PR campaigns can be used to achieve various different end goals, one of them being to raise awareness on a specific issue. In honor of March being Women’s History Month, let’s take a moment to look at how PR campaigns have helped advocate for female empowerment and gender equality.
Campaigns such as Always’ Like a Girl Campaign and Gillette’s The Best a Man Can Be Campaign are re-defining the conversations on gender stereotypes. The Like a Girl Campaign looks to redefine what the words “like a girl” mean, and make it empowering instead of demeaning. Gillette’s Campaign looks at toxic masculinity and encourages men to stand up and keep each other accountable for their actions.
These two campaigns created thousands of conversations across the country. The Like a Girl campaign eventually aired one of their many commercials during a Super Bowl which garnered national attention. When the Gillette ad first aired it immediately became a trending topic on social media. These two campaigns have opened up conversations between men and women about the struggles they face battling gender stereotypes and opens up the door for more change to occur.
While PR campaigns won’t bring about wide-sweeping societal change, companies that launch campaigns like this allow for society to take small steps towards a better more equal world by opening up conversations and acknowledging there is a problem. When major companies such as Always or Gillette create campaigns that bring social issues to light, it makes the nation face these issues by airing ads during prime TV events and creating trends on social media.
For example, the Like a Girl- Unstoppable campaign received 1.77 billion impressions from the United States and 81% of women who participated in a research survey after the campaign said they supported a movement “to reclaim ‘like a girl’ as a positive and inspiring statement”. While there isn’t a lot of data out on the impact of Gillette’s The Best a Man Can Be Campaign because of its recent launch, it will likely also have large numbers of impressions as well.
These statistics show that PR campaigns aimed at societal issues can actually make a difference, which is one of the many reasons I am so passionate about the PR industry. Because when PR professionals work on campaigns they are passionate about great change can come from it.
Hannah Scott is a senior from Goshen, Ind., majoring in public relations and political science. Hannah is the senior account manager with Fifth Street Communications®, a student-run public relations agency at Anderson University.