Okay, I never thought I would start a post with that title, but I couldn’t resist. In today’s Wall Street Journal, I read about a new craze that’s kind of the push up bra for your derriere. Seems that Beyonce and Kim Kardashian’s curvy bottoms have now made a well-shaped backside top of mind for millions of women who are buying all kinds of inflated panties to make up for what nature didn’t give them.

A couple of women dreamed up Booty Pop which is really just underwear padded on the back to fill out tight jeans. Spanx has their version. Victoria’s Secret has theirs. Might there be a Butts R Us coming to a shopping mall near you?

Guess there’s a never ending market for giving women a chance to become what they’re not. Curly haired women get keratin straightening treatments. Pale girls are instantly spray tanned. And now pancakes are becoming creampuffs. The good news about this story is that for once, the bigger gals or the ones with ‘assets’ get to win for a change. And that is truly bootylicious!

I was glad to see the recent findings that declared that exercise and weight loss are just a nudge away. Supposedly, test groups of women who were reminded to exercise by human or computerized phone calls, worked out more often and lost more weight than the control group. Women are used to being nagged or to nagging themselves but these ‘nudges’ were done in a good way. Could positive reinforcement be the answer to the never-ending cry of “I don’t have time to exercise”?

I am a testimony to the success of this carrot vs stick approach. Although I worked out for years with trainers who could teach me good form, I never really cracked the code of exercising out of their sight. But (drumroll), one year ago, I started to work out with a wonderful woman named Colleen Tomko of Frenchtown, NJ and she has made all the difference due to one thing: a constant stream of motivational nudges, courtesy of text messaging. Every day she’ll write me simple texts like, “How was the gym?” (note her expectation that I went) or “H2O? Pushups? How are the food choices?” which make me grab the water, hit the floor and drop the muffin I may have accidentally grabbed.

For the first time in my life of up and down pounds, I’ve lost and kept off 20 pounds and exercised pretty much 5-6 days a week for a year and shockingly kept a positive mental attitude toward the whole process (or “PMA” as Colleen cheerily calls it.) It’s true that when I’ve shared my Colleen messages with others, the constant attagirl’s aren’t for everyone. But marketers who are wondering how to get customers re-engaged, might try the nudge approach—that doesn’t sell or scold—but simply reminds.

Yesterday’s Wall St. Journal story about Campbells hit me with a big ‘duh’. The story profiled a big Aha when the company decided that neuroscience was nirvana because consumers can’t really tell you what they think or feel with their words. Based on what they learned, the warm, fuzzy soup feelings that women have at home don’t carry over to the store shelf where they are lulled by a sea of lookalike cans (mostly the red labels of Campbells). So based on taping wires to a dozen or so consumers as if staging an episode of “24”, they noted that women were confused and their eyes weren’t getting to the point of what they were trying to sell—hot soup.

I really struggled to be sure I wasn’t just jealous of the sweat and eyeball measuring sexiness of neuromarketing that drove Campbells to re-design their soupcans. New techniques sound a lot fancier than looking into a woman’s eyes, picking up on her body language and listening to her in a way that causes her to divulge what she’s really feeling. Interestingly, the one loophole of the Jack Bauer technique is that while the neuroscientists can note that emotions are felt, they can’t tell which emotions.

Are ya kiddin’ me? Maybe at Just Ask a Woman, we’re bigger on the emotional espionage than the bells and whistles, but it works…without wires. Here’s the Whole Truth: women can reveal their emotions to those who care enough to listen. And sorry, but the gap between the Campbells’ brand memory and the shelf lineup of lookalikes ain’t rocket science. Just ask.

Christina Passariello wrote an interesting article today in The Wall Street Journal about the guilt people have when they are buying luxury goods. I absolutely agree with the article and there was one line in particular that keeps sticking with me because it is one that I’ve heard in research plenty of times. 

“It used to be about keeping up with the Joneses, and now it’s about outsaving the Joneses,” says Alexis Maybank, the co-founder of Gilt Groupe

On the surface I think this statement is very true because more than ever we are comparing ourselves to our neighbors and friends (even more to our enemies) to see how we are faring against them while the times are tough.   On a deeper level I’m just not sure how much saving is really going on. 

I spent a lot of this year traveling to talk to women about their lives and the economy and what I kept hearing was that they were still spending but they were spending differently.  Some used coupons for the first time (my favorite was a self proclaimed luxury queen who said ‘coupons were her crack’ now) and others shifted spending from themselves to buying for their children or saving for college but not for retirement but the money was still being spent. 

Many women talk about being “good” almost Puritanical for a few weeks and then feeling righteous enough to let a little spending slip in.  Before they know it they have spent more than they anticipated and jump right back on the saving wagon. (A pattern us women have learned from years of dieting!) Bottom line though is the money is still spent.

Making sure we are on par with the Joneses protects our egos and makes us feel like we aren’t that bad.  (A little Schadenfreude, anyone?)