Ground Floor: Writing about Dundrum Town Centre elicited more response from Irish Times readers than I usually get from writing about the dollar or euro zone recovery prospects, which is not all that surprising.

Most people who've shopped there are cynical, but there is a cluster of readers waiting with baited breath for the arrival of Harvey Nicks.

My shopping binge made me think more about the nature of retail - a huge part of which is creating demand for something you didn't know you wanted in the first place.

What makes us shop in one store and not another? Why do we favour one brand over its rival? Why is it that one year Levis are the only jeans you could consider wearing and the next it's Calvin Klein? Why do people suggest that shopping can be a "holistic" experience?

Marketing is the main answer and marketing is all about finding our insecurities and persuading us that by shopping at Dundrum rather than Liffey Valley, or by buying L'Oréal rather than Garnier, we are better people.

It's nonsense, but we allow ourselves to be seduced by it, even knowingly. I don't generally buy expensive cosmetics, for example, but when I splashed out on a high-priced brand, I tried to convince myself that it was doing a better job than the one for a third of the price. Sadly, it wasn't. I still have those fine lines that were meant to vanish in an instant.

The marketeers now have to chose where to target their spending power to get a return on their investment in increased sales. Their prime target is working women in the 24-54-year-old age bracket who, despite still earning less than their male colleagues, make more than 80 per cent of the domestic buying decisions.

Anecdotally, the statistic is true. In our household, the man chooses the snacks and I deal with everything else - although we did have a long conversation about the choice of car.

The net result of the realisation of a woman's power to influence spending is that manufacturers are paying far more attention to a product's aesthetic appeal, knowing that if it does the job but looks awful, a woman is more likely to turn away from it.

However, the problem for the marketing people is not in the cut-throat health and beauty area, where women either know what they want or let themselves be persuaded otherwise, but in attracting a woman's attention to products that they traditionally market to men - such as DIY and electronic equipment.

Surprisingly, it seems to take marketing people time to get up to speed with changing trends!

Their problem is that, generally, women don't have time to be distracted by advertising for products that they're not specifically interested in at any given time.

We may instinctively tune in to information about a new face cream but, unless we're thinking about putting up shelves, we're far too busy juggling career and a family to notice ads for hammer-action drills.

A new term, "multiminding", is used to describe a woman's simultaneous thought processes. Multiminding makes it difficult for marketing people to distract us from thinking non-retail thoughts and to focus our attention on buying their product.

Although aesthetics are important to women, more women demand technical detail on a product than their male counterparts.

In other words, we're more demanding consumers. We're less likely to take a salesperson's word regarding the quality of the product and we're far more likely to have done advance research and demand the answer to the question that they didn't want us to ask.

Simply labelling something "for women" or colouring it pink won't work.

Most research confirms that women consumers have the power to make or break brands. Women will walk out of a shop without buying anything if they don't like the attitude of the salespeople.

Equally, however, women are more likely to shop online than most marketing people realised - in 2000, female online purchasers outnumbered their male counterparts, although, at that time, the internet was heavily marketed towards men.

One of the more interesting things about female consumers is that we will ask for help more readily than men. Just as we ask for directions when we're lost instead of driving around hopelessly in circles, we will look for someone to assist us if we are unsure about the product.

Although price is still a major factor in our purchasing, the fact that many of the goods that we buy are items that we don't need, but simply want, has turned retail into an even more marketing-driven experience.

Browsing in the hope of being seduced by an implanted idea of what the product can do for you has replaced shopping as a means to an end, and the net result is that the stores are constantly battling each other for our custom and trying to make our shopping experience "holistic".

They need to keep fighting. Competition in the sector is fierce and uncompromising.

It's nice to know that I have such power but I'm not sure I really use it and, although I enjoy DIY and downloading music, I still wish the expensive cream had worked.

www.sheilaoflanagan.net