"If she's crying, she's buying" Brand Equity, India 2016

Brand Equity, India, did an excellent digging on the topic of Femvertising in: If she's crying, she's buying: Are brands manipulating female consumers?, interviewing plenty of ad professionals, myself as a representative of Adland included. (archive link)
 

So, what's wrong with riding the Femvertising bandwagon?

There's nothing wrong with hopping on the Crisis du jour Express. Except that if there's no brand connect or intent to sustain the message beyond the ad, it ends up mocking the idea of women empowerment first, and denuding the brand image eventually. While the likes of Anouk are yet to prove how well femvertising can work, brands like Skore aren't able to score positive points for progressive display of women because of shabby execution.

Where they plan to go via the femvertising route is a question brands ought to ask of themselves. As Åsk Wäppling (aka Dabitch), founder of ad portal adland. tv, points out: 'Will keep you dry' is a promise a sanitary napkins brand can keep. 'Will let you win the Olympics because you're a powerful woman,' is not. Aspirational is one thing, but promising societal changes due to product use is not right — unless the brand is into fair trade, water saving, donating to research, planting trees or otherwise actively doing something other than making advertising. Not to mention how most of these ads are only high on plot recall and not brand recall, as is evident from Mrs. Sharma's list.