Beyond Demographics: The Deep Work of Understanding Women.
Surface-level audience research isn’t enough—especially when you’re marketing to women. If you want to build trust, relevance, and resonance, you have to go deeper than age, income, and symptom checklists. You have to understand her values, her lived experience, her cultural pressures, and the emotional landscape she navigates daily.
One-Size-Fits-All Advertising Doesn’t Actually Fit Anyone.
When it comes to clothes, we all know the drill: "one size fits all" never really fits anyone. Sure, the tag might promise simplicity, but what it actually delivers is compromise. And a poor fit for everyone. The same thing happens with advertising. A one-size-fits-all approach demands that women adapt their unique experiences into the confines of a shallow, outdated stereotype—a stereotype that’s so basic and superficial, it’s really no one’s life at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.