Bridging the efficient light bulb gender gap

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http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=132180&ntpid=24

Bridging the efficient light bulb gender gap
Staff/news services

One of the dimly lighted truths of the global warming era is that compact fluorescent light bulbs still seem to be flunking out in most American homes -- often, market research suggests -- because women are less likely to accept the light they throw off.
..........

In groceries and drugstores, where 70 percent to 90 percent of light bulbs historically have been sold and where women usually have been the ones doing the buying, CFLs have not taken off nearly as fast as they have in home-improvement stores such as Home Depot and Lowe's, where men do much of the shopping.

"My gut feeling is that the last remaining factor that we have not cracked in selling these bulbs is the wife test,' " said My Ton, a senior manager at Ecos Consulting, a company in Portland, Ore., that does market research on energy efficiency.

Published: May 3, 2007

(ducking)
':nuke:'


seriously.
enlighten me.
I don't get it.

I spent two years designing and selling lighting and most of the current CFLs really suck at light quality-- the light is generally a sickly yellow and lousy for things like putting on makeup.

Guys, btw, hate fluorescent light when they do stuff like painting, modelmaking, photography, and such. Women who do that sort of thing just have another reason to hate fluorescent light.

Excellent flourescent light exists, with quality every bit as good as the best incandescent, but it is expensive and the light output goes down, so we don't see it mass marketed. (My best customers were large fabric design studios where I relamped entire floors with full-spectrum flourescents, giving them almost perfect lighting and saving them a bundle on lost productivity waiting for the Macbeth box or finding a window.)

So, we see women cruising the lightbulb aisle and not even thinking about buying a CFL when all those cheap flattering incandescents that don't buzz, take time to warm up, or hurt your eyes are still for sale.

The average woman is still being educated to think that technical stuff -- engineering, science and math are for guys. The kind of light bulb you use is a technical thing and an automatic turn-off to a lot of women.

http://image.bizrate.com/resize?sq=160&uid=491980236&mid=147816

:shrug:

who would just grab the old style lightbulb off the shelf out of ignorance and disinterest. And I ascribe the ignorance and disinterest as a bias against anything having to do with wires or the like. I don''t think younger women feel that way, but a lot of women in my generation do.

women who were stuck on the old-fashioned bulbs due to habit and familiarity I would emphasize *SAVINGS* -- women of all ages like a bargain and will change their habits to save $$$ - especially on something like the electric bill.

not to hijack, but what is a macbeth box? I have color corrected florescent in my sewing studio. And I'm little by little adding cfls around the house. :hi:

specially calibrated lamps in it for color checking and matching of dyes, prints, fabric grading and all sorts of stuff like that. It, or something like it, is sbsolutely necessary in any shop or studio where color matching is critical.

Color corrected full-spectrum fluorescents with a CRI in the 90s will do fine for most work, like your sewing studio or most design studios, where color is important-- just not for some final corrections in production.

I'm not sure if they ever tried selling them in those stores or not.
Could it have something to do with the stores themselves rather than the customers?

grocery stores - placement at eye level is critical for sales.

to cost more than in a home improvement store. I learned that if you want the best for your money you buy groceries at the grocery store, home improvement items at a like store, fabric at a fabric store, drugs at a drug store etc. At least around these parts.