising suggests that women are only complete when they have met their ‘knight in shining armour’, or sit about as pretty ornaments, waiting to be ‘saved’. Thankfully modern cosmetics firms are beginning to get their act together and are aiming their marketing at a new audience – that of real women. There are new female role models in the world and they aren’t all supermodels; they are athletes, politicians, senior executives, women who have a message and want to be counted.

However, in light of modern feminism it turns out, according to Lancome’s research, that what women really want is no longer independence, but happiness. The happiness they want is not provided by ‘another’ but comes from within. I’d suggest that the ‘happiness’ that most women want is closer to that referred to by Aristotle – eudaimonia. It is more about ‘wellbeing’ than actually hedonistic happiness, the Greek word means literally “the state of having a good indwelling spirit, a good genius”.

Having moved beyond the suggestion that a women could only be happy once she had successfully attracted the attentions of a man, the feminist world began to place value upon economic gain or quantifiable / measurable success. Financial independence was a huge part of women’s move towards independence. Women no longer needed knights in shining armour to care for them because they were perfectly capable of looking after themselves.

But according to Lancome’s research it appears that women are once again moving on – away from what Umir Haque refers to as hedonic opulence but more towards a eudaimonic prosperity:

“it’s about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed “consuming” but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing — all the stuff that matters the most” .

http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/05/is-a-well-lived-live-worth-anything/

Image: the stonepicker © Peter Baron