Our brief was to leverage the PPS brand promise of “success is better, shared” (a belief and commitment to equality and mutuality) to connect emotionally with the professional market in order to build brand favourability and a long-term pipeline of potential customers. Our objective was simple, we aimed to unlock the potential of professional females through a purpose-led strategy that empowers women to achieve equally in a male-dominated work environment.

Despite the fact that there are more women graduating from university in South Africa than men, in 2018 only one of the Top 40 JSE-listed companies had a female CEO, and according to Stats SA, women accounted for only 32% of managerial positions. To perpetuate the issue, in August 2018 (National Women’s Month in South Africa) civil engineering CEO, Mangolin Pillay wrote an article questioning the place of women in the profession, saying that “women are predisposed to child-rearing and people-oriented careers… generally related to caring.”

These figures are mirrored in the PPS customer database with women accounting for under half of PPS membership.

Given the prevalence of gender stereotyping in the South African context, we asked ourselves, “What if the words used to devalue woman, could reflect their invaluable contribution instead?” Does a women belong in the kitchen because she is a woman, or is there another reason?

The answer lay in the commitment that underpins our logo – PPS. For Professionals. “She doesn’t belong in the kitchen because she’s a woman, but because she is a dietician”.

Tapping into our customer base, we challenged real professional women to leverage their professional titles to #BreakTheStereotype.

We set out to create a campaign that speaks to the ambitious millennial workforce of women who according to social listening insights, are the ones driving the conversation against gender injustices on social media. Leveraging our insight into social media usage across the desired segments, we deployed our campaign with intelligent targeting across WhatsApp and Facebook, supported by Twitter and LinkedIn to extend the campaigns reach to a broader professional audience.

Our phased approach focused exclusively on targeting women in the first two weeks to build a stronghold within our desired audience, and then opened up to the broader professional market to encourage conversation across gender barriers.

To avoid fighting for share of voice, we launched the campaign the last week of Women’s Month. Spanning a period of 8 weeks, we drove the campaign primarily on social media with occupation-based targeting across selected gender and age bracket segments.

Given the traction of the campaign online, we extended the placements to key out of home sites and tactical trade print, amplifying the campaign to the broader South African audience.

Over 200 000 people across the world added their voices to the campaign, resulting in over 40-million estimated organic social media impressions – excluding global earned media across Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Publico in Portugal and many more.

We could never have imagined what would happen next: Over 13 000km away, thousands of women began to recreate our campaign by breaking the stereotypes they face as professional women in Russia.

In just eight weeks PPS went from a company that represents South African professionals, to a company that stands up for professional women around the world.

But most importantly we created a platform that empowers professional women to #BreakTheStereotypes they are forced to confront every day.