BMO’s purpose is to boldly grow the good in business and in life, with a key driver being support for women’s initiatives. We wanted to harness BMO’s purpose to tackle the pervasive gender bias that has been damaging to women’s financial self-belief and security for years. While the financial category has touched on women’s lack of financial confidence, we wanted to strategically take it deeper by uncovering the root cause. Our strategy led us to expose the financial stereotypes that erode women’s financial confidence so that we can begin to rewrite women’s relationships with money and close the confidence gap.

Bank of Montreal (BMO) was seeking to establish a new purpose-driven brand, positioning itself as a bank that uses financial services as a force for good. Support for women’s initiatives was a key part of BMO’s new strategy, as the bank has a strong history of championing women’s advancement – from their long-standing support of women-led businesses to achieving over 40% female leadership within the bank.

Our goal was to launch BMO’s new purpose-driven brand through the lens of female empowerment for International Women’s Day, in-order to build brand affinity and engagement in a category that consumers tend to tune out.

We set out to fight gender bias in the financial system by addressing the root causes of women’s financial disempowerment. Today, only 31% of women believe they’re financially knowledgeable; the financial industry has long acknowledged women’s lack of confidence, but our goal was to finally address the underlying cause.

Within an industry that’s traditionally run by men, for men, BMO stands out as a bank that invests in women. BMO has set out to fight gender bias in the financial system by addressing the root causes of women’s financial disempowerment.

This purpose-driven initiative aims build an emotional connection in a low-engagement category by bringing a cultural issue to light and highlighting a critical need for change. While the campaign showcased gender bias against women, we knew it was important to also target males in a way that highlighted their common cultural behaviour, behaviour that continually reinforced these biases.

Success will be measured in terms of recall, favourability and engagement. Specific communication objectives include:

Brand Recall: +10 pts increase

Brand Favourability: + 4pts increase

Brand Engagement:

• Drive 24,000 customers to BMOforWomen.com and increase time spent over last year’s campaign

• Increase usage of BMO’s existing hashtag #BMOforWomen

Our desktop research revealed our story: cultural conditioning creates a vicious cycle that disempowers women financially. We wanted to validate our story with focus groups that included women of all ages, financial backgrounds, and cultural identities. Our qualitative research confirmed that when it comes to finances, gender bias is pervasive throughout society and is damaging to women’s financial self-belief and, ultimately, security.

Women aren’t inherently less confident or competent with money, they’re just conditioned to feel that way. From “retail therapy” to “marry rich”, women are surrounded by a cultural narrative that paints them as reckless, incapable, and inferior around finances. The more society tells women they’re bad with money, the more they believe it.

Most women experience financial bias, but few are aware of the impact. So we had to reveal this cycle of cultural conditioning in order to close the financial confidence gap.

Financial Fairness is a campaign that chronicles one woman’s experiences with negative cultural programming and its end result. This story told every woman’s story.

The campaign launched with the film ‘Jane’s Story’, which showed how a lifetime of negative stereotyping erodes a woman’s confidence with money. The story spotlights seemingly small and harmless moments to demonstrate their cumulative impact on Jane. She leaves financial planning to her husband and faces financial insecurity as a result. But rather than ending there, the video flips the script, showing that if we can #bankruptthebias we can help dismantle the myth that women are bad with money and build women’s confidence.

Short-format videos also highlighted these labels in a social-first way, and the campaign was amplified by women financial influencers.

This purpose-driven initiative created a connection in a low-engagement category by bringing a cultural issue to light, revealing a critical need for change. By challenging the cultural inequity of women’s financial confidence, BMO built an emotionally charged campaign that dominated the conversation on International Women’s Day. We far exceeded our goals; increasing brand reach and recall with over 90MM impressions.

Brand Reach and Recall:

· +19.8 pts (compared to financial norm of +6.1)

· 90MM+ impressions

· 50MM views of Jane videos

Brand Favourability:

· +7.1 pts (compared to financial norm of +0.7 pts).

· 99.3% positive/neutral social sentiment

Brand Engagement:

· Drove 83,400 customers to BMOForWomen.com, a 348% increase in visits compared to our campaign objective

· 42% of users spent more than 15 seconds on the campaign’s content page, up from 33% during last year’s campaign

· 109% increase in the use of #BMOforWomen compared to 2019 campaign