Dressing up packaging for consumer electronics: women purchase more than half of all high-tech gadgets. Branding tactics and packaging designs shift to attract female shoppers.

Think of consumer electronics products. The core target audience is male computer geeks in their twenties, right? Wrong. Women make up the majority of buyers.

"It has traditionally been a business that has a lot of brown boxes, especially for larger equipment," says Hayes Roth, Vice President for Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Landor Associates, a brand-consulting firm. "It was always about the latest widget you could get--what new bells and whistles we could add onto this box that could give us a competitive edge."

Today that is all changing. A recent study by the Consumer Electronics Association underscores the shift in the marketplace as marketers are re evaluating the power of the female consumer and coming up with new ways to make their product packaging more appealing to women.

"More and more women are comfortable with technology and certainly purchasing it," says Anne-Taylor Griffith, Communications Specialist for the Consumer Electronics Association. The organization found that women spent $55 billion on consumer electronics last year. Since the industry raked in $96 billion in total, women accounted for more than half of the dollars spent.

To take advantage of this growing audience, consumer electronics companies are redressing their packaging to attract female shoppers.

The main audience "isn't just guys who are gearheads," Roth says. Retailers know those days are over from a mass-marketing standpoint. So the new challenge is coming up with ways to appeal to women before their decision to purchase.

One company at the forefront of targeting women is Eastman Kodak

Picture this: Female buyers

"We decided about three years ago that we were going to target women with everything that we were developing on the digital camera side because in the film world, 70 percent of the pictures taken are by women," says Nancy Carr, Director of Worldwide Advertising and Vice President of Kodak's Digital and Film Imaging Systems division.

To attract the eye of female shoppers, Kodak sought to make the packaging appealing to mothers.

"If you go into a store and look at our packaging, whether it's on our digital cameras or our printer docks or even our inkjet paper, you will see a lot of the imagery is morns with kids Cart says. "Children, mothers doing things, the soccer moms of the world, kids being kids--the imagery is placed there specifically to attract her."