A wave of progressive challengers are reinventing categories by connecting with female audiences and making women’s voices heard. But despite progress in marketing’s portrayal of women, fundamental problems remain, and largely unregulated social media platforms risk pushing society backwards on gender equality. Brandsplaining (Penguin Books), by Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts, explores how much has really changed since fourth-wave feminism and offers a solution for marketers to close the gap between how women are presented and how they really are. We chat with Jane and Philippa to discuss the notion of The Good Girl in advertising, the opportunities for brands in genuinely sexist-free marketing, and the hypocrisy of many brands on social media.

What was the frustration that led you to set up PLH Research, a consultancy specialising in female audiences?

Philippa: It was the observation — and this is still true today, that in advertising, men were in charge most of the time. And that was particularly true in the creative departments where it was primarily men, most of the time doing most of the work and certainly judging the work. So, as a result, female categories tended to be considered pretty second division. From a consumer point of view, we felt that there weren’t the same levels of interest in what women wanted and needed and how they were, so we’d see old-fashioned and outdated stereotypes of women in advertising.

Jane: It seemed to us like a massive missed commercial opportunity because, at the same time, we were seeing much better documentation of the female opportunity and just how much money they were worth as a consumer audience across the globe. The gap between the interest shown in the female audience and what they were interested in and the commercial opportunity they represented for most brands was huge.

What are some of the stereotypes of women that emerged in advertising due to it being such a male-dominated industry?

Jane: We talk about the notion of The Good Girl, as women presented in advertising who constantly have to play a pleasing role to men or male allies. Several different stereotypes get played out, but they all show the idea that women have to please men to be successful. Women have historically always been secondary in society to men who had all the wealth or power, and consequently, they’ve needed to play these roles to secure male patronage. Marketing has played a significant role in crystallising these ideas, painting them in technicolour for the audience and then suggesting that you can achieve Good Girl status if you buy products and services.

Philippa: This is as true today, even as much as it was then. A very dominant perfectionist narrative tells women throughout their lives that they are not enough, and they need to change and be different, and they should be working towards this idea of the Good Girl. Women are told they need to change their appearance, face, hair, clothes, and house. Whatever it is, it isn’t enough. And that’s genuinely so different to how male audiences get spoken to, where there isn't that constant need for improvement. It’s an endless perfectionism, which, as we now know, is very damaging, particularly for young women and girls.

What impact do you think fourth-wave feminism has had on marketing?

Philippa: Fourth wave feminism was created and catalysed by the rise of social media around 2005-06, and it continued really until 2015-16. Feminism was going mainstream, and social media enabled some proper grassroots conversation around what it meant to be a woman today. And then there were the brands that both rode and drove that wave in the early days. Most famously, of course, Dove and all the incredible work they did to change the narrative in beauty. A combination of social media catalysing fourth-wave feminism and these big brand interventions that launched femvertising led to a much more constructive narrative for women in marketing.

Jane: The responses we received initially to femvertising, certainly to brands like Dove, were very positive. Partly because Dove wasn’t just talking about the issue but actually running grassroots programmes in schools, and people were aware of that. But also, the campaign for Real Beauty felt like a proper response to women who had complained about impossible ideals in advertising for years. There are probably two problems with femvertising. First of all, some brands just did a veneer of feminism and used feminism as an advertising concept rather than delivering against a feminist purpose. But there’s another more fundamental problem with femvertising, which is it’s still ‘brandsplaining’. It’s still brands telling women they need to change. But instead of advertising telling women how to look, femvertising often tells women how to act. It says if women change their behaviour, they’ll achieve their goals. And in the same way, corporate feminism tells women to ‘lean in’. So again, it says women must change, don’t change the system. But that’s a fundamentally flawed approach. Because brands should be asking themselves, what have we been doing? And how does our category need to change?

Which brands are really listening and responding to women today?

Philippa: To sum it up in a sentence, the brands that are really listening to women today are trying to fix the category rather than fix the audience. In underwear, female-founded ThirdLove is making underwear for the wearer to feel comfortable, rather than for the male viewer, and talking to women in a conversational and understanding way, rather than presenting a male-gaze ideal that women need to live up to. Likewise, in female health, brands like Thinx and Ruby Love talk about female bodies in an open and direct way rather than in veiled terms. And brands like Glossier and The Ordinary cut through all the bullshit pseudoscience that’s usually directed at women in the beauty category by just being straightforward in how they talk about what they sell.

Jane: Whitney Wolfe’s Bumble is completely turning around the dating category by putting women back in charge of their love lives and sex lives. It’s not about women being there to be chosen, which is how Tinder made women feel. And again, there’s a huge commercial advantage on the back of connecting very deeply with women and, consequently, becoming brands of choice. Interestingly, many of these brands are D2C because these relationships have had to have been built directly with customers. It isn’t easy in the traditional corporate context to really listen to what women want and then respond to that.

What advice would you give brands looking to serve female audiences better?

Jane: Our research, methods and practices are all about ensuring that women and what they think get heard. And that often means asking women quite hard questions and getting them to really challenge the norms of the category. We would, for example, ask women how they feel the beauty category would operate if women were in charge of it, or mums were in charge of it, or young women were in charge. The result is a very different set of dynamics playing out in the category. And we often run two and a half, three-hour groups to really understand and get to grips with the context of women’s lives. Because often in consumer research, companies rush straight into the advertising or product development. And brands need to understand the context before getting into what do you think of my brand or what do you think of my product. First, brands should ask, how are you? And how is life for you?

Philippa: We did some fascinating work recently looking at the cycling category through a female lens. And we’d rarely seen a category that is so astonishingly masculine. Almost all the bike brands presented as if cycling was a race. It was all about survival of the fittest, who can cycle further or fastest, and the bike was a machine with all these features and facets required to excel at cycling. But we knew that for most women, cycling wasn’t about that at all. We knew that it was more likely to be about a really practical way of getting around. Or about aspects of wellness and well-being and being out in the air and the elements and connected to nature. And about sustainability and not being in the car. For many, it was more likely to be about being out together as a family or group of friends. These were all really rich territories and terrains, but these weren’t reflected in how bike brands were presenting which was about simply going faster.

While many progressive, often female-led, challenger brands push society forward in terms of gender equality, the social media platforms they were born on are built on algorithms that seem to promote quite sexist ways of thinking. What role do you think social media has had in advancing gender equality?

Jane: The algorithms are a huge problem. And the platform’s defence is usually that young girls love that imagery, and that’s what they want to see. But it’s imagery that plays on their fears. And it’s creating a very unhealthy hunger on those platforms with severe long-term health impacts for young people. Brands have to decide whether they want to participate in that, and many companies are refusing to. For example, Lush is not on social media anymore because they don’t believe it’s a safe space for their customers and their daughters. But social media has also been a massively progressive force for women. It facilitated the MeToo movement, which enabled so many female voices to be heard, so it can and should be a massive force for good in terms of progressive portrayals of women. It’s up to brands to decide where they want to stand. Most seem to be on the fence and doing both. They say ‘Dream Big’. And then show someone wearing a tiny little bikini.

Brandsplaining — Why Marketing is (Still) Sexist and How to Fix It by Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts is available now.