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As women demonstrate a growing appetite for consumer tech products, retailers and manufacturers are still only beginning to cater to this potentially huge reservoir of customers. High-tech businesses and electronics retailers are changing store designs, increasing their marketing toward women, focusing on gadget accessories and boosting advertising in women's magazines--all in a pitch to get women to walk the aisles and walk out with cell phones, MP3 players and plasma televisions. To draw women in, stores have been turning down the music, changing the color schemes and adding staff trained to meet women's needs. Radio Shack has gussied up its gray and black decor with bright purple, orange and green at its newer stores. Aisles have been widened and the product arrangements redone to make the place look less like a cluttered electronics hardware store. The company also has put more women on the sales floor. "The store doesn't feel like a men's club anymore," said Charles Hodges, a spokesman for Radio Shack. "Now women can walk in and be helped by women just as knowledgeable as guys." Most technology manufacturers have few women among their top executives, and that translates into the kinds of products on the shelves and the way they are marketed, according to Quinlan, author of "Just Ask a Woman-cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy". Few devices-iPods and Palm handheld computers are among the exceptions--tap into a woman's sense of style, she said. "Design is key-attractive, holdable, showable design." she said. Women often are swayed to buy a product for reasons far different than those that drive men. They will choose a gadget not because they want to be a pioneer but be-cause they and their friends have discovered the usefulness of the thing. "Where men like to be the only one with a product, women like to bring more of her friends into their find--they want to share the good news of what's working for them," Quinlan said. But friends are only one of the ways that women are discovering what's important to them when it comes to tech. There's also a growing number of outside influences--product-specific or trend articles in magazines that target women of all ages, for example. Recently, Radio Shack worked with Seventeen magazines--known for its fashion, beauty and relationship features for young women--on a story about MP3 players.