Since last year, several media surfaces and advertising campaigns had been highly occupied with the topic of evaluating women’s roles, worth and their place in society. Does this tendency stem from deep empathy or financial interests?

Advertising to women makes good business sense, no denial in that. While women have traditionally handled household spending, making the overwhelming majority of home-related purchasing decisions, they are increasingly holding the purse strings in other areas typically considered to be male-dominated, such as electronics, finance and cars. Female control of purchasing decisions is not a new phenomenon; the female consumer base started to grow rapidly with the expanding of middle class.

However, many marketing executives have experienced the “dawning realization” of the female consumer only quite recently. This launched a rising wave of female empowerment advertising given its own name: “femvertising”. How could this trend become so popular and world-web wide? The answer is not far to seek, it all happened thanks to social media. It might be a surprise, but women are the more active users of social media - making up 58% of Facebook’s users, having 8% more friends than male users and accounting for 62% of shares on the social network – it is obvious that companies need to appeal to women.

Thus, brands started to make impact by numerous female-oriented campaigns, most impressively, denying the notion that a woman’s worth correlates to her physical appearance. Dove explores this idea with their new “Choose Beauty” campaign. The advertisement challenges women to enter a building through either a door labeled “Beautiful” or a door labeled “Average.” The ad has been watched by almost 8 million people on YouTube, at the same time the campaign received severe criticism as well, for some found it manipulative and polarizing. ‘Here’s my own public service announcement: advertisements aren’t empowering. Ads can be entertaining, they can be thought-provoking, and they can be inspiring. But they come with an agenda to sell a product.’ – wrote Arwa Mahdawi, journalist of theguardian.com. Dove’s response to the reviews was; women choosing “beautiful” are those who understand that their worth encompasses much more than mere looks.

Not only are Dove’s ads powerful and eye-catching, but the long-standing Real Beauty campaign is a move that has paid off in dividends for the brand: since launching Real Beauty more than 10 years ago, Dove’s sales have increased nearly two-fold from $2.5 billion to $4 billion. They have also paved the way for other mainstream brands to build market share while building acceptance. Since then, Google, Procter & Gamble, Verizon and Chevrolet are among the dozens of companies that have released videos championing female empowerment.

Always’ powerful #LikeAGirl advertisement, which gained immense popularity following its Super Bowl spot, presented that doing something like a girl has a pejorative content, it is associated to clumsiness and lack of power. Microsoft’s ‘Girls do science’ campaign shows that 7 out of 10 girls are interested in science, but as they grow older, only 2 out of 10 pursue it as a career for they regard science and technology being more of a ’boy thing’.

Several polls prove that female consumers favor brands whose advertising by-pass gender stereotypes and unreachable beauty standards in favor of diversity and pro-female messages and images. A SheKnows Media survey of more than 600 women found that 52 % of respondents have purchased a product simply because they liked how the brand and their advertising depicts women. A whopping 92 % of women who took the SheKnows Media survey said they are aware of at least one pro-female ad campaign (Dove’s Real Beauty being cited the most often) and nearly half have shared a commercial or print advertisement with a pro-female message.

Always’ and Dove’s ads could become extremely popular due to their endeavor to sell products by inspiring women and girls instead of lashing up feelings of shame and reinforcing their insecurities. We know well that female-empowerment campaigns are designed to boost a firm’s profit, but then, they transmit positive messages - such as, there is beauty in every dissimilarity, girls’ mental capacities aren’t lower than of boys’, everyone should be proud of what they represent as a person - to help women increase their self-confidence.

While often ringing as preachy or even clichéd, these campaigns draw critical attention to the daily challenges girls and women face regarding self-esteem. All in all, femvertising is good for bottom lines, at least in the short term. Profitable corporations are not likely to solve complicated societal problems present for a long while, but they can motivate people to bring forward a change on their own.

Sources:
www.bcgavel.com
www.theawsc.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
www.theguardian.com