Selling Empowerment: Understanding Femvertising in the Sport Market

Abstract

Femvertising, advertising that challenges gender stereotypes, empowers women, and promotes gender equality, has grown exponentially in popularity over the past decade. However, this advertising strategy has received mixed responses from both consumers and the advertising industry. While some identified it as a result of recent feminist movements to empower women, promote feminist values, and support equality (Hsu, 2018; Sobande, 2019), others signified it as brands new technique to generate greater brand engagement (Mamuric, 2019; Sterbenk et al., 2022). Therefore, to understand this popular phenomenon, I conducted three independent studies to investigate the effectiveness of Femvertising in three different levels of creating, adopting, and communicating. The first study, with an advertising approach, was designed to examine how sports brands frame their support of gender equality through Femvertising. Conducting a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis with a critical feminist lens, this study revealed that although sports brands claim that they genuinely are promoting social equity, their new technique of Femvertising still involves gender stereotypes and post-feminist elements. Having the sports brands' controversial approach in framing their Femvertising attempts raised the question of how authentic they are in their support of gender equality. Accordingly, the second study, with a CSR approach, explored the extent sports brands are engaged in acts that empower women and address the gender gap. Using signaling theory, this study aimed to examine whether companies' behaviors (internal and external CSR programs, as well as the percentage of women in leadership positions) reflect what they claim through Femvertising (support of gender equality). By comparing sports brands that have practiced Femvertising as their CSR communication tool with competitive non-Femvertising sports brands, this study demonstrated that Femvertising sports brands were not significantly engaged in more gender equality CSR activities. The findings of this study suggest that, while sports brands are practicing Femvertising as a signal to communicate their support of gender equality, their attempt still lacks a deep commitment to the social issue. Derived from the results of the second study, the third research questioned whether this lack of commitment to Femvertising messages affects sports brands' consumers. Thus, with a consumer behavior approach, my third study investigated consumers' purchase intention behaviors when faced with a mismatch between brands' claims (of women empowerment) and actions (of dedicating equal seats to women in leadership positions). Following the tenets of attribution theory, this experimental study explained the impact of Femvertising on customers' attitudes towards the ad and the brands and, consequently, their purchase intentions. Results demonstrated the negative effect of the low percentage of women in leadership positions on consumers' attitudes toward the brand and purchase intentions. Overall, the mismatch between brands' actions and claims seems to lead consumers to perceive CSR advertising as a result of the brand's extrinsic motivations, reducing their brand attitude and consumption behavior.