Society’s Changing, Are You?
We’ve been sharing our taboo research insights for a year now, and it’s clear that change is here. It’s not a matter of if but what progress we pursue now.
Women Want to Buy From Brands That Support Them
Ultimately, you can choose how you show up as a brand. This is privilege, and it is power. You can pander and prioritize your profits only. You can do the bare minimum to meet your bottom line. You can come up with any number of excuses why you can’t do more (“We’re just a brand!” “That’s not our responsibility.” “We don’t have the time or resources.”) Or, you can change minds and lives.
How to Help Women Feel Comfortable Sharing Taboo Purchases
Our research shows most women are talking about taboo purchases with people in their social networks. But to reach the women who would benefit most, brands need to make it easier for women to talk openly about their experiences. The first step might be starting and facilitating those general conversations so that women can ease into sharing more personal details.
Women Are Starting Taboo Conversations
Women talk. Even if they’re discerning about who they talk to, most do not keep taboo purchases completely private. These products and services may be taboo publicly, but that’s far from the case in women’s private conversations.
Join Women’s Conversations to Create Better Ads
Women often don’t see themselves in the body types, clothing choices, careers, lifestyles, emotions, and more presented in ads. The bar isn’t going to raise itself. It’s up to us. Can’t we create ads that resonate more? As far as we’re concerned, an ad hasn’t done its job unless the women in the audience can say, “I feel seen.”
Channel Word of Mouth to Reach Women
Women’s friendship circles have shrunk in the last two decades, but guess what hasn’t? The power of word of mouth in helping women find products and services they need.
Newsflash: Women Want Accurate Period Ads
In 2023, menstrual product brands are going head-to-head with media companies, continuing to gatekeep the messages women receive in their ads. These powerful companies often consider menstrual blood on par with other bodily fluids, deeming these visuals inappropriate, gratuitous, or graphic.
“Aunt Flo” Can Take a Hike
Menstrual product advertising in the U.S. has a long history of euphemism. Aunt Flo. On the rag. Crimson tide. Shark week. We have dozens and dozens of (cringy) ways to avoid saying menstruation. Our research shows women are 100% over cutesy terminology to reference their monthly cycle.
Sex, sexuality, and sex products in advertising
We know sex is a powerful force in people's lives. In some ways, it makes sense advertisers jumped (and continue jumping) to use it to sell products and services. But does sex sell?
We have two opposing forces at play. Advertising uses women’s sexuality, a Frankenstein version, to sell products and services. Yet women have little ad space for exploring their sexuality authentically. In some ways, how women feel about sex, sex toys, sexual identity, pleasure, desire, and more is absent in advertising. It’s implied, contorted, and avoided in messaging. Instead, women are often face to face with a reductionist version of their sexuality, with them as objects for men’s desire.
Where Have All the Women Gone?
We cannot accurately portray women of any age without hearing and seeing them. Advertisers must seek to understand women, commit to accurate representation, and then roll up their sleeves and do the work.
As our research revealed, women over 40 are thriving. They feel wiser, sexier, more confident, more powerful, more energized, and, paradoxically, younger than ever before, and yet they do not see their experience in ads. Often, ads targeting them focus on products for aging, slowing down, or desperately seeking ways to look and feel younger.
Women Writing Women
Women need to “write” the story in advertising. They need to be involved in the process — in leadership, product development, creative direction, and more.
Gender Stereotypes Advertising Needs to Ditch
Women are ready for something new, something fresh, and something relatable. The 600 women who participated in our attitudinal segmentation research and the insights we learned from them can help us advertisers usher in a new stereotype-free era.
Ad Targeting By Attitudinal Segment
Advertising has a long history of erasing women’s experiences and replacing them with stereotypes, impossible standards, and disempowering storylines. There’s been progress, but are we resting on our laurels instead of pushing for more?
taboos and gender inequality
Even though people of all genders buy products like cannabis, alcohol, and sex toys, women consistently say they’re treated differently by advertisers—as if they’re not using the same products as their male friends, partners, and brothers. Brands need to ditch their preconceived notions about gender-based consumption.
Perform Less, Empathize More
The road to advertising to women is often paved with good intentions. But good intentions are not enough to reach women. Performative feminism is advertising’s lip service, and women deserve better. Sure, the 50s housewife no longer features in ads, but sexism is still there; it’s just covert.
It’s Time for Brands to Talk Taboos
Change isn’t easy, and it often comes with discomfort. It’s time brands take on the discomfort. Do some heavy lifting with your messaging, take risks, and upset the status quo. On the other side, you gain access to women who are guiding financial decisions and have immense spending power.
How do you craft better messaging? And how do you assess whether it’s landing? Read on…
Increasing the Social Acceptability of Taboo Products and Services
According to our research, women are buying taboo products and services but are often reluctant to discuss these purchases with others. Women want to be understood and see their lives reflected in ads, and when social stigmas keep this from happening, it can prevent them from buying these products and services, discussing their use openly, and becoming brand advocates.
How Social Stigmas Influence Taboo Purchases
Social stigmas are a powerful force in the product and service world, serving as a literal wall between women and their communities. However, brands are uniquely positioned to take that wall down, brick by brick, making it easier for women to talk about products and services that benefit them.
Ending Gender Discrimination in Advertising
To advertise to women effectively, you need to understand their context. For many women, discrimination and gender disparities are realities they’ve faced and continue to face. These experiences are sources of pain, stress and are part of their daily lives. Advertising is more effective when it solves a problem, and many women have a big problem at work, at home, and just living in society.
How Advertising Can Help Solve Gender Equality
Advertising has a problem, and women want a solution. Women want better on-screen representation—to see themselves in ads the way they see themselves in life. And they want brands to wield their enormous power and influence to change society for the better. Our attitudinal segmentation research explores how women feel about advertising and what they want from brands. If advertisers want to get it right, they have to start listening.