Why YOU should attend the JUMP Forum on April 29th in Brussels!

JUMP Forum 2010: The Extraordinary Impact of Women in the Economy!

Join the fourth edition of the JUMP Forum that inspires hundreds of professional Women and Men across Europe, featuring the most successful Women and the most brilliant experts in gender diversity!

For Women: why YOU should attend!
The JUMP Forum is the biggest single day event dedicated to enhancing the professional lives of women. Each year, it offers professional women the opportunity to attend workshops by top business leaders, network with other professional women and to think about and develop their careers.

For Companies
Gender balance is above all a business issue. In a constructive and optimistic way, JUMP helps companies unlock the market and talent potential. It is simply a strategic and economic priority.

The JUMP Forum offers Women practical tools to realise their professional and personal aspirations, and supports organisations to implement a successful gender balance initiative.

Business leaders and gender balance experts will share their views, strategies and advice.

Topics include:
- To quota or not to quota? Europe's best practices on policies, quotas and targets.
- How to profit from a gender balanced business.
- Powerful strategies for your career success.
- How to find your true vocation.
- Using social networks to benefit your career.

This is your chance to learn strategies for success by leaders including:

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox (Canada-France), CEO of 20-first, Consultant, Coach and Author of Why Women Mean Business and the forthcoming How Women Mean Business 

Mirella Visser (Netherlands), Author of De Zijderoute naar de top and Founder-CEO of the Centre for Inclusive Leadership

Rohini Anand (USA), Senior Vice President and Global Chief Diversity Officer, Sodexo

Marleen Temmerman, Professor, Member of the Managing Committee of UZ Gent and Member of the Senate
Lieve Verplancke, Managing Director at Bristol-Myers Squibb Belgium 
Dominique Leroy, CEO of Unilever

You can view the day's program here. Register here

The Netherlands: not as liberal and emancipated as we think.

Many countries look to the Netherlands as the example of liberated thinking. A country where "live and let live", tolerance and a willingness to discuss (and embrace) everything from recreational Cannabis use to televised pornography is part of the fibre of the nation's national identity. Everything, it seems, but opening the corporate Old Boys Club to include women. That, until today, seems to prove a bridge too far.

A study just out spotlights the dismal situation:

60% of the top 10 companies in the Netherlands do not have a single woman in their Executive Committee.
Giants such as Shell, ING, Philips, Akzo Nobel and Heikeken don't have a single woman on their boards.

Even worse?
Of the 4 women who do actually sit on Executive Committees, 3 are in line/operational roles, 1 in a staff function. The harsh truth of this reality? One women alone on a board will never have enough weight in the group to affect change. There is a rule that says you need 3 people in a group of 10 to affect change.
3 in 10. Not 1 in 10. So those 4 women are in effect, "invisible" committee members: present but unable to make a fundamental difference.

This situation needs to change. Urgently.
Today, more than 50% of all college graduates are women.
Research has proven that gender-balanced companies perform better than those who's boards consist only of men and that the current economic crisis probably wouldn't have been as fundamental had more women held executive positions, participated in more key decision-making.

Women need to be encouraged to participate at strategic level. Our future - not just women's future - depends on it.

What she's not telling you.

I've written before about the questionable validity of results obtained from focus groups (you know, those demographically aligned groups of strangers we put behind one-way mirrors to fiddle with and discuss our products or ideas). Then along comes the book "What she's not telling you" and confirms what we have always dreaded: our focus group research is worth Nada. Zero. Nil.
Because the participants (women, in this case) weren't telling the truth (but that could go for men too).

Recommended reading BEFORE you finalize and test that one winning 'big idea' on yet another focus group:

"What She’s Not Telling You: Why Women Hide the Whole Truth and What Marketers Can Do About It."

Just for Fun: "Forehead Tittaes"

Forehead Tittaes w/ Marion Cotillard from Marion Cotillard

Man Should Be Brave.

I couldn't resist posting this ad from the French Connection campaign.

I posted it on my Facebook account and immediately got tons of positive responses - from women. They love this ad!

Why? Because it adheres to two the core values of smart marketing to women: be real and be brave.
We all agreed: "Brave men" are men who dare to be silly, funny, poke fun at themselves and who don't take their male egos too seriously.

We also liked the "realness" of the image. A guy with a beard, in a plain t-shirt proudly (not arrogantly) looking ahead. No airbrushing, no impossibly high cheekbones or six-pack stomach. No obvious marketing blah-blah or overtly irrealistic promises.

Just simple, tongue-in-cheek humor.

Great marketing-to-women, kudoz FC!

Getting it wrong for Valentine: Back into the doghouse!

Valentine's Day - the American way.
Remember the JC Penny "In the Doghouse" campaign of last year? (We wrote about it here).

The retailer has continued the successful campaign with an ad for Valentine's day called "Return to the Doghouse". Reading the adwomen blog this morning, I found out that the creative team behind the new ad, made by Saatchi and Saatchi NYC, contained no women. (The creative director of the first ad, Aimy Valentine, was not involved in the making of this ad).

The ladies over at the adwomen blog are right to pose the question: do we think it's noticeable that there was no women on the creative team for this ad? I'll let you decide that for yourself...



Valentine's Day - the British way.
And then there's this campaign, called "HardChorus" by Puma. As you know, this year Valentine's day fell on a Sunday, which in the UK means football. Puma found a very creative, tongue-in-cheek way to defuse the age-old field of tension between women and football. Enjoy!

To our moms we'll always be kids.

I just discovered this new ad by P&G that ties in with the winter Olympics taking place right now.
It's a great example of a very simple yet very effective ad that targets women - be they mothers or not.

As you'll see in the video below, the ad centers on the concept of Olympic athletes always remaining kids to their moms.

The ad works beautifully for a few reasons:

1. We can all relate to always being a kid in the eyes of our parents.

2. The Olympic athlete that is also just someone's kid: it's a disarmingly gentle concept that stands in stark contrast to the cut-throat competitive nature of the Olympics.

3. Many different types of women will be able to relate to it, for even if they are not moms, they are still someone's daughter.

4. It's human, it's honest, it's simple, it's real. And those are just about all the qualities most of us (women as well as men) are attracted to after years of global capitalism and consumerism-at-all-cost.

Sexist Super Bowl ads.

Oops they did it again!

The ladies over at Momlogic.com give us a look at this year's misplaced Super Bowl ads.
It's interesting to note that Dove - for years at the vanguard of gender equality and a beacon of light in the banishment of stereotypes - is on the list too!

Dove recently launched Dove Men+Care a range of personal care products for men. With it, Dove again uses positioning based on gender peer identification to attract men to the brand. I understand why the ladies at momlogic.com don't particularly like the Dove Super Bowl ad (nor do the guys over at Guardian.co.uk, by the way). It's not original nor creative, and it does go through the whole list of stereotypes - for both genders - in less than a minute. But it does have a positive, empowering take-away, so we'll give them credit for that.

Come on Dove, we're still looking to you to go beyond the standard cut-and-paste approach, to inspire us and to break new ground! Don't loose us now!

Let's talk about sex baby

A new meta-study conducted throughout 87 countries puts it to rest for once and for all: when it comes to sex, men and women aren't as different as we think.

The study, conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reports that "men and women are more similar than different in terms of sexuality". They start having sex at almost the same age, they overlap in the number of partners, the frequency of intercourse, extramarital sex and condom use.

But there was one notable difference: reported masturbation and pornography use.
Not so strange, you may think: men simply prefer these "autoerotic activities" to women.

Maybe not. Women are taught from a very early age that "autoeroticism" is bad, socially unacceptable and certainly not discussed. Actually: it simply doesn't exist. So the difference does not lie in the fact that men prefer auto erotic sexual activities more than women do, it just means it is more socially acceptable for men to talk about it than it is for women to do so.

The report also supports some of the more popularly held theories of evolutionary psychology.

This Newsweek article discusses the theories through believers and non-believers.

You can read Tom Jacob's review of the report here.

Please meet the Real Mom.

Advertising Age just published a very interesting white paper called "The New Female Consumer: the rise of the Real Mom". It's a great spotlight on the way society - and the roles of women in it - has changed over the past three generations.

You can download the entire report here. Well worth a read!