Despite growing openness in today’s conversations, some subjects are still approached with hesitation. Women’s intimate health is one of them, often shrouded in euphemisms, awkwardness, and silence. The Balance Activ campaign shows how thoughtful, strategic marketing can help break the stigma and turn a taboo topic into part of the everyday conversation.

The Communication Challenge

Women’s intimate health products face a unique marketing challenge: how to be informative without being clinical, approachable without being trivialising, and attention-grabbing without being inappropriate. It’s a delicate balance that many brands struggle to achieve.

What Makes the Balance Activ Approach Different?

The campaign’s effectiveness stems from three key strategic elements that any brand tackling sensitive topics might learn from:

1. Finding the Sweet Spot in Tone Successful taboo-breaking campaigns understand that tone is everything. Balance Activ uses a voice that combines factual information with approachable language and just the right touch of humour, “a little bit naughty” without crossing into inappropriate territory.
2. The Strategic Use of Visual Metaphor Rather than choosing either clinical imagery or avoiding visuals altogether, the campaign employs botanical graphics that elegantly symbolize natural balance. This visual approach creates an accessible entry point for a conversation that might otherwise feel uncomfortable.
3. Creating Dual Communication Layers Perhaps most importantly, the campaign distinguishes between different communication needs: educational content remains straightforward and informative, while social content leverages more playful elements to capture attention.

Beyond Products to Cultural Conversations

The best campaigns addressing sensitive topics recognise that they’re not just selling a product, they’re participating in a cultural dialogue. By giving audiences “more laughs, less blushing,” Balance Activ does more than promote pH-balancing products; it helps normalised conversations about women’s bodies.

Conversation-Changing Marketing

Volkswagen: Embracing Imperfection

In the 1960s, when American car advertisements glorified size, power, and flashy design, Volkswagen’s “Think Small” campaign broke one of advertising’s biggest taboos: acknowledging a product’s limitations.

The now-legendary campaign featured a tiny Beetle in a sea of white space with the headline “Think Small.” Subsequent ads included lines like “Lemon” and “Ugly is only skin deep.” In an era when brands exclusively amplified their strengths, Volkswagen’s candid acknowledgment of the Beetle’s compact size, unusual appearance, and occasional manufacturing defects was revolutionary.

What made this taboo-breaking so effective wasn’t shock value but radical honesty. By addressing consumers’ potential objections directly, Volkswagen built unprecedented trust. The campaign transformed perceived weaknesses into strengths—small became efficient, unconventional became distinctive. This approach didn’t just sell cars; it changed advertising by demonstrating that authenticity could be more powerful than exaggeration.

Bodyform: #BloodNormal Campaign

Bodyform’s groundbreaking decision to show red liquid instead of blue in their demonstrations represented one of advertising’s most significant taboo-breaking moments. The campaign extended beyond this visual choice to include realistic portrayals of period experiences; pain, mood swings, and everyday activities.

What made this campaign remarkable wasn’t just its shock value, but its fundamental message: hiding normal bodily functions behind sanitized imagery only reinforces unnecessary shame. By depicting reality, Bodyform created authentic connections with consumers tired of having their experiences sanitized.

Universal Principles of Taboo-Breaking Marketing

What these campaigns including Balance Activ, demonstrate is a set of principles applicable to any brand addressing sensitive topics:

1. Normalise, Don’t Sensationalise

Effective taboo-breaking doesn’t shock for shock’s sake. It presents previously hidden topics in straightforward, normalised contexts.

1. Use Humour Strategically

Humour serves as a powerful tool for disarming discomfort but must be deployed with sensitivity, laughing with audiences, never at them.

1. Balance Education and Engagement

The most successful campaigns recognise that they must both inform and involve their audience, adjusting content appropriately across platforms.

1. Visual Intelligence Matters

Smart visual choices, whether botanical imagery for intimate health or realistic representations for periods, can communicate powerful messages without words.

The Cultural Power of Marketing

The most meaningful campaigns don’t just increase sales, they shift conversations. By addressing women’s intimate health with the perfect balance of information and approachability, campaigns like Balance Activ demonstrate how marketing can be a force for positive change.

When brands have the courage to break taboos intelligently, they don’t just connect with consumers, they help create a world where important topics don’t have to be whispered about. And that’s a goal worth pursuing beyond any product benefit.

View Balance Activ case study here. 

1. Tech brands don’t talk to their audience. They talk about themselves.

Count the number of times you say ‘we’ and ‘our’ on your home page.

Then, count the amount of time you mention your audience ‘you, your’.

Let’s just let that sink in for a moment.

If the ratio is about 50:50, then well done. You’re not doing too badly.

If it’s tipped in your favour, then you’ve got work to do.

2. They’re too reductive about benefits of their solutions. 

Your audience wants to know about desired outcomes and yet tech brands rarely talk about HOW the solution can actually help people in any meaningful way.

It’s not enough to tout generic benefits like saving money or time or accelerating growth.

It’s easy to see why this occurs so often in the tech sector. The inherent nature of tech products and services is to normalise and standardise input to create repeatable, scalable results. It’s embedded in the DNA of the sector.

But the trouble is, your audience doesn’t see themselves or their unique and complex business challenges as ‘input’ for your new tech product.

3. They’re too reductive about the audience.

It’s a fatal mistake to assume all ‘business’ is the same.

And worse, that all ‘business people’ are the same.

Your audience cares deeply about their business.

By forcing the audience to think and act in categories that are convenient for you, you’re reducing them to a lumpen mass. And they feel it when they visit your website, as they glaze over trying to understand your world view instead of you trying to understand theirs.

Don’t ever forget that even though it’s called B2B, you’re never communicating with a ‘business’. You are always, every – single – time, communicating with a human being. They might acting on behalf of the business, but they still have human interests at heart.

“We bring together the latest workplace technologies to deliver solutions for your business users.” Un-named Tech Brand

4. They overestimate their importance.

Tech is a tool.

It’s the means not the end.

And for the audience, it’s beginning to feel like tech brands have simply become vendors who have technology that’s looking for a problem to solve.

5. They oversimplify the problems.

Business challenges are not a thing you can neatly contain in a bullet point list and manage with a simple, end-to-end solution that costs £XX.99 per month.

We get it, you want as many customers as possible. But when you over-simplify your audiences’ needs and challenges to create a convenient ‘average customer’ you end up appealing to none of them.

“The extreme simplification of communication makes it impossible for users to distinguish which brand category the message belongs to — whether it’s banking, education, investment… The brand identities become blurred, and as a result, brands lose their connection with the audience.” Medium

6. They overstate the ‘solution’

What do you mean when you say ‘solution’?

Because we certainly don’t know

7. Messaging is lazy and confusing

Data. Growth. Scale. Future-proof. Solution. Transformation. End-to-end. Innovative. Accelerate. Technology. Empower. Workplace. Legacy. Digital transformation. Deploy.

These are tech sector buzz words.

And no one likes them.

Try harder.

“Delivering a fully automated, user driven, transformation based on data analytics performed against your legacy environment.” Unnamed IT/Tech brand

8. Stop talking about ‘humans’

This ship has sailed. Let’s talk about something else please.

Tech brands love to talk about ‘being human’ and yet their messaging is anything but. Most of us mere mortals won’t ever be able to live up to the epic promise of their tech solutions.

The skills gap is growing day-by-day as tech gets smarter and smarter. This leaves most of us feeling left behind and inadequate in the face of your insistence that we can accelerate, unleash, unlock, enable, empower, increase, transform, improve, and out-perform.

Let’s turn the volume down a bit.

(ps: we all know ChatGPT loves power verbs)

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