• by Danielle Oster , March 13, 2025

International Women’s Day in 2023 might have sparked a “requiem” for more meaningful messaging, when “marketers mostly played it safe and small,” as Marketing Daily’s Sarah Mahoney noted in a post then. But this year’s widespread brand silence was even more deafening.

Brands weren’t completely absent, but what initiatives did exist weren’t easy to find. Mattel’s Barbie shared four pairs of dolls honoring women’s friendship, but they were not made available for sale. Video streaming platform Twitch launched a campaign celebrating “Legendary WomenFor the most part, though, such engagement was limited to niche or smaller brands, and nonprofit organizations – with the latter occasionally getting some brand support, like KFC and Paramount’s Plan International partnership.

“I believe there is a lack of bravery around marketing and brands right now,” Katie Hooper, CEO of creative brand studio Notorious 111, told Marketing Daily.

That lack of courage is far from limited to International Women’s Day or Women’s History Month. Brands seemed at least equally silent last month for Black History Month, and only displayed the most muted support, when they showed any, for Pride Month last year. To Hooper, though, the lack of brand engagement around events acknowledging such a wide segment of their audience demonstrates the full depth of the problem.

“There seems to be a lot of fear” about showing support for “topics that historically have not been polarizing, like supporting 50% of our population.”

Hooper said she was “served absolutely zero content that speaks to anything about what it means to be a woman in this environment” despite being an “ideal demographic” to target with such messaging.

Even brands for whom women are a primary audience seem to struggle to find the courage to engage on the issue. Hooper described a Notorious 111 healthcare client that struggled with how to respond to negativity online.

One “of many pieces of content” for the healthcare brand “literally just supporting the notion of women’s health” led to “some negative comments” in response to the post, “accusing the brand of making this about DEI” and “glomming onto buzzwords” associated with far-right rhetoric, Hooper explained.

“They asked for our counsel on whether to change the headline,” she said. “Our inclination as an agency was to do the opposite. [Supporting women’s health] doesn’t mean we're taking a stand against any other gender.”

“The fact that such an innocuous post about women's health immediately generated that negativity – whether real or trolling – was the most universal signal that something is wrong,” she added.

"The flip side is, we have clients that aren't even interested in dipping their toes into this conversation.”

The agency advised the healthcare client to “ignore the haters” and stand behind its messaging. “It wasn't like it was a hospitality brand giving a shoutout to women's health,” she said. “This was so core to their proposition as a brand that we didn't anticipate we were giving someone anything to argue against.”

The silence comes as International Women’s Day’s profile has, if anything, gained importance in the wake of rampant political and cultural misogyny.

“The significance of International Women’s Day 2025 cannot be overstated. It is no longer a case of addressing unfinished business on the gender justice front, but one of bracing ourselves to resist active regression and a mounting assault on our rights,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.

 “For several years now, brazen anti-rights movements have conspired to turn back the clock to an age when patriarchal oppression was the norm. We cannot afford to be complacent in the face of this gathering storm, for women, girls and LGBTQI+ people are under attack the world over.”

By being too afraid to stand out, brands are missing out on opportunities to differentiate themselves to consumers and “speed up their business,” Hooper said

“I don't think you have to be incredibly polarizing, take a political stance – or even a moral stance,” she added -- just tell “interesting stories that feel authentic.”