“We have a great acceptance on the new Yukon series by women. The old one was more manly. This has wider door handles and more comfortable seats.”
John Pitre, general manager of Motor City Buick-Pontiac-GMC in Bakersfield, California
“Safety, utility and the functions are the three most mentioned things for female buyers, but they aren’t going to be seen in something that doesn’t look great.”
Cadillac dealer Jacques Moore, owner of Moore Cadillac in Richmond, Virginia
“There’s a lot more female interest in the Chevrolet Tahoe than in the past. For trucks, they drive like a car.”
Gordon Stewart, president of Stewart Management Group in Harper Woods, Michigan
In the summer of 2002, about 100 male General Motors employees headed to the US proving grounds outside Detroit to do something not in their job description: Wear skirts made from plastic garbage bags and high-heeled shoes, sport long fake fingernails, and carry a purse and a baby doll.
“I would never have expected it,” says Mark Cieslak, assistant vehicle chief engineer for full-sized SUVs, and a participant.
The intent: Show male engineers exactly what a new generation of full-sized SUVs must do to win favor with women, says Mary Sipes, GM’s vehicle line director for full-sized trucks. She was the brains of the exercise she called “Mr. Mom.”
It looks so easy
Sipes gave the men what seemed to be a simple assignment. They were to wheel a baby stroller to an SUV and use a remote to unlock the doors, then use the door handle – careful, don’t break a nail!
They had to remove the baby doll and fasten it correctly in a car seat, fold the stroller, walk – watch those heels – to the rear of the truck, lift the rear door to put the stroller away – don’t rip that skirt! The men had to sit in the driver’s seat without using the running board – oops, there goes a heel! – then fasten the seat belt and adjust the radio – uh oh, another chipped nail!
To engage the male competitive spirit, Sipes timed them. And she deducted points anytime a man tore a skirt, chipped a nail, twisted a heel or struggled in any way.
“Trying to get into the vehicle [as a woman] was a very different experience,” recalls Cieslak. “It gave me a better appreciation of the meaning of running boards to the female customer and realizing the importance of the size of buttons and using handles with nails.”
Considering a purse
Sipes says women are half the US drivers of full-sized SUVs and influence 85 percent of all SUV purchases.
Cieslak had never before thought about what to do with a purse. His post-Mr. Mom conclusion: Install a large console area with 20 liters of storage.
“I thought, Well, shoot, I would want my purse right at arm’s reach,” he recalls. “So you start searching for that area. You want it accessible, but not to be staring at it when you’re driving. So that’s how we came up with the console area.”
He also had to maneuver pedals in heels. The new trucks built on the GMT900 architecture have revised pedal positions and ranges of motion. Cieslak learned the old trucks’ rear liftgates and rear seats were hard to use in a skirt. So new GM trucks offer power liftgates and power folding seats.
“The focus on the customer is like never before,” Cieslak says. “And it’s how you translate those needs and integrate those needs into the design. It’s got to be flawless execution.”
Sipes says women rank safety higher than men as a reason to buy. So GM added head-curtain airbags to all three rows of seating in the full-sized SUVs.
Because women tend to be smaller than men, GM lowered the instrument panel and moved it forward. GM used adjustable pedals so that a woman can sit farther from the steering-wheel airbag but still reach the pedals.
Using powertrain features, GM made sure women didn’t feel like they were “piloting a school bus” when driving a GMT900, Sipes says.
“Some of the refinements we made, we did have to fight for,” Sipes says. “We are given an allocation of money to spend, so it comes down to trading off somewhere else.”
Larger mirrors
One such battle came when male executives wanted smaller uniform visor mirrors on all GM vehicles to save money. Sipes concocted another surprise exercise during lunch. She took a group of men and women out to a vehicle to get inside and check their teeth for food. The women all used the visor mirror while the men used the rear-view mirror – making her point that women want large visor mirrors.
According to the Power Information Network, fewer females are purchasing GM’s 2007 full-sized SUVs than prior models. For instance, 31.2 percent of buyers for the 2005 Chevrolet Tahoe were women, but only 28.7 percent for the 2007 model through June. The gender mix for the GMC Yukon was unchanged. For the Chevrolet Suburban, 25.3 percent of 2007 model buyers are women, up from 23.9 percent. GM did not provide its own buyer data. But Sipes cites anecdotal evidence that women like the vehicles.
“We’re selling much more highly contented trucks than we did with the outgoing models,” she says. Sipes believes that women are influencing purchases, considering that power liftgates and rear cameras are pricey options.
You may e-mail Jamie LaReau at jlareau@crain.com
