U.S. Auto Firms Wonder: ‘What Do Women Want?’ : Sales: They buy half of all new vehicles, but Detroit is unsure how to tap the lucrative market.

DETROIT — The effort to sell cars to women might have reached its low point with the 1955 Dodge La Femme. Sold only in pink and lavender, with a rosebud interior and matching purse, umbrella, raincoat and boots, the ill-conceived sedan attracted fewer than 1,000 customers of either sex.

It has been apparent ever since that pastel is not the way to go. But four decades later, when women buy half of all new cars and even drive the contraptions themselves, the auto industry still has not quite figured out how to act around the “fairer sex.” Its clumsiness has, by many accounts, left the lucrative women’s market up for grabs.

Most agree that the industry is making progress: Auto designs are taking shorter legs and longer nails into account, auto advertising features conspicuously fewer women draped suggestively over hoods, and sensitivity training programs for dealers abound.

But attracting women without turning off men is just one quandary facing an international industry that has for years billed its products as the ultimate symbol of masculinity. Meeting women’s needs without patronizing them is another. Nor does simply avoiding blatant sexism yet come naturally to the heavily male-dominated business.

As the statistical evidence of women’s importance to the auto market keeps mounting, critics--and some auto executives--say the industry has a long way to go.

“One of the things that surprises me as we have talked about this in the company and shown people these numbers is that everyone is completely shocked” about statistics that show the strength of women’s buying power, says Bobbie Koehler-Gaunt, marketing research director for Ford Motor Co.

With women now spending what Ford estimates to be $65 billion annually to buy cars and trucks, Koehler-Gaunt and other industry analysts say manufacturers cannot afford to overlook the extent of women’s purchasing power much longer.

In the latest push in this long-running pursuit of the female motorist, Ford has launched a campaign to tout the company’s efforts at accommodating the growing women’s market. As a new twist, only female reporters were invited to this month’s presentation in Detroit.

Even at such an overtly promotional event, there was a hint of the ambivalence that has stymied past attempts to capture women’s hearts. Ford engineer Flora Brooks told how the company’s Women’s Marketing Committee had influenced a design change in the new Mercury Villager minivan when one of its members discovered that high heels got caught in the floor track on which the seat moves back and forth.

But committee Chairwoman Marilouise Burns hastened to explain that, although Ford expects half of the Villager and the 1993 Ford Probe customers to be women, they are not to be viewed as “women’s vehicles.”

“You can’t categorize them as women’s vehicles any more than you can categorize them as men’s vehicles,” Burns said. “They’re lifestyle vehicles.”

Women’s share of new vehicle purchases has climbed 13 percentage points since 1980 despite industry neglect, leading some manufacturers to insist that developing a different appeal for women is unnecessary.

But others say the dearth of products and advertising targeted at women leaves the field wide open for manufacturers who can come up with a way to cultivate loyalty among the many women now buying what’s out there almost by default.

“There’s an untapped opportunity in the women’s market,” says Tom Healy, a partner with Agoura Hills-based market research firm J. D. Power & Associates. “It’s a group that no one has really wooed. If someone can get out there with effective communication, they can steal the market.”

Certain things have already been tried.

As recently as 1986, for example, General Motors Corp.’s Buick division was advising its dealers to host tea parties for its female customers. Fashion shows were also recommended, until a group of GM’s female managers suggested that the idea was insulting--and not very effective besides.

Variations on Buick’s “Know Your Automobile” campaign, which invited women to single-sex workshops to learn basic vehicle maintenance, were also popular among auto marketers during the early 1980s. Buick went co-ed with its program when it was pointed out that, in fact, many men might benefit from such instruction as well.

Each of the Big Three created women’s advisory committees in the early 1980s. But Ford and Chrysler’s committees are purely voluntary activities for employees who have full-time jobs elsewhere in their respective corporations. And GM’s Buick and Chevrolet divisions disbanded their women’s panels several years ago after deciding that women car buyers want the same things as male car buyers.

“Now, we go to women’s conventions, so we have a presence at places where women are, but we don’t do anything to market specifically to women,” says Corby Casler, communications manager at Buick.

Most research has found that men and women do want the same essential characteristics in their cars, with women placing a higher priority on dependability, safety, comfort and dealer service, whereas men care more about driving performance and speed.

Other than that, it is the “little things,” says Brooks, that make a difference to women. For example, the Ford women’s committee lobbied for the installation of power lumbar seats to give pregnant women back support, and its counterpart at Chrysler persuaded engineers on the new Jeep Grand Cherokee to design an auto release mechanism for the vehicle’s heavy hood.

And then there is the “fingernail consideration,” as Niki Safron, head of Chrysler’s women’s committee, puts it, to which auto makers have paid near-zealous attention in recent years, designing knobs and door handles with special care for the well-manicured motorist.

Lexus’ male engineers went so far as to paste on fake nails to wear when they were testing proposed new designs for power window controls.

But a more substantial difference between the two sexes in vehicle preference, Safron suggests, is price. The reason is the male-female wage gap. According to 1992 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage for full-time male workers is $26,364; women make $19,812 in comparison.

“Women need to have a cheaper car,” says Safron, who writes owners’ manuals for Jeeps. “Women’s spending power isn’t the same as men’s. That’s probably the main difference in what they select.”

The importance of price is reflected in women’s representation in different market segments: they purchased 54% of all small cars in 1990, contrasted with 31% of large cars and 36% of luxury cars.

In a particularly dramatic example, when Mazda introduced the new model of its RX-7 sports car this year with a $4,200 price hike to $31,300, company marketing director Jan Thompson predicted that the number of women buyers would drop from 52% to 20% as a result.

Some analysts speculate that it is this bottom line, coupled with the threat of losing male customers should a model become known as a “woman’s car,” that has made auto makers reluctant to risk promoting a car directly to women.

“I don’t know if women’s interests are enough to make them a prime consideration when their buying power is factored in,” says Ann Job, who has written about the auto industry for 10 years and is now the test driver for the Associated Press. “I think there’s always the question in (the auto makers’) minds: ‘Will we be turning away men?’ ”

David Kiley, who writes about auto advertising for the New York-based trade publication Adweek, says Toyota is looking at ways to avoid that stigma with its sporty Paseo. The car has been an unexpected hit with women, who account for 69% of its buyers.

“They feel like they’re not getting as many sales as they could because they’re appealing more to women than to men,” Kiley says. “Either from a design standpoint or an advertising standpoint, they think it’s essentially too feminine.”

If there’s scant difference between what men and women want in a car, then the burden for attracting women shifts to the advertising folks and the imagery they create. Auto advertising has begun to shed its longtime reputation for depicting women as sex objects.

Advertising analysts say more auto ads aimed at women are appearing--the 1993 Ford Probe will be featured in the first six-page fold-out ad from an auto maker ever to appear in Elle magazine this August.

But as for appealing to women on their own terms, most agree that the industry has made little progress.

In a study of national automotive commercials from 1988 through 1991, Jim Hillson, an analyst at Phase One, a Beverly Hills-based advertising research firm, found that in the vast majority of those that included women, they were featured as a mother or part of a couple. Women were featured alone in only about 7% of the 225 commercials, which included all brands.

But there are some exceptions. A notable one is Saturn, the GM small-car subsidiary known for innovative advertising and customer satisfaction, which has made women the stars of several print and TV ads.

Still, even non-sexist advertising and a serve-the-customer mantra cannot avert the often hostile environment women encounter when they walk into a dealership. It is at the dealership level, where women have their only face-to-face contact with the company, that industry analysts and executives concede the most work needs to be done.

Debbie Hemela, a 41-year-old Altadena author and producer, was drawn to Saturn by its ads of “strong, earthy, solid women.”

But in a story echoed by many women who have ventured into dealerships recently, Hemela says she was laughed at and condescended to by employees at the Saturn of Monrovia franchise she visited. The dealership does not dispute her account.

“I’ve done my years in the ‘70s,” says Hemela, who ended up buying a Honda Civic despite receiving a personal letter of apology from Saturn President Richard LeFauve in response to her complaints. “I don’t need to be treated like that.”