Insight and testing helped ‘This Girl Can’ inspire 2.8m British women to exercise
Insight and testing, not preaching, was key to the success of the British Government’s This Girl Can campaign in driving behaviour changes, according to its architect, Tanya Joseph.
Joseph told the audience at Mumbrella’s Health & Wellness Marketing Summit that while the campaign took a year from the first discussions to the above the line launch, the majority of time was spent gathering and testing insights.
This Girl Can generated a worldwide response
This Girl Can was launched by Sport England in 2015, aiming to close the gender gap between men and women in fitness.
Two and a half years later, 2.8m British women have been inspired to do some activity or more activity, and 1.6m British women are doing exercise for the first time since school.
For Sport England, the campaign was the most “impactful intervention” they had ever made into getting people active – compared to direct investments in sports, facilities and other various initiatives.
According to Joseph, the insight which drove the results, was women’s fear of judgements, which was holding them back from sport and exercise.
“Insight was at the very heart of what we did, so it informed the creative campaign. It also informed all our media planning,” Joseph told the audience.
In order to “liberate women” from judgements, Joseph said Sport England was particularly mindful of casting, and various sporting activities featured.
Joseph said insight was at the ‘heart’ of the campaign
“We talked about it being campaigning, rather than a campaign,” she said.
“Women come in all shapes and sizes, and all levels of ability. It doesn’t matter if you’re rubbish, or an expert – the point is you are a woman and you are doing something.”
To communicate with the public, Sport England used everyday women, rather than celebrities or elite athletes, to communicate their message.
“We had to promote a wide variety of activities, it couldn’t just be about women playing football, or women running, or women playing hockey – it had to be about everything,” she added.
“We also had a lot of debate about how thin they could be and how fat they could be.
“I don’t know how much our sizes marry about but we went from about a UK size 6, to about a size 18 or 20. And we did that working very closer with our chief medical officer.
“Even if the woman had a natural thigh gap – I’m not going to use her because that says all the wrong things. Some of them are really really good at what they do, some of them are rubbish.”
While she said the British Government has a “cynical view” of marketing” and using public money on “advertising,” Taylor said she was able to retrieve the money by showing them a graph of the massive gender gap in fitness in the UK.
“The whole campaign is let’s not preach, let’s not make women feel worse about themselves, let’s celebrate them,” she said.
“To unlock the money, I just had to show them the graph, which showed them this massive gender gap and then made the case for very good equality reasons we needed to do it.”
Joseph on stage at Mumbrella’s Health & Wellness Marketing Summit
However, she said the insight was used to “unlock the creative.”
“I think it really helped the creative team, because we really understand our audience, so we could paint a really good picture of what the audience was currently thinking and feeling, and what we wanted the audience to think and feel,” she said.
Also in the keynote, Joseph noted previous campaigns by the government were based on “personal prejudices” and by those who loved sport, and evaluation wasn’t looked at until well after the campaign launch.
“There was a lot of if we paint it pink it will be fine, if we put a curly font on it women will respond,” she said.
“But it doesn’t really work like that.
“In the end the brand colour we came up with was purple, but we tested that, and women really like purple because they thought it was a really strong colour, and was a really active colour, and if it was pink I would’ve said no.”
Later, she told Mumbrella the “only way” campaigns could work was if they were based on insight.
“I think of the things I’ve done in the past, where on the face of it, they look great, they look beautiful and the work that’s gone into them has been really really great, but it’s built on anecdote or personal prejudice, it’s never going to have the impact it can have,” she explained.
“The ones which resonate and have the most impact are one’s with really are connecting with their audience, and you can only do that if you really understand them, and you only get that if you use insight.”
Joseph said she was confident the campaign would work locally.
“This Girl Can will resonate with women with Victoria,” she said.
“One of the things that really surprised me about the campaign was when we were developing it, we were really focused on women in England, because that’s where our money was coming from and we could only spend in England.
“What was really clear very quickly was that it was resonating around the world, because that fear of judgement is a universal truth,” she noted.
“Women in Australia – we had tonnes and tonnes of really positive feedback from them, in NZ, in Canada, again not necessarily surprising given that culturally we are not that dissimilar. But also women in Vietnam, Mexico, Nigeria and Spain – countries that are really culturally different were coming back and saying ‘We love this campaign’, can you tell us more.”
Is this sexist? I mean all these women exercising without men…
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