What’s in this article:
The current state of marketing to women has a vibe that harkens back to the print ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes that ran through the 1970s and 80s with the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The backgrounds were a representation of the bad old days of restrictions on women that contrasted with the confidently posed model holding her slim cigarette.
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The bad old days for marketing featured blatantly sexist ads in which women aspired to nothing more than pleasing their husbands or on catching a husband by being pretty and ladylike. We have moved on, but not altogether.
Marketers have become aware of the need to move with the time and have adapted ad images accordingly. The way women are represented in ads is no longer limited to airbrushed models who exhibit the “right” figure, skin tone, hair, and age.
While ad imagery has come a long way, surveys of women indicate that marketing still has a long way to go.
Not exactly passing marks
Only 29% of American women believe advertising portrays them accurately is the title of Callie Schweitzer’s LinkedIn article posted on March 9, 2021. The statistic comes from Morning Consult. Even men weren’t fully convinced, as less than half (44%) said they considered women’s representation accurate.
A flame-broiled fiasco on International Women’s Day 2021
You don’t have to look hard for the brand that seriously misread the room in issuing a Tweet in honor of International Women’s Day, and the Internet made sure you knew about it even after the Tweet was deleted.
The extremely provocative-sounding declaration was meant to reference support for women who become professional chefs and its project called HER (helping equalize restaurants). But without that immediate context provided only within the print ad that you can see below, there was the apparently sexist declaration alone, and that boomeranged against the brand.
The backlash was so strong, that the account had to offer the combination of an apology and reason for deleting the tweet.
Burger King fell right into that marketing hole that Schweitzer complained about with an assertion that “perpetuates centuries-old cultural stereotypes of what society ‘expects’ women to be.” It should be obvious that marketers should steer clear of marketing to women in such forms. But it is still trickier for them to identify what women do want to see and hear in marketing.
What women want
A couple of years ago, Kantar set out to find out exactly that with its study What Women Want? It concluded “that brands can do more to engage with women meaningfully and that doing so has both commercial and societal benefits.” It offered a number of recommendations to focus on representations that makes women feel included and understood.
More recently, a Marketer Must Read survey of 500 women in the United States revealed some answers that Schweitzer shared in her article. Not everyone found fault with marketing, though some took issue with specific types of women shown like “‘complainers’” and “‘Stepford wives.’”
Some found the standard mom figures rather too limited and said they’d like to see women shown outside the pink-collar trades. Ideas include “fighter pilots, construction workers and CEOs.” Generally, they indicated they would like to see portrayals that are “less sexualized and more inclusive of women of different sizes, shapes and ethnicities.”
Substantial diversity
Marketers’ response has been to try to be more inclusive, and that, in turn has led to a lot more searches for images that tick diversity boxes. In 2020, image searches for “diversity” increased 133% and “inclusion” 126% over the previous year, according to Getty figures. Certainly, anyone paying attention to the imagery currently used by retailers and brands can see that the models are a lot less uniform than they had been in the past.
Even dolls are no longer limited to a single Barbie mold. The same impetus has even influenced products. A couple of years ago Mattel introduced its Fashionista line of Barbie dolls featuring a whole range of body types, hair colors, skin tones, and even includes dolls with prosthetics and Vitiligo.
Yet certain ads still leave women feeling excluded, as exemplified by one of the Kantar study’s quotes: “Sometimes I feel that companies only like to empower certain ‘types’ of women that fit into what they think an Empowered Woman is.”
Another woman in the Kantar study complained about idealized beauty shown in the context of exercise (one of the reasons the 2019 Peloton ad came under fire). She said: “When I see ads of tall, thin, pretty women in tight-fitting sports gear smiling while they run / cycle / do whatever, I just feel alienated and frustrated as I’m not able to be part of that demographic.”
Different types of women exercising together
Athleta must have had that complaint in mind when it designed its current ad campaign with the tagline “Athleta all powerful women” and the hashtag #PowerOfShe. The video description says: ““We believe in the power of all. Introducing our most inclusive size range yet – 500+ favorite styles, now available in sizes XXS to 3X, online and in all stores.”
Athleta does get credit for breaking out of the mold of showing only slim women exercising, but it still could have done better by thinking beyond differences in race and body shapes. There are no women here who look over 40, and it would have been great, for example, to include one who is visibly older or with graying hair.
They could even do better by expanding their range of clothing to include exercise clothes offering enough coverage to work for observant Muslim women to wear in public. Even more daring would have been to show a woman who does exercise without being conventionally able-bodied, relying on extra support, a prosthetic, or a wheelchair. Perhaps next year.
Improving representation for women in marketing is still a work in progress.
We should be happy that we have come a long way from the bad old days of marketing that clearly did assume women belong in the kitchen. Yet we still have a way to go in letting women in their great variety of roles, shapes, ages, abilities, and hues be seen in full.