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BEATTIE MCGUINNESS
BUNGAY WOULD USE
SLOGAN T-SHIRTS TO GET
THEIR MESSAGE ACROSS
THE ‘REDEFINING’
APPROACH
JWT is the fourth-largest marketing
communications network in the
world, and has accounts with MTV,
HSBC and Smirnoff; jwt.co.uk
Feminist. It’s a dirty word – one few
young women would use to describe
themselves. But look up feminism in the
dictionary and it simply refers to
someone who believes in gender
equality – an ideal most of us would
subscribe to. Seems it’s not the ideal
that’s the problem. It’s the word. So how
would we rebrand feminism? By finding
a new ‘ism’, that denotes the same belief
in gender equality but is free of the
baggage the old term carries with it.
We believe the new word should be
the subject of public debate. So the first
part of our campaign would be to
facilitate an open dialogue to decide
what feminism’s replacement should be.
We would do this by hosting public
debates. Once a new term has been
democratically chosen, we would create
a website and hold events to highlight
gender discrimination, which we
would then bring to the public’s
attention and attempt to change
through advertising.
JWT BELIEVES WE SHOULD
KILL OFF THE WORD 'FEMINISM'
AND FIND A NEW, MORE
RELEVANT TERM
THE ‘FASHION’
APPROACH
Beattie McGuinness Bungay,
awarded Marketing Agency of the
Year in 2008, has clients including
Selfridges, Samsung, Ikea, Virgin
and Penguin; bmbagency.com
The task is to make feminism cool,
sexy and something to be proud of.
For us that meant getting beyond
the intellectualism and transforming
it into something we can all relate to.
We would spread the word in the
form of a must-have fashion item – a
T-shirt. Feminism only means
something if it’s personal to you, so
by wearing the T-shirt, women will
engage with what feminism means to
them today, not just as a stuffy idea
from the past.
We’d ask designer Henry Holland,
king of the slogan T-shirts, to create
them for us. They should be cheeky
and irreverent, a world away from the
idea of feminism as intellectual and
old fashioned. These could include:
NEW - WA VE FEMINISTS
◆ Feminists get laid more
◆ Man-loving feminist
◆ Hello-boys. I’m a feminist
◆ Miss Feminist
◆ This is what feminism looks like
Once created, the key is to get the
right celebrities wearing them. Alexa
Chung and Lily Allen would be great, as
would the cyclist Victoria Pendleton.
These strong, successful women would
become walking adverts for feminism,
physical embodiments of what it is to
be feminist today – sexy, confident,
empowered and fashionable.
Next we’d encourage women to make
“THE IMAGES COULD BE
DISPLAYED AS PART
OF AN ART EXHIBITION”
their own T-shirts on a website, where,
for a small fee we’d print and post their
design to them. We could get a famous
photographer like Rankin to photograph
women, both celebrities and members
of the public, wearing the T-shirts. The
images could be displayed as part of a
feminism art exhibition as well as classic
poster ads. The more we see the
T-shirts, the more we get people thinking
and talking about feminism and what it
means to be a feminist now.
THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER?
SEND YOUR IDEAS TO
EDITOR@STYLIST.CO.UK
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