There are a few people who are exploring this opportunity, like Andrea Learned, who runs the Learned On Women blog and is also the co-author of Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy. . The core of her ideas is available for free in her Manifesto, Marketing to Women for the Common Man. .

” Women showed much stronger buying involvement than did men, particularly on the leisure and social dimensions, whereas men were high on apathy … as a general tendency, men are comparatively more motivated by functional factors, whereas women are more motivated by emotional and social factors.” (1)

(1) Helga Dittmar, Karen Long, and Rosie Meek, “Buying on the Internet: Gender Differences in On-Line and Conventional Buying Motivations,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 50.5-6 (2004), Questia, 28 Dec. 2007

This paper, along with other research, supports what most people would have guessed: shopping can have a strong social component, but primarily for women.

Increasingly, shoppers use social shopping networks like This Next or Kaboodle to find new products. Your customers are talking about products on sites like Style Hive and reading about them on Omiru. If your products are not on sites like these, they may be invisible.

Clothing isn’t just a commodity; it is a personal statement, and customers buy for entertainment, or therapy, or to express themselves. Your marketing campaigns should be just as personal, getting customers involved with your products and your brand.

Furthermore, when asked how they find new retailers, 52% of 700 online consumers said they used a search engine, versus 17% for word of mouth and 81% of respondents have researched products online, most often using a search engine.

With such a large number of customers using the web for product research and to find new retailers, it is critical for all retailers to have a web presence, even if the retailer does not intend to sell products online.

The report predicts the revenue of the online apparel, accessories and footwear market at $22.1B in 2007, a 21% increase from the previous year, with about 10% of total sales in the sector occurring online. As Shop.org notes in a press release, the online clothing market is now larger than the online computer hardware market, even though a much smaller percentage of all clothing is purchased online.

One of the most interesting features of the report is the six full-color landing page heatmaps. The heat maps look like high-tech heat-vision images of a web page, where the parts of the web page get hotter or colder depending on where people look or click. They are useful tools for figuring out what parts of a page attract the most attention.

For apparel retailers, the most interesting findings are:

• 20% of all consumers will research apparel purchases online
• Conversion rates for repeat visitors is low for apparel retailers, only 8%

The VRM Wiki page describes it as:

The goal of VRM is to improve the relationship between Demand and Supply by providing new and better ways for the former to relate to the latter. It is to improve markets and their mechanisms by best equipping customers to play the role of independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply side of the marketplace.

Johannes Ernst also talks about the idea on his blog. Johannes gives this example:

With Vendor Relationship Management, you would construct an RFP saying what you want, put it somewhere (e.g. on your blog), and vendors would propose solutions to your problem.

Doc Searls seems to have kicked the VRM idea off with this post .

A user centered data server like Central Sign On could participate in VRM in a variety of ways:

Publishing a consumer’s RFP for a product.

Publishing preferences or past product purchases. This information would help a vendor select a product that the consumer might like.

Publishing other information required for a transaction, such a shipping addresses.