UnPinked

Your monthly doses of creativity and feminism

When Feminism Was Marketing
(and when it stopped being)

In recent years, something has changed in the creative and tech industries. Many companies that until recently filled campaigns and billboards with words like empowerment, inclusion, and diversity have quietly dismantled their DE&I policies. Programs have been cancelled, teams have been reduced, and budgets have disappeared. This hasn’t happened solely because of the current global political climate; it has also happened within companies that, over the past decade, have turned feminism into a brand language.

To understand what we are seeing today, we need to take a step back. In the early 2000s, advertising began to incorporate the language of feminism. The 2004 Dove Real Beauty campaign is often cited as the symbolic moment of this shift, for the first time, a corporation seemed to move away from glossy beauty standards to talk about “real beauty.”

Since then, this approach has become a communication model. According to a study also cited by Jennifer Guerra in her book Feminism Is Not a Brand, around 65% of campaigns aimed at women used messages connected to postfeminist discourse, while more than a third directly used keywords such as empowerment, liberation, and independence (Gill, 2007; Windels, 2020).

But that language never really challenged the system that produced those inequalities. As Andi Zeisler observes, the result is a kind of “uncanny valley of feminism.” The message feels familiar and reassuring — it speaks about freedom, autonomy, self-determination — but when we look more closely, we realise it does not challenge power; it simply tells us to feel good within its rules.

The shift is subtle; the problem is no longer the system, but how women perceive themselves within it.

Don’t change the world.
Change how you feel about yourself.

Buy this bra.
Love your body.

Dove “Real Beauty” 2004 out of home, Tube London

Feminism as a Market

Over time, feminism has become a market in its own right. Not just advertising campaigns, but also products, empowerment courses, and services designed to make companies appear more “women-friendly.”

The problem, writes Guerra — also mentioned by Kasey Windels — is not so much that advertising uses feminist messages to sell products. Advertising has always borrowed from cultural languages to market things. The issue is that feminism itself has become a product.

A reassuring form of feminism, compatible with the market, that allows people to feel rebellious without paying the social price of dissent. Consumption thus becomes a form of symbolic political participation. We do not take part in a movement; we buy its aesthetic.

When the Narrative Breaks

And this is where we arrive at the present. If feminism has been a positioning strategy for years, it is not surprising that many companies are now abandoning it at the same speed with which they once adopted it. When the political climate changes, the brand narrative changes as well.

Diversity policies are scaled back.
Campaigns stop talking about empowerment.
Companies return to silence on the issue.

This does not necessarily mean that companies have suddenly become anti-feminist. It means that feminism was never their political project — it was a communication strategy.

Members of QuAIA carry a banner depicting the progression of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Palestine during World Pride in Toronto in June 2014. QuAIA stands for Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.

The Reversal

The result of this process has been described very clearly by the philosopher Roberto Ciccarelli, who argues that one of neoliberalism's typical strategies is to invert the relationship between causes and effects.

Social movements that criticise the system are often perceived as responsible for the very problems they denounce. In this way, feminism is accused of having become marketing, of being complicit with corporations, and of being an elitist or performative movement.

But this accusation overlooks an important point: it was not social movements that turned themselves into brands — it was brands that appropriated social movements. When many companies today abandon gender policies, what we are witnessing is not the failure of feminism, but feminism turned into a marketing strategy.

Pinkwashing is easy to criticise. It is visible, often clumsy, sometimes even caricatural. The real issue, however, is how economic power can absorb, neutralise, and resell the language of change.

The risk is that the disappointment generated by these operations reinforces the narrative that feminism is nothing more than a trend or a branding exercise. In reality, feminism does not lose power because it becomes marketing — it loses power when it stops challenging power itself.

International Feminist Strike - 8 March 2026, London.

So, what now?

And perhaps this is where the current crisis of so-called “brand feminism” becomes most visible.

On March 8th, we were in London at the International Feminist Strike. Crowds of people marching, handmade signs, drums, slogans about work, care, gender-based violence, Palestine, Iran, Sudan, wages, and reproductive rights. One struggle that contains many others.

A feminism that looks nothing like the one in advertising campaigns, because it is not designed to sell something, but to question power relations.

Walking through the crowd, it becomes clear that feminism was never meant to be comfortable. When feminist language entered advertising campaigns, it was often made harmless — stripped of conflict, cleansed of its political dimension, and turned into an aesthetic.

But real feminism continues to exist in marches, in collectives, in workplaces where strikes and demands are organised, and in conversations that question how power is distributed.

Perhaps what we are witnessing today — with companies quickly abandoning the language of inclusion — is not so much the end of feminism in corporations, but the end of a phase in which it was useful as a brand positioning strategy. And paradoxically, this could also be the moment when it becomes something harder to neutralise again: something that is not meant to sell, but actually to change power relations.

So if we want to move beyond this phase, the question is not how to create more “authentic” campaigns, but who has the power to define what feminism means today.

Companies. Algorithms. Platforms. Creative industries.

Or the movements that are still trying to change the system?

Perhaps this is where we need to start again. Not from the branding or rebranding of feminism to make it more appealing or engaging, but from the power it is meant to challenge.

Our events

In the next season of We Hate Pink events, titled “Work or Dissent. This Is the Question,” we want to start precisely from these contradictions.

For those of us who work in the creative, communication, and technology industries, the question is: how can we remain politically responsible while operating inside systems that tend to neutralise conflict and turn even dissent into content?

In this context, the challenge is to understand how to use communication tools without being completely absorbed by them.

We are not looking for individual answers or moral shortcuts. As always, we will try to build the answers together.

📍 Foggia — 30 April, Palazzetto dell’Arte Closing event of the RealAds exhibition, curated by Matteo Sinopoli and Giulia Magaldi, who reinterpret advertising through a queer lens to push for more authentic and genuinely inclusive representation.

📍 Rome — 7 May, AANT – Academy of Arts and New Technologies

📍 Milan and London — Autumn 2026 To continue this journey in different contexts, shaped by the same tensions.

We don’t have all the answers, but we have the right questions. And above all, we have a community that refuses to stop at the surface.

If feminism stops being a marketing language, perhaps it can return to what it has always been: a collective practice that challenges power. But for that, both things are needed.

Anger, to name injustice. Care, to build alternatives.

We choose both.

With anger and care, The We Hate Pink team ✊💗

We Hate Pink is a Community Interest Company that does not receive sponsorships or any form of financial support from organisations or companies. Our strength lies in the commitment and dedication of the people who make it what it is, driven solely by activism.

If you find our work valuable, please support us!