The 'A' to 'Z' of women's needs?

WHAT DO women really want? Here are the options.

a. Handbag

b. Shoes

c. Clothes

d. Cosmetics

e. Accessories

Well, at least those were all the choices an advertisement agency gave to those who had come to watch a special show of `What Women Want' arranged for one of the clients of the agency.

``As you can see, men don't figure in the list,'' smiles Anita Gupta, Senior Vice-President and General Manager of HTA.

The agency hit off on this idea to take all of its staff for the movie, and also use the movie title to promote their client's range of products, given that the film's storyline is set in an ad agency. Talk about mixing business and pleasure.

Incidentally, the ad agency in the movie, Sloane- Curtis decides to hire a woman creative director Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt) in a bid to break into the women's psyche and also bag clients vying for the increasing market of women's products.

The logic: Only a woman knows what a woman wants. So Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson), supposed to be male chauvinist in the film, gets Darcy for a boss whose very first assignment for her team is repositioning a few women's products. That's probably where HTA's own Darcy McGuire saw the bright idea. Of positioning women's products through a movie women would want to watch.

The agency arranged for giving away passes to Lifestyle's regular customers, who were asked to fill the questionnaire: ``What Does a Woman Really Want?'' with the five choices given above.

It is while trying out the women's products himself, when Nick electrocutes himself accidentally, and gets this miraculous power of hearing what women were thinking, just by looking at them.

One would have expected the film to do justice to the women characters, especially with a woman director Nancy Meyers, calling the shots. But throughout the movie, it's Mel Gibson who takes the cake, eats the best lines, gets the girl/s and has his way throughout, by just listening to what women think/want/think they want.

Some kind of mind-reading. Which, HTA brought in to make a pitch for its client: the joint can read a woman's mind. All those women (the men were included later) who had filled up the contest forms and dropped the coupons into the box, could win upto Rs. 1000 worth of whatever they had wished for, the agency announced.

Moving on with the story, Nick able to read through Darcy's ideas and mind, falls for her after lifting her ideas, but only after getting to more than date the girl he always wanted to, Lola (Marisa Tomei) and getting to understand his daughter Alexandra (Ashley Johnson), all by sheer listening to thoughts.

Thought-provoking and funny most of the time, What Women Want is surely a clever promo move by HTA for Lifestyle. But the options in HTA's promo contests-namely Handbag, Shoes, Clothes, Cosmetics and Accessories, most definitely are materialistic answers to the question.

Now, is that what women really want?

By Sudhish Kamath

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