How many times have you had a conversation about the menopause?

Unless you’re going though it right now, and maybe even if you are, the answer is likely to be “never”. After all, we have only recently become more comfortable with having open conversations about periods. Menopause is still yet to break free from its stigma. “The change” feels worse than mere periods because it is also about women ageing, being ‘barren’ and ‘past it’. The only thing more taboo than young women having periods seems to be the thought of older women without them.

But ignoring the menopause won’t make it go away; there are about thirteen million peri and post-menopausal women in the UK right now. Simply having heard of hot flushes out of the 21 symptoms does not seem sufficient in preparing all women for this big part of life.

The ‘Menopause Support’ and ‘Health Awareness’ surveys tell us that half of menopausal women say they feel depressed, and a quarter even consider resigning. Even more harrowingly, those who do resign often don’t even recognise menopause is what they were experiencing. The stigmatisation of menopause is so severe that it even unknowingly effects women’s careers. Dangerously similar to the outlook on mental health a generation ago, even women going through menopause rarely discuss or understand it, let alone know where to seek the help that is available.

Fortunately, this challenge is one that advertising is brilliantly equipped to solve.

By exploring the psychological models behind great creative work, it is clear that success relies on the balance between the new/ original and the familiar. Novelty Reward and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon evidence our innate human attraction to the original, whilst the Familiarity Principle, Mere-Exposure Effect, and Confirmation Bias theories prove the power of the familiar. Advertising titan John Lewis even emphasize the importance of both ‘consistency’ and ‘freshness’ within their Gold IPA Effectiveness paper.

Advertising Creatives can not only use this balance in the way that they are best know for, using creative originality to transform mundanely familiar products and services into something exciting and interesting. This formula also holds the power to do more societal good. By creatively using familiarity principles, advertising holds the power to bring alien or taboo topics into a more comfortable realm.

In order to normalise the taboo topic of menopause, it is paramount that the campaign accurately educates all ages of women. How can we feel comfortable about something we know nothing about? However, it is also important to not only familiarise the audience factually, but emotionally as well.

Partnering an educational charity such as MPowered Women with a familiar and fun brand such as Lush, who already advocate that natural means good, has the potential to initiate much healthier relationships towards this biological process. If advertising could destigmatize menopause and reframe it simply as a natural part of the female experience, this could make a huge difference to the millions of women who will live with and through it for a good half of their life.

Betty then used this essay as a springboard for a creative response to brief.