Customers are people too

Postmodern Sass has written an interesting piece about marketing and consumer targeting. I e-mailed her about it, and she replied:

I love teaching -- precisely for those moments like I had in my class last week with the "Rolex exercise". I was a little freaked out at how close they came to describing Jack. But it proves the marketing point I was trying to make: there's a typical customer for every product.

Who is the typical customer for my database? We should do a little research & thinking on this topic, sometime soon. I do know one very interesting thing about our customers as a group:

The people who use my database are almost exclusively female, but the people who buy it are almost exclusively male. Glass ceilings and all that, you know.

Thinking about this gives me an odd "elephant in the kitchen" feeling, that there is something really obvious here that I am missing. I can't help thinking that there should be a way to use this fact to improve the database - but how, where?

Enough blogging, already. Back to work.