The following guest post is by SAP senior director Joe Pantigoso.
How do you impact public perception with limited budgets and bandwidth in a message-saturated market? One way is to create something that will get people’s attention, something that will inspire as well as provoke, something that can deliver on the saying, “Go Big or Go Home.”
The Fearless Girl statue is a big impact idea, for example, that captured the public’s attention and helped bring the topic of gender diversity top of mind. Commissioned from sculptor Kristen Visbal by the investment firm State Street Global Advisors and ad agency McCann to celebrate State Street’s campaign to get more women on corporate boards, this four-foot bronze statue of a pony-tailed girl, hands on hips and chin in the air, was installed facing Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull statue in March 2017, just in time for International Women’s Day.
The statue ignited immediate and abundant reactions—both positive and negative. Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, posed with the statue and tweeted: “Fight like a girl.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the statue “has fueled powerful conversations about women in leadership.” New York City public advocate Letitia James commented: “Fearless Girl is a powerful symbol to women young and old.” Countless tourists have also endorsed the statue, making it a favorite New York City photo op. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it became one of the most highly-honored campaigns of 2017.
Critics, however, like the Huffington Post’s Emily Peck, considered it a case of “pink-washing”: “That adorable, perfectly irresistible little girl is just a super-sophisticated bit of feminist marketing, used to make us feel good and do little that is substantive.” The Washington Post wrote that “the ‘Fearless Girl’ vision of female power is more than a little demeaning. Were there no adult women around to model leadership?” The New York Times said: “The point is not that working to expand the presence of women on corporate boards is in itself an unworthy goal. It is that building a bronze monument to the plight of the more than 14 million women who make up two-thirds of the low-wage work force would also be worthy.”
Regardless of your point of view, there’s no question that the Fearless Girl initiative brought the topic of gender diversity in executive leadership to the forefront. In the 12 hours after the statue’s inauguration, for instance, it generated more than one billion impressions on Twitter. According to Bloomberg, the statue generated $7.4 million in free advertising in its first 51 days. It was described as “the biggest public art controversy in years” by The Guardian. It even brought public attention to State Street’s own employment practices, resulting in a discrimination lawsuit and $5 million settlement.
A risky big idea, indeed, but a statue planned for one week in March extended its stay indefinitely, breaking into the public discourse and becoming a topic of debate and (indeed) making a big impact. As McCann notes, “the Fearless Girl was dropped on Wall Street in the middle of the night and became a global phenomenon within 24 hours.”
And as Rakhi Kumar, head of asset stewardship and environmental, social, and governance investments at State Street Global Advisors, told Bloomberg, the campaign has spurred change. “Forty-two companies have since committed to increasing their directors’ diversity and seven have already added women to their boards, according to State Street. ‘The Fearless Girl has gotten the attention not only of companies on Wall Street but also the rest of the world,’ said Kumar.”
Joe Pantigoso is a Senior Director in Global Branding at SAP, a leading enterprise software company and top globally ranked brand. Read more from Joe in his series on Brand Tips for Branders.
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