During one of my marketing classes in business school, they emphasized how every single piece of wardrobe in successful department stores are placed strategically.  I remember walking into Macy’s from the main entrance and finding the high-end men’s suits immediately to my right, and women’s designer shoes to my left with the accessories section straight ahead.  Out of curiosity I found the back entrance to the store and found men’s more casual clothing to my right and the junior’s section to my left, with purses straight ahead of me. Where was the women’s clothing? It was given the entire second floor, and kids and house-ware could be found on the third floor. Throughout Macy’s you always seem to find the regular priced items towards the front, with the sales racks in the back.  Overall I found this to be a good strategy.

It was clear that the store carried products for both genders and a variety of ages, and the products were strategically placed to encourage buyers to find what they’re looking for before they got to the sales racks resulting in decreased potential profit to the store. Online, Macy’s does not do as good as job marketing to both their male and female target customers, and unfortunately neither do their competitors.

I normally enjoy browsing through racks and going to the physical location of the store, but with a full-time job, and a baby it’s not always so convenient. Especially when I need to go shopping for my husband! Thank God for the Internet right? Well yes of course, but after browsing through the first three sites of the stores that I normally go shopping at it was clearly evident that men are not getting the attention they deserve.

I start at  Lordandtaylor.com because I have a coupon that expires in a couple of days and thought it would be beneficial to put it to good use.  This is where I landed:

As you can see there were no visual displays of men’s products on the homepage, so using the navigation bar I clicked on “MEN’S” and landed on:

Still, there are no displays of the latest trendy outfits that you would find in the store.  We thought that they probably don’t have any good sales running since they weren’t actively advertising for them and moved on to nordstroms.com.

Again, the homepage I am faced with displays a large ad geared towards women.

The funny thing is that I noticed in the navigation bar that “MEN” was the second item

as opposed to the fifth at lordandtaylor.com:

Interesting strategy! Let’s see what their men’s page looks like:

What an improvement! OK, now our interest was sparked by the “JEANS GUIDE” ad in the top right. We didn’t end up finding what we were looking for, so we decided to go to Macys.com.

Wow, I was expecting to see “women” as the first item again in the navigation bar and was surprised to find it third after “for the home” and “bed and bath”.  They still incorporated women’s shoes in their main landing page though, however as shown there is a clear “shop men” as well. On a side note they have an excellent call to action bolded in red at the top of the page. I don’t even need furniture and I was tempted to buy something since this was the “last week to save!”

We moved to the men’s page and landed on:

The big promotion for the week at Macy’s seemed to be shoes and furniture so after a few long hours online, we decided that it would be much easier and less time consuming to just go to the mall! Besides, my husband was offended by the lack of attention that men received on all three sites. I wonder how many of their men prospects are actually converting?