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Project Body Love: Empowering women from the inside
Hearst magazines
Challenge
Just 6% of women love their body, and 9 in 10 admit this holds them back from enjoying life events. But why is confidence so low and what can be done about this clearly pervasive issue?
To fuel the development of an inspiring body positivity campaign by Women’s Health magazine, Mindlab sought to understand how triggers such as social media, media representation and aesthetic treatments affect women’s perceptions of themselves. We looked into the unconscious drivers of low self confidence and how body confidence can be built over the long term, enabling women to lead fuller, happier lives.
“With female body confidence at a shamefully low level in the UK, Hearst UK is committed to addressing this issue, in order to help women get more out of life, which is critical when we know that poor body confidence can lead to women opting out of life events and occasions.”
Faye Turner, Head of Commercial Strategy & Insight, Hearst Solutions
Research
To investigate the demographic and psychometric characteristics of women with varying levels of body confidence, and understand their subconscious motivators, perceptions, and emotional states:
- 2,500 participants
- Engaged in a single-market, mixed methods online study
- Using a bias minimisation strategy
Step 1. A set of in-depth questions explored actions and attitudes across backgrounds.
Step 2. Body confidence levels were measured and standardised using a validated psychometric tool.
Step 3. Further psychometric tools and a suite of semi-implicit tests explored perceptions and determined what could be influenced.
Step 4. Using emotion literature theory, participants were activated with an emotional prime from their own memory and asked to reflect on a time they undertook an activity to improve their body confidence. Emotional state was tested pre- and post-prime to detect differences which could be attributed to participants’ personality or psychological profile.
Step 5. Open-ended questions provided rich context to the findings as participants used their own words to describe why they think they feel the way they do. These answers were analysed using AI software to optimise thematic coding.
Findings
- Fewer than 1 in 5 women have high body confidence.
- High body confidence is seen in women who have high levels of social interaction, less reliance on external validation and participate in activities like mindfulness. High confidence women exercise to feel good and because they enjoy it.
- Low body confidence appears to be influenced by social media, lack of representation in the media, and undertaking more passive activities like watching television. This group is more likely to undergo external aesthetic procedures and may exercise to look good and improve body image rather than for fun.
- Many women are unclear how to set and achieve goals to improve their confidence. They don’t realise which activities are most likely to have a positive impact, and even those who knew that activities such as exercising and meditation help emotional well-being, did not make the link between this and improved body confidence.
By understanding subconscious associations and knowledge gaps, our research highlighted how the magazine could develop campaigns to empower readers, supporting them to boost their body confidence over time, manage their mindset and balance out negative triggering factors.
The campaign has since reached more than 20 million women and powered a 43% uplift in the number of readers agreeing they have high body confidence.
“Mindlab helped to deepen our understanding in this topic area by using techniques that went beyond the claimed, allowing us to see which influences unconsciously contributed most or least to a woman’s body confidence.”
Faye Turner, Head of Commercial Strategy & Insight, Hearst Solutions
