Mental Health Ads Are Often Harmful. They Don’t Have to Be.
Reading Time: 5 minutesDove’s Ad on Eating Disorders Missed the Mark. But There Is a Way for Companies to Do Better., Having companies take an interest in mental health is better than the alternative., Purpose-marketing: Everything brands get wrong in ads about mental health.
Welcome to State of Mind, a section from MediaDownloader and Arizona State University dedicated to exploring mental health. Follow us on Twitter.
A recent commercial for Dove starts with a blond girl of perhaps 5 or 6. She pushes back from the camera playfully. ‘Let’s sit down and I’ll read you a book,’ she says. The image fades to a white title page: ‘Mary’s story.’
What follows is a montage of Mary’s life, first happy and carefree, but—once she’s given a cellphone—quickly distressing. The ad is styled more like a short film or a PSA than a direct case for buying soap. Selfies are intercut with footage of handwritten notes about overeating and influencers demonstrating waist cinchers. The montage ends with a teenage Mary tearfully looking directly into the camera; the next shot is an arm stuck with an IV tube, signaling she has an eating disorder.
‘The cost of toxic beauty content is greater than we think,’ reads a title card with the Dove logo. The video ends with a call to visit Dove.com to support the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms to limit teens’ access to harmful content.
The ad has been praised for highlighting the connection between social media and eating disorders and for providing an opening for parents to talk to their kids about the topic. It’s also part of a long series of (at times controversial) Dove ads that focus on the beauty industry’s effect on self-perception and self-esteem. By tapping into women’s insecurities, Dove is trying to position itself as a ‘hero’ that can solve not only personal hygiene issues but also psychological ones. The truth is, a corporation can’t do that and hasn’t done so here. (One petition for one imperfect bill just won’t accomplish much, other than conveniently getting signatories to the website where Dove sells its wares.) Instead, ads like this are purpose-washing: They tap into real emotion but do little to effect real change—all while filling corporate coffers. Using these tactics for mental health is especially fraught, and it’s easy for brands to cause real harm.
Promotion like this is known as cause marketing, a strategy in which brands connect to social issues. I first wrote about cause marketing more than a decade ago in my book Compassion, Inc. I discovered that after 9/11, connecting brands to causes became an imperative. First, ads aimed to demonstrate patriotism, like Kmart’s full-page pullout ad of an American flag in the New York Times. Fairly quickly, promotion turned to calls for philanthropy vaguely tied to consumption, like Home Depot asking consumers to bring their tax rebate to their stores, and to donate it to the United Way once there. Although cause marketing had existed since the 1970s, the combination of wanting to do something—anything—and the exponential growth of the internet and social media enabled this strategy to take hold.
At the same time, institutions like religion, family, and lifetime employment were losing heft as the identity markers they once were. Corporate America filled the void with brands like Starbucks, Apple, and Prius, which became the building blocks of personal identity. Because brands say something about the buyer, consumers easily take to those that are embedded with social values—and even come to expect that of them.
This expectation of a brand-issue connection is especially salient for Gen Z consumers, who are now in their late teens and twenties and are establishing brand loyalties. Research shows that Gen Z likes when brands are clear about their values, and this seems especially true when it comes to mental health. The youth marketing firm YPulse found that 71 percent of Gen Z consumers like when companies make mental health part of their marketing.
The problem is, many companies have looked at these numbers and opted to playact purpose rather than create real impact. The biggest mistakes brands make when they do this are inserting themselves into social conversations where they have no standing or producing hypocritical advertising, like Amazon calling its employees heroes during COVID only to try to bust unionizing efforts meant to fight workplace abuse.
Although examples abound of brands getting this wrong, they don’t have to. If done more intentionally, purpose marketing, today’s term for cause marketing, can be great—for causes, for consumers, and for brands. The way forward is to focus on impact: What social problem exists that the brand is uniquely positioned to solve? That’s where success lies.
To do better, brands need to tie a cause to their core competencies. Food manufacturers do best when they can help ease food insecurity, like Panera donating bread to local food banks. Transparency and consistency are similarly important. MAC Cosmetics famously donates money annually to HIV/AIDS charities through the sale of a special lipstick. The campaign has been running since 1994, and all money from the sale of the lipstick—not just profits or a percentage—goes to charity.
Long-term commitment is essential when the cause in question is mental health, a topic that is not easily wrapped in a marketing-friendly ribbon. Burger King learned this the hard way in 2019, after it launched the ‘Real Meals’ campaign in conjunction with Mental Health America. The fast food giant created a series of different ‘mood’ meals (clearly a play on McDonald’s Happy Meal), including a ‘Blue Meal’ and a ‘Yaaas Meal.’ It produced a YouTube video with the tag line ‘No one is happy all the time. And that’s OK.’ It seemed as if Burger King was more interested in poking at a competitor than authentically engaging with the mental health crisis.
Mental health doesn’t have a clear product pair, like Panera and food donations. So companies that responsibly embrace mental health as their purpose do so as a commitment to customers. To embody this commitment, they need to prominently and consistently provide information about mental health services, support existing organizations with donations and volunteers, and embed their commitment in their brand identity.
A perhaps surprising example here is TOMS shoes. Most people probably think of TOMS as the buy-one-give-one company. That strategy turned out to be controversial. The company’s top-down approach of donating its shoes (rather than working with local organizations) made consumers feel good about their purchase—but it did little to solve the underlying problems (while making harmful assumptions about poverty). Learning from its mistakes, today TOMS donates one-third of its profits to one of three initiatives: mental health, increasing access to opportunity, and ending gun violence. The company is not itself doing the charitable work. Instead, it provides grants to grassroots groups through which change can be effected on the local level, and TOMS makes long-term commitments to these partners.
Other brands are rethinking how their own outreach to consumers can exacerbate mental health problems. Lush, for example, walked away from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok in 2021—and continues to stay off these platforms. ‘The serious effects of social media on mental health are being ignored by these platforms,’ the company said in a statement. Instead of product pictures, the brand’s Instagram page hosts a collage that says, ‘Be somewhere else.’
Ultimately, the most successful companies are ones that have supporting mental health baked into their DNA, like Madhappy or Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. One percent of all proceeds from the sale of Madhappy clothing goes to the Madhappy Foundation, which provides grants to organizations researching or providing resources for mental health. Similarly, Gomez is well known for her activism around mental health, and her company’s Rare Impact Fund hopes to raise $100 million over 10 years to expand access to mental health services.
Brands taking an interest in mental health is better than the alternative—even if revenues are what motivate participation. The corporate world is arguably more powerful than nation-states and definitely more powerful than nonprofits, and it will be hard to move the needle without it. Today, in fact, it’s in brands’ best interest to do better: New research shows that consumers not only want brands attached to values, but they also know the difference between true support and performative allyship. Profit-motivated or not, having companies authentically engage in the fight to destigmatize mental health is a net positive.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the NEDA Helpline is available online, or via text or over the phone at 1-800-931-2237.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/marketing-mental-health-mistakes.html
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG