How Bodyform used research to tell women’s stories

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Women are historically woefully misunderstood and rarely accurately represented by the corporate world. Feminine care brands have typically avoided the complex, multifaceted reality of women’s bodies in marketing their products, with advertising depicting carefree women wearing white jeans, and blue liquid shown in lieu of period blood.

Bodyform’s ‘#WombStories’ campaign was different. The three-minute ad, developed by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO (AMV BBDO), which ran across TV, YouTube and social media in 2020, portrayed the pleasure, the pain, the love and hate women associate with their bodies, telling different ‘womb stories’ through various animations and creative worlds.

In one story from the ad, fertility struggles are portrayed by a lovingly tended garden and a barren wilderness. In another, angry red flames represent the menopause. From first periods to not wanting children to dealing with agonising pain, the film captures the various impacts women’s bodies have on their lives.

(Misery Roulette by Selby Hi, part of a series of artwork commissioned by AMV BBDO for Pain Stories)

Radical listening

Bodyform, part of global hygiene and health company Essity, wasn’t afraid of taking a bold approach with its marketing – previous campaigns have focused on normalising period blood ( 2017’s ‘#BloodNormal’) and celebrated the female anatomy ( 2018’s ‘Viva La Vulva’). What made ‘#WombStories’ different to anything Bodyform and sister brand Libresse had done before, according to global brand and communications director Tanja Grubner, was a more “radical” approach to research.

To enter creative territory involving topics that are still taboo – including menopause and fertility issues – the brand had to ensure women’s experiences were at the core before beginning production.

“We already knew we wanted to tell a story about women’s bodies and what women go through from first period to last, and everything in between,” says Grubner. “But, we realised that we missed the language to tell the story.”

Working with strategists from AMV BBDO, this involved questions that were very different from a typical research project. “There were questions asking ‘if your womb was a person or a place, what would it be like?’ Then you got completely different answers,” explains Grubner. “This then informed the creative teams, who said ‘well, if we talk about womb stories, every womb deserves its own story and creative world to bring it to life because everything is so unique’, and this is how they came up with the idea of the womb dwellers.”

Margaux Revol, strategy director at AMV BBDO, says projective techniques were key to avoiding an impersonal approach with the research and helping participants open up about personal, often difficult experiences.

“We gave them projective questions so that they could imagine their own uterus as a person or a creature or a landscape or a soundtrack. This projective technique opened up completely unexpected metaphors and stories that women themselves were surprised by, and it made them realise that they had never examined that relationship before.”

The initial online survey conducted in more than a dozen markets globally consisted entirely of open-ended questions. “The dogma in research is ‘people are bored, they don’t like open-ended questions, people are lazy’,” says Revol. “Actually, we only did open-ended because we didn’t want to put our words in people’s mouths; we wanted to hear their experience, we gave them the tools of projective techniques of anthropomorphising their wombs.”

Additionally, to recruit women who had gone through difficult experiences for qualitative interviews, the strategists worked with a storyfinder who usually specialises in sourcing people for documentaries and casting. “Instead of doing quantitative cold research recruitment, we knew we were recruiting based on sensitive questions – it felt like it wouldn’t work to do it in a general omnibus survey,” says Revol.

AMV BBDO also worked with The Outsiders on the brand’s pain research (see ‘Painful truth', below), which primarily focused on interviews with health experts on gynaecological pain, and also drew on projective techniques.

“That was the core idea and way of thinking in this campaign, and also fuelled the hypothesis that sometimes when you want to uncover certain truths and insights, you also have to be creative about how you research it, and you can’t just do yes or no questions and multiple choice expecting new results,” says Revol. “That was the whole premise of how we did the research throughout – asking questions in sensitive, interesting, creative ways – you get people feeling like they’re listened to and that we actually care about what they’re going to say, rather than just something quite cold and process-driven that often just gets people to click through, finish and not really engage with the questions.

“Once we started asking questions, women wanted to answer more and more because nobody was asking them those questions, so they were discovering things about themselves as well.”

Hearing women’s perspectives opened up a “new world” and informed the brand’s next project, Pain Stories (see ‘Painful truth', below), according to Grubner, who says the team listened to input from all angles, including individuals working on the project who identified with what they heard from other women about the pain of endometriosis, for example.

When presenting ‘#WombStories’ in another market, the head of marketing there disagreed that the approach was relevant for the region, because they thought the pain shown was “exaggerated”, but another member of the team spoke up to share that it was also their experience.

Grubner says that in addition to helping validate insights further, the encounter also reinforced one of the big
learnings of the work. “One of the things we’ve learned is if you’re not experiencing something, it can often be quite difficult to relate to what others go through, and you need to be very careful with that bias. I think ‘#WombStories’ really helped us to become better at listening – not only to consumers but also internally – and to also become better at sharing, because there is so much silence.”

(Inner Wringing by AMV creative team Lauren Peters and Augustine Serf, part of the Pain Stories project)

Sustainable shift

Grubner and her team are in charge of six regional brands in the feminine care category (Bodyform in the UK) and looking after brand strategy, comms, digital, sustainability and research. “Category intelligence, shopper insight and consumer insight are very much an enabler for our strategies, and also often a facilitator,” she says.

For example, Grubner’s team works closely with intelligence and innovation teams to identify how trends are developing in a category that was previously very stable but that is now seeing a lot of disruption, with new products including menstrual cups and period underwear.

Consumer interest in sustainability as well as the responsibility of the company as a manufacturer to offer more environmentally sustainable options have been key drivers for the brand’s recent launch of a range of period underwear, Intimawear.

Research conducted in its biggest markets globally, Mexico and Colombia, as well as markets in Europe and Asia, including France, Russia and the UK, found that women reported being unable to treat period days like any other day as they always need additional products, Grubner explains.

“That was one of the insights that led to period pants and what we added from a comms point of view when we launched is that period products have only been designed for five days a month, whereas underwear has only been designed for 25 days a month, so it’s been really ignored that women have periods and that their regular underwear is not catering for those specific need days.”

While Bodyform works mainly with research agencies depending on the field – Kantar for brand health tracking and Nielsen for product innovation testing, for example – marketers within Essity are encouraged to run their own consumer interviews on a regular basis in various markets globally. For Grubner, pre-pandemic, this involved conducting in-home visits ideally every time she travels for work.

“It opens the door to the women who you are working for, and when they invite you to their home it’s really interesting how open they are to share with you, especially in Latin America, where many people live in households with many family members. I’m always surprised how little taboo periods are, because you have your interview partner and then often the kids are around or the grandma and you know they are all listening. In many other countries this would have been a no-go because talking about periods makes them uncomfortable.

In Russia this would be unthinkable, for example. “Those are the things where this direct consumer contact is really important, because it puts all the work in perspective and makes it more tangible and real.”

This artcle was first published in the october 2021 issue of IMPACT.