It’s time to talk about Moms. Why? Because Mother’s Days tend to sneak up even on the most devoted children. So, to get you thinking about what Moms mean to you, I wanted to bring together some riveting (and emotional) social marketing experiences designed to put the power of motherhood front and center.
Dove: Dove Choose Beautiful – Women all over the world make a choice
As most people know, Dove has been a trailblazer in the world of social experiment marketing. With their #RealBeauty campaign, the company likes to create experiences that challenge how women perceive themselves. In this experiment, Dove has created signs that were positioned above the doors of a popular mall. A customer, many of whom are women, can either walk through the door labeled “average” or the door labeled “beautiful.” While this video focuses on women in general, I really love that Moms in the video use the opportunity to pull and push their daughters into the “beautiful” choice. It’s so seldom that mothers and daughters have real world opportunities to spark a discussion about real beauty.
Elevation Church: “A New Perspective for Mom”
A New Perspective For Moms from Elevation Church on Vimeo.
Full disclosure: I’m a Mom. And this video has a cry factor of about 8. That’s on a scale of 1-10 huge tears. The aspect of this that I appreciate is that the producing company, in this case a church, did not go overboard in its branding. It met all the basic criteria of a successful social experiment for marketing: authentic, trustworthy, sensitive, unique and compelling. Moms are asked how they see themselves. And, as one would expect, they are really hard on themselves. Virtually all of them express some level of failure or at least the need to make big improvements in areas like patience and listening. But if you ask their kids what THEY think of their moms, you begin to hear words like “hero” and “always there for me” and “proud.” Kids know what’s what. And in this case, Moms are awesome.
Everlast Peru: “Sílbale a tu madre” con Natalia Málaga
Cat calling has gotten a lot of press in the last year. And in Lima, Peru, Everlast is on a mission to stop it. So they hatched the idea to have mothers dress in disguise to find out if their sons—reputed to be horrible offenders—really do give women on the street a hard time. And guess what. They do. The moms in this video completely freak out when their own sons unknowingly make sexist remarks to their own mothers. Let’s just say that there’s some serious purse swinging, yelling and wig throwing happening here.
The Mrs. rock band: Promoting their single “Enough”
A group of married ladies got together to promote their new single, “Enough.” They decided to set up a clever interactive mirror in a Texas mall and invite Moms to come in and tell the mirror what they thought about their own reflections. Many of them were extremely critical of themselves, until the mirror (and the great people behind it) took over and laid a thick coat love, kindness and gratitude on the unsuspecting Moms. Tear factor: 10.
Photo Mother’s Love by Vinoth Chandar. Some rights reserved. License available here.