(Photo Credit: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
International Women’s Day was this past Sunday, March 8th, and the month of March is celebrated as International Women’s Month. One of the annual traditions of these celebrations is that many corporate brands bend over backwards to build marketing campaigns that try to communicate how much they value and appreciate women.
Unfortunately for many companies, despite their best efforts, the ads and activations that they build often come across as inauthentic. And sometimes, they are so bad that they are relentlessly ridiculed on social media and by traditional media outlets.
This year, the award for worst International Women’s Day marketing campaign went to gas station brand, Shell. Shell decided to celebrate and appreciate women by changing its name to She’ll (as in She Will) online and for an activation at one gas station in California on Sunday. The company also ran an advertisement focused on the idea of women’s empowerment titled, She Will.
If you use Twitter as a barometer for the success or failure of advertising campaigns, it is safe to say that Shell’s campaign was a flop.
“As the “She’ll” activation circulated on Twitter today with an image of a gas pump with the temporary logo change, Shell’s effort was largely mocked and denounced for seeming opportunistic or insincere,” wrote Monica Marie Zorrilla for Adweek.
While it’s not an inherently bad thing for brands to recognize and celebrate International Women’s Day, as marketers, it’s worth considering if a one off celebration is effective at connecting with female customers.
A poll by WPP agency Berlin Cameron, which included more than 1,000 women ages 13-75, found that “90% think women should be celebrated year round. Beyond that, 30% said they think brands advocating for women in ads are just trying to drive sales.”
Berlin Cameron president Jennifer DaSilva told Adweek that “one month of women-focused initiatives aren’t enough to make women feel seen and heard. If brands want to show real support for women, they must find ways to celebrate them every day of the year.”
A separate poll by international consulting firm, Kearney, found a similar sentiment in its 2020 Women Consumers Survey. “Over 75% of women surveyed said they’d pay more for products that truly support the advancement of women, but walk away from brands they don’t see helping a cause.”
So how do companies market themselves in a more authentic way among women year round? How do they harness this opportunity to establish themselves as true champions for women consumers?
To me, the answer is to invest more marketing dollars into women’s professional sports. Leagues like the WNBA, the NWSL, and the NWHL are open for business. They are growing in popularity across the Unites States. But if you look at how many brands are investing in sponsorship of women’s sports, there’s a stark difference in the level of marketing spend in women’s pro sports in comparison to men’s pro sports.
The Massive Gap in Sponsorship Spending
To better understand why there is such a big gap in sponsorship spending between women’s pro sports and men’s pro sports, I talked with Caiti Donovan, the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of SheIS.
Donovan and her team founded SheIS to “use the power of women’s sport to create a future of, by, and for strong women.” The organization works to drive attendance and viewership of women’s sport at all levels, connect through storytelling, inspiring fans to take action, and centralize resources to help create the sustainable growth of women’s sports.
When I asked Donovan about this problem, she described the gap in sponsorship investment into women’s sports as a “chicken or egg conversation.” When we hear the reasons why companies are not spending as much money marketing in women’s sports, we often hear that there’s not enough people interested in women’s sports and therefore more people need to be watching and attending games before brands are ready to invest. However, there’s also an argument that brands and media organizations need to invest more up front in order to build the audience and build the overall interest in women’s sports.
Therefore, Donovan told me, we find ourselves in the position we are today where women’s sports sponsorship investment is equal to “less than five percent” of overall sports sponsorship spend, and “depending on who's data you're looking at, sometimes those can even sit at less than one percent,” Donovan said.
Indeed, an organization named Women in Sport estimated that “women’s sport sponsorship accounted for only 0.4% of total sports sponsorship between 2011 and 2013.”
In It For the Long Haul
So while it’s true that right now, women’s pro sports leagues have smaller audiences, and perhaps they won’t provide as big of a return on investment for marketers in the short-term as men’s sports, a shift in mindset needs to take place. The number one thing that brands can do to address this problem and to create deeper more authentic connections with women consumers? Think long-term.
“I’ve really looked at this space and started saying to brands—this is a long-term investment that you want to put your company behind,” Donovan told me. “The companies who are investing are already seeing incredible returns on women’s sports.”
Donovan cited brands such as Visa, Luna Bar, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, and Adidas as examples of companies that are reaping the benefits of marketing in women’s sports. The reason it is such a great opportunity? Because the current consumer atmosphere is very pro-women, and companies have a chance right now to grow their businesses by demonstrating their commitment to positive social progress.
“The sports world has always been full of our idols. It has been full of the people that we truly look up to that we want to mimic. So when we create spaces for women to be lifted up as these idols, it ultimately has a ripple effect into other areas of society where we start to see and treat women as idols and leaders.
So that's really the opportunity for brands—to start looking at that space and recognizing that this is truly an opportunity that will not only drive their bottom line, but is ultimately going to be in line with where the societal mindset is currently and is only continuing to grow.”
-Caiti Donovan, co-founder of SheIS
The Top Three Reasons Why Brands Should Sponsor Women’s Sports, Right Now
To make sure we fully wrap our heads around the opportunity to invest sponsorship dollars into women’s sports, I asked Caiti Donovan to break down the top three most compelling reasons why brands should consider investing right now. She can do a far better job articulating this than I can, so I thought I’d share her take. Here’s what she said (responses were edited for clarity).
1. The Vineyard Analogy (Get in on the Ground Floor)
“Everybody likes wine and if you're gonna go and buy a vineyard and invest in that, it's a long-term investment. You can't expect that you're going to have revenue-producing grapes at the end of year one, it needs to be a long-term proposition. You need to keep watering it, you need to keep putting the money into it year after year.”
“Within the next five seasons or so, I absolutely see a quick change happening in women’s sports, and definitely within the next 10 seasons, depending on the sport, there's going to be a massive revenue-driving product.”
“The way that I like to put it for brands is that right now, you're getting in on the California wineries at a time when everybody still thought that French wines were the only delicate and decadent wines. You're getting in on on this opportunity when the buy-in is less, when the opportunity is truly fluid, and when there's really something interesting that you can do that you can adapt and really be innovative at a ground level, but also at a level where it is a genuinely good product.”
2. Alignment With the Gen Z Consumer
“As we're looking at what Gen Z is really interested in, what they care about, what's going to motivate them to purchase, it is being involved in this space.”
“These are their idols, these are the people who are going to motivate them to take certain actions to be certain types of people. We've seen it with the likes of Kendall Coyne, definitely Megan Rapinoe. With any number of women who really had not had a lot of name recognition even 18 months ago, they are now becoming household names. Little boys and girls are dressing up as them for Halloween, they're posting videos saying hey, ‘I'm playing like Megan’ or ‘I'm playing like Kendall, I'm skating like Kendall.’”
“That's a real opportunity. You can align with where your young consumer is and you're setting up an opportunity to create real brand resonance for a long term and at a point when kids are definitely paying attention to this. That's gonna stick with them and that makes them more brand loyal as they continue to grow up.”
3. Opportunity for Collaboration and Innovation
“As we are going through this really interesting time right now where there is a lot of more defined black and white, and it's become a very divisive society, there's something to be said for the level of collaboration and opportunity that exists within the women's sports space.”
“Women are working together. They are, especially in sports, they are supporting one another. You can look at a number of the different content pieces, you can look at what Women Sports Foundation has done, what we've done at SheIS, what On Her Turf has been doing. This is definitely a space where as the saying goes, ‘If you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go further, go together,’ and the women's sports space is a go together space.”
“I believe that, and I have experienced that firsthand. This is the go further space and brands that want to really go further and want to establish that type of conversation with their fans, with their consumers, should be looking at women's sports as the biggest opportunity to do that.”
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