The worst rebrand of the last fifty years
Somewhere out there is a PR agency that should never work again, because the most catastrophically botched brand campaign of the last fifty years was not a corporate scandal or a product recall. It was the word feminism.
A word whose entire definition is equal social, legal and economic rights between all people somehow got positioned as fringe, angry and vaguely embarrassing, which is a marketing failure so complete it deserves its own Harvard case study.
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Circa 2014 I was sitting near the front of a Business Chicks conference as a guest of PwC, next to a long time colleague and mentor, close enough to see Julie Bishop's stilettos in glorious, bedazzled detail. Manolo Blahnik or Louboutin, unconfirmed, but heavenly either way.
She was then one of the most senior women in Australian politics, the picture of a polished professional at the absolute top of her game and when the word feminism came up, she declined it. She would not publicly call herself one.
I know exactly why she felt she couldn't.
She was still inside the system, still inside a party room, still playing by rules that punish women for naming the game while they're standing on the board.
I felt frustrated but my frustration was never with her. It was with a structure so effective at discrediting one word that even a deputy leader of a major party, a Foreign Minister, a woman who had clearly lived every reason the word exists, calculated that saying it out loud was too expensive.
But sitting in that room, watching a generation of women look up at her waiting for permission that never came, something clicked that I have never been able to unclick. A woman in a position of power is not automatically advancing equality in a way that matters.
Representation without the willingness to name the thing is just decoration. It broke my heart a little, and I'm sure she did fabulous things that were less seen, but I have never forgotten the silence where one small word should have been.
The problem was never the word. The definition has not moved an inch since the beginning. Equal rights, socially, legally and economically, between all people. That's it. That's the whole product.
What happened is that the product got trashed by decades of deliberate disparagement, the man-hater caricature, the humourless scold, the implication that wanting equal pay meant hating your husband.
The conditioning runs so deep that a significant chunk of mainstream millennial women now have the ick with the word while agreeing with every single line of the definition. They'll say "I believe in equality, but I wouldn't call myself a feminist," which is like saying you love bread but refuse to be associated with flour.
Once you clock it, you can't unsee it either.
The discomfort with the word was manufactured and it was manufactured by people who understood that if you can't win the argument, you discredit the vocabulary.
Because the argument itself is unwinnable. There is no clean, intelligent debate against equal rights that doesn't eventually reveal itself as fear of losing a sense of power someone was taught they were entitled to in the first place.
We are several waves deep now, fourth, fifth, honestly I've lost count, and we still haven't fixed the branding. We don't need a new word. We need a reboot of the old one, where equal rights is hot, saying the word is normal and flinching at it is the thing that looks unhinged.
Call to Action
Say the word. Out loud, in rooms where it costs you something small, because the women who came before us paid in rooms where it cost them everything.
When someone recoils, don't argue the caricature, hand them the definition and let them tell you which part they disagree with. If they genuinely don't think women deserve equal social, legal and economic standing, that is information, not a debate invitation. Wish them luck, suggest therapy, block accordingly.
The word was never broken. The branding was. So consider this the relaunch and consider yourself on the campaign team.
Mel
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