FLEB Marketing Tactic #8 Safe Status Quo Imagery
Day 8 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB).⠀
If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀
If you’re an entrepreneur, download this free 10-day class to help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀
- Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
- Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended⠀
WHAT NOT TO DO⠀
FLEB Tactic #8:
Safe, Status Quo Imagery⠀
FLEBs use safe imagery that’s easy to consume because it aligns with social roles & expectations:⠀
STATUS. The people in the photos will have socially desirable bodies/identities. (No fat people. No wheelchairs. Etc.)⠀
POSITIVITY. Quote cards will be platitudes that make us feel comfortable⠀
APOLITICAL. If they do quote revolutionaries, it’s for cool points, without any political context (Ivanka Trump’s brand used to quote WOC and civil rights icons all.the.time)⠀
INHUMAN. Many of their photos won’t even contain humans, at all. They’ll be still-lifes of pristine desks & countertops. (Pesky humans disrupt perfection and the design!)⠀
WEAPONIZED IMPERFECTION. FLEBS display apparent imperfection against a backdrop of perfect, expensive homes/lives. Their “imperfection” is a vehicle for highlighting backdrops of wealth/privilege/status because that’s what builds their authority⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Instead of creating safe status-quo imagery, create brave culture-making imagery⠀
Ask yourself: what are the visual norms in my industry? Then interrupt them in your photo. ⠀
What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)
and why is it a problem?
Female
- Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
- Reinforces gender dualist/binary
Lifestyle
- Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women
Empowerment
- Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
- Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)
Brand
- Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
- Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character
Ask yourself: What Would Frida Kahlo Do? She made lush, vibrant and gorgeous self-portraits AND she included counter-cultural, “non-pretty” details like her hospital bandages, scars, unibrow and moustache. #WWFKD⠀
This is good culture-making AND can be GREAT marketing. In a sea of safe FLEB-y photos, brave imagery that’s NOT easy to consume *will* get attention. ⠀
And that’s the point of marketing in the first place! ⠀
