QUINLAN, Mary Lou 1953-

PERSONAL: Born 1953. Education: St. Joseph's University (Philadelphia, PA), B.A., 1975; Fordham University, M.B.A., 1982; Alvernia College, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES: Office—Just Ask a Woman, 670 Broadway, Ste. 301, New York, NY 10012.

CAREER: Writer, business consultant, lecturer, and advertising executive. St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA, director of communications, 1975–78, and adjunct professor of marketing; Avon Products, director of advertising, 1978–89; Ally & Gargan, senior vice president, 1989–91; DDB Needham, executive vice president and managing partner, 1991–94; N.W. Ayer & Partners (advertising agency), president, 1994–99, CEO, 1995–99; MacManus Group, vice chair, 1999; Just Ask a Woman (strategic marketing company), founder and CEO, 1999–. Member of board of directors, St. Joseph's University, and 1800flowers.com.

MEMBER: New York Women in Communications.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named Advertising Woman of the Year, Advertising Women of New York, 1995; Matrix Award for Advertising, New York Women in Communications, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Just Ask a Woman: Cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy, J. Wiley & Sons (Hoboken, NJ), 2003.

Time off for Good Behavior: How Hardworking Women Can Take a Break and Change Their Lives, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Fast Company, Marie Claire, MORE, Global Cosmetics Industry, and O.

SIDELIGHTS: Author, advertising expert, and business consultant Mary Lou Quinlan has some real-world advice for retailers who see their sales sagging and their receipts dragging. Don't blame the market or the economy or other external factors, Quinlan advises. Instead, look to the source of eighty percent of the retail sales made in America today: women. Successful marketing to women is a matter of listening to what women want and taking their needs into account when advertising products and services to them. In Just Ask a Woman: Cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy, Quinlan offers sage advice, leavened with humor, on the importance of women and women's influence on business in the twenty-first century. Her conclusions are based on her long career in marketing and advertising, as well as on hundreds of interviews she personally conducted with women in conjunction with her strategic marketing consultancy, Just Ask a Woman, founded in 1999.

There is no single correct answer to the question of marketing to women, Quinlan notes, and business must be attentive to changing needs and wants of women as their lives evolve. "Women change every day," Quinlan said in an interview in ConsumerMarketing Biz. "Even after listening to so many women over the years, I continue to be surprised. They are never predictable. Their lives are operating at a huge rate of acceleration, and they are adapting and growing every day." Quinlan writes about the thought processes that lead women to buy. For example, reluctance to commit to a purchase does not necessarily mean distrust of the product or service; instead, it usually means that the woman needs more information about what she is being asked to buy, and that she feels the need to consult with her personal coterie of experts and advisors before she makes the purchase. "Women are better than men at thinking on different levels at the same time," noted Rance Crain in Crain's New York Business. "And women don't see things as contests, as men often do."

Women are looking for products and services that will simplify their already complicated lives. Too many companies do not understand this basic need of their most numerous customers. They also tend to couch their advertising messages in the simplest, safest terms possible. "The biggest mistake companies are making in advertising to women is how bland it all is," Quinlan said in ConsumerMarketing Biz. "Ad campaigns are missing so many emotional jumping off points to communicate and be relevant to women," she continued. "Companies are not carving out uniquely relevant messages to women. They are relying on the same boring stuff." Perhaps worse, Quinlan "contends that women are angry, because they feel largely ignored by the retailers who depend on them for their economic success," observed a reviewer in MMR. "I wish companies trusted women more and really believed in their capacity to help them solve their problems," the author remarked in the ConsumerMarketing Biz interview.

Just Ask a Women is "particularly strong in its analysis of what women's lives are like and how that translates into their needs, behavior, and demands as consumers and potential customers," commented a reviewer in Marketing to Women: Addressing Women and Women's Sensibilities.

In Time off for Good Behavior: How Hardworking Women Can Take a Break and Change Their Lives Quinlan offers advice for busy women who want to take time off from their careers to improve their lives and recharge themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. She relates her own story of how, as CEO of a mid-sized advertising agency, she was exhausted and burned out. "Like many women, I was empathetic to everyone's problems but my own," Quinlan wrote in an article for O. "Finally, a concerned friend suggested I needed some serious downtime. That obvious insight had never occurred to me, but I was so exhausted and at my wit's end that I turned a mental corner." She asked for a five-week sabbatical, which allowed her to experience life at a slower pace and to reassess her priorities. At the end of the five weeks, she quit her job, and shortly thereafter founded Just Ask a Woman, her marketing consultancy. The switch in careers did not result in disaster. "Many days I work just as hard as I did at the agency," she wrote in O. "The difference is that I'm doing things I love, and I protect my rest stops. I work out regularly. I don't do the late-night shift anymore. Weekends are weekends. And my family comes first."

Quinlan also profiles thirty-seven other women who, like her, were desperately in need of a change and who gathered the courage to take a sabbatical, quit a destructive job, or shift careers into a field better suited to their temperament and life goals. She "generously hands readers the tools (e.g., end-of-chapter questionnaires) to do the same," noted Booklist reviewer Barbara Jacobs. Library Journal contributor Deborah Bigelow found the book to be "well written," while a Publishers Weekly critic called it an "energetic … rumination on the transformative power of time off" that is "undeniably appealing in concept."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 2004, Barbara Jacobs, review of Time off for Good Behavior: How Hardworking Women Can Take a Break and Change Their Lives, p. 696.

Business Wire, March 9, 2004, "Marketing Guru Mary Lou Quinlan Reveals the Female Consumer Profile for the Yellow Pages Industry," p. 5526.

ConsumerMarketing Biz, August 17, 2001, Lisa Johnson, "Mary Lou Quinlan of Just Ask a Woman Explains What Marketers Need to Know about Women" (interview).

Crain's New York Business, July 21, 2003, Rance Crain, "CEO Gender Modification," review of Just Ask a Woman: Cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy, p. 9.

Global Cosmetic Industry, March, 2005, review of Time off for Good Behavior, p. 9.

Library Journal, January 1, 2005, Deborah Bigelow, review of Time off for Good Behavior, p. 134.

Marketing to Women: Addressing Women and Women's Sensibilities, July, 2003, "Why Marketers Should 'Just Ask Women,'" review of Just Ask a Woman, p. 9.

Mediaweek, April 23, 2001, Megan Larson, "Spotlight On: Mary Lou Quinlan," p. 21.

MMR, May 12, 2003, "Understanding How Women Buy," review of Just Ask a Woman, p. 14.

O, the Oprah Magazine, April 24, 2004, Mary Lou Quinlan, "The rest of Her Life," p. 206.

People, January 31, 2005, interview with Quinlan.

Publishers Weekly, December 6, 2004, review of Time off for Good Behavior, p. 52.

ONLINE

Just Ask a Woman Web site, http://www.justaskawoman.com/ (May 21, 2005), "Mary Lou Quinlan."