The North Face promises women equal space in its ads

A campaign with a commitment attached

In April 2018, The North Face launched Move Mountains, its first global campaign focused on women, developed with the agency Sid Lee in Los Angeles.¹ The film series profiled women in exploration well beyond the mountain: the alpinist Hilaree Nelson, the climbers Ashima Shiraishi and Margo Hayes, the ultrarunner Fernanda Maciel, the actor and women's empowerment advocate America Ferrera, the NASA scientist Tierra Guinn Fletcher and the musician and activist Madame Gandhi.² The campaign ran on social media under the hashtag #SheMovesMountains.³

What set it apart from a conventional campaign was the commitment printed alongside it. The North Face pledged "equal representation of women in all of its advertising, social media and content".² The campaign was not only a set of films about women; it was a rule for every piece of communication the brand would make afterwards.

The premise behind the pledge

Tom Herbst, global vice president of marketing at The North Face, stated the premise in the announcement: "We know better than anyone that there are plenty of women out there who are already accomplishing incredible, inspiring things every day."³

The sentence frames the gap as one of representation rather than participation. Women were already exploring; the pledge was about whether they would be seen doing it. The North Face's own history contains the counter-example. In 1978 the first all-female team to summit Annapurna, led by Arlene Blum, reached the summit, and the brand lists that expedition among its milestones.⁴ That record gave the pledge a precedent in the brand's own history.

The timing was also part of the context. Marketing Dive placed the move within a wider push for gender equality in marketing, which had gained momentum "over the past year in the wake of movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo".² The North Face's answer was to turn the subject from a message into a measurable standard. A single campaign about women can be judged on its films; a pledge covering all advertising can be checked by anyone counting faces in the next catalogue. That is the risk the brand accepted. A promise of balance is measurable on every day after it is made, which binds future campaigns as well as this one.

Commitments outside the advertising

The pledge was supported by investments that had nothing to do with media, and none of them needed a camera, which separated the programme from a campaign that only portrays. The brand expanded its Explore Fund grants programme with a new $250,000 grant to enable female exploration.² FashionUnited reported that the grant honours Ann Krcik, one of the founders of the Outdoor Industries Women's Coalition, and that the programme as a whole grew to $750,000.¹

A multi-year partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA created 12 new outdoor adventure badges, covering mountaineering, climbing, backpacking, hiking and trail running.² Retail followed the same line. The North Face announced two women-specific stores for 2018, one in Edina, Minnesota, focused on running and training, and one in San Francisco carrying the full women's range.³ FashionUnited also noted a new line of women's bottoms, including high-waisted and contoured technical leggings.¹

Each element addressed a different stage of the same pipeline. The badges reached girls before they had chosen a sport. The grants funded women already planning expeditions. The stores and products spoke to customers. The advertising pledge made sure all of it was visible. Taken together, the programme presented women's exploration as something the brand would help produce, not only depict.

Asking the audience for the pictures

The social element turned the audience into contributors. The brand invited people to post black and white images of female explorers on Instagram with #SheMovesMountains, and selected submissions were shown in a public art installation in New York City in the summer of 2018.³

The mechanic suited the campaign's argument. If the problem was that women did not see themselves represented as explorers, the most direct remedy was to collect the pictures that existed and put them in public. The installation put community images in public under the brand's name, made by its audience rather than by a production.

For The North Face, Move Mountains changed what a campaign could commit the brand to. Earlier work had widened the meaning of exploration in what it said. This one fixed a rule about who would be shown saying it. Five months later, the brand's next global campaign set out to expand exploration again, into music and city culture, and carried the same balance into its casting.⁵