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Keywords
private practice, women over 50, mental wellbeing, BACP campaign, No More Stiff Upper Lip, mental health awareness, therapy for women, public conversation about therapy, media coverage for therapy, counselling for women
Transcripts
Speaker A:
In today's episode, I'm talking about something rather controversial.
Speaker A:
In fact, so controversial that I sort of hesitated about recording it in the first place.
Speaker A:
But in fact, that is entirely the point of this episode.
Speaker A:
When we're in a crowded market space, we need to stand out, but it's hard because it divides opinion.
Speaker A:
So here I am, talking about something that I hesitated to talk about.
Speaker A:
Welcome to Good Enough Counsellors, the podcast for growing a private practice without the pressure to be perfect.
Speaker A:
I'm Josephine Hughes, counsellor and creator of Therapy Growth Group, helping you get the clients you want and create the practice of your dreams.
Speaker A:
Now, where I'm going to start is do you remember the milk tray man?
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So, for anybody who's listening, who's of the younger generation, the milk tray man was a James Bond type figure and he'd go through all sorts of feats of derring do in order to deliver a box of milk tray chocolates to the woman he loved.
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And the tagline was all because the lady loves milk tray.
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But it was obviously quite a catchy campaign because it went on for years and years and years and it was only withdrawn about 10 years ago.
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I might have got that wrong.
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Anyway, that ad has really aged and there's several reasons why it's aged.
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It's aged because of things like people found it a bit creepy, actually a bit stalkery, that this man was breaking into a woman's room to leave her a box of chocolates.
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It also very much didn't appeal to many women who felt it painted them as passive recipients rather than being active.
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And Cadbury's did try and change the campaign slightly and use a woman instead of milk tray man, but I don't think that really worked either.
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So suffice it to say, that advert has gone down.
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It's now part of advertising history, but it isn't something that we use very much nowadays.
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So basically, you know, adverts don't always last and they don't stand the test of time.
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Advertising often reflects the culture of the time and later on we look at it and we realise we've moved on.
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So why have I introduced this subject to you?
Speaker A:
It's because today I am going to talk about the BACP no More Stiff Upper Lip campaign.
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I wonder if you've come across this.
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Certainly if you're on any social media site where there's other therapists, I think you may have heard about it, because it's turned out to be quite a controversial campaign and it's basically a campaign where Women have been photographed.
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It's all women who have experienced therapy and found it to be of benefit.
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They're women over a certain age, they're supposed to be over 50.
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And the whole campaign is fronted by Lorraine Pascal, who's a TV personality.
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And really the campaign is aimed at women over 50.
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It's aimed at women who perhaps have been socialised to have a stiff upper lip, to put people in front of their needs and who continue to try and cope alone.
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There may be the sandwich generation.
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They're so used to looking after other people that they don't prioritise their own needs.
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And BACP research, when they've researched it, found that these women tend to not look for therapy.
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And also suicide rates are actually highest amongst this cohort of women compared to other age groups of women.
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So that's the thinking behind the campaign.
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But it's attracted a lot of criticism, not least from therapists and members of bacpur.
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So what's happening with this?
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Are we seeing women being encouraged to not be silent any longer, to actually speak up for themselves?
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Or as many people have commented, are we seeing women being silenced and told just to put a bit of makeup on and carry on as normal?
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So let's have a little bit of look at the background.
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I spent a bit of time reading up about it and seeing what's happened since it was launched.
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It was run by somebody called the Kindred Agency.
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As far as I can tell, they're a sort of PR and advertising agency.
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And what they say is that for generations, women have been taught to cope quietly and with the no more stiff upper Lip campaign, BACP are calling time on that expectation.
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And in case you don't know anything about the campaign, they actually used four lipsticks to promote the idea of women speaking up for themselves.
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And the lipsticks were named after things that women might receive as a benefit of therapy.
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So the one that sticks out to me is the lipstick that's named Resilience.
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And as part of the launch of the campaign, they were giving out these free lipsticks to women in a shopping centre.
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So the BACP actually say this.
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They say we used lipstick as a creative eye catching device to challenge the outdated notion of maintaining a stiff upper lip.
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And I think that's a really worthwhile thing to explore.
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So let's sort of have a little bit of a think about it.
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Going back to the Kindred Agency, what they quote is that 64% of women over 50 struggle with mental wellbeing and 87% admitted that they actually hide their struggles.
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And in terms of the campaign, it did receive a lot of attention.
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Obviously it received quite a lot of negative attention from therapists, but across the media it appeared on BBC Breakfast.
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I've seen an article in the Times about it.
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Ashley James has covered it.
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I've certainly seen it being talked about.
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I think it was on Good Morning Britain as well.
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So in terms of sort of like talking about mental health, in terms of talking about women over 50 and what their mental health needs are, it does seem to have struck a chord and it's definitely generated conversation.
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And I think it's really important to pop in at this point that the BACP has a couple of charitable aims.
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One is to promote and provide education for therapists and the other one is to educate the public.
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So you can see how something like this campaign is actually designed to fit around that charitable objective of promoting therapy to the public.
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And ultimately that does benefit us as therapists, especially if we're therapists in private practice and it leads to women booking in with us.
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And the campaign actually points to going to the BACP therapist directory and finding a therapist who would suit you.
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So I don't know if anybody has had anyone yet who said, I read about you as part of this campaign.
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Wouldn't it be great to hear from you if you did?
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So do let me know.
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But I think it's really important to note that this was a professional campaign, the membership body paid for it and it did actually secure national coverage.
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And there was this intention behind it to get people talking.
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But let's have a look at some of the criticisms that it actually garnered, especially from people in the therapy profession, because I think it's really important to listen to.
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There really does seem to have been a gap between what was intended in terms of what the PR agency was doing and the way it was received, certainly by some therapists.
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So, for example, looking as lipstick, the agency wanted to make lipstick, the sort of expression of the no more stiff upper lip.
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It's about not masking, but actually using your voice.
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And the lipstick was supposed to be a sort of eye catching way of drawing people in, but for many therapists it didn't actually get that message across to them because some of the criticisms that I've read on Facebook said things like it's counterintuitive to say, no more stiff upper lip, but give out lipstick, because often lipstick is something that we use to mask ourselves, you know, shove some lipstick on and smile.
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So something we use to convince the world that we're actually Coping.
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huge backward steps into the:
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It looked like a makeup advert.
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So it's a really interesting observation there about the way it comes across to people.
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So for some people the expression is what it's all about, being able to express yourself and for other people it's actually come across as concealment.
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And I think that's part of the reason why people really didn't like it, because for them it was about putting on a stiff upper lip, not having no more stiff upper lip and to move on, we're sort of thinking about how expressing ourselves could be thought of as breaking silence.
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But for many people it felt like it wasn't about that.
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It was actually people needing to keep a stiff upper lip just to survive.
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It didn't come across right to a lot of the viewers, so it just sort of came across as this is the way culture expects you to be, this is the way society expects you to be.
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You should just be coping now.
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Another thing the agency wanted to do was to use real women.
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So the campaign was fronted by a video of these women being made up and what they were saying about how therapy had helped them.
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And there was also a photograph and they were photographed by a well known British photographer called Rankin.
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But they were actually real women who'd experienced therapy.
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Except certainly when I looked at it, they all looked, I don't know, they looked quite glamorous because they had all been made up.
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I'm someone who, who never, I don't own a lipstick and never wear it, might have a bit of lip gloss and that's about it.
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So for me it felt a bit like they were.
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I'm in my early 60s and it felt like they were possibly a bit younger than me.
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There were I think at least one person there who was gray haired, but certainly for me, I didn't realize they were real women until I read more around it.
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So for me it didn't come across that these were real women.
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And in fact I did wonder at first if they were actually computer generated.
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And certainly some of the critics have said they don't feel that these images represented real women like me.
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Not all women wear lipstick and some people said that they felt it appealed to sort of older middle class women.
Speaker A:
Well, I'm an older middle class woman and it didn't actually speak to me.
Speaker A:
So did it actually hit the people who it was aiming at?
Speaker A:
I. I don't know.
Speaker A:
I think it was supposed to be about authenticity, but for some people it actually meant exclusion And I think that's a really sort of interesting point to hold onto this idea of exclusion.
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And we will come back to it in a moment.
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And then there was also the agency wanting to reframe therapy as practical and wise and it being a courageous step.
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But for some therapists, they felt quite insulted by the tone of the advert and they were saying things like, we aren't a makeover, we're not a quick fix service.
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Someone said, if I was sitting with shame, I'd run a mile.
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And someone else felt that it really minimised our work.
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So, on the one hand, the agency was trying to make therapy more accessible, but for some of the people looking at it who are therapists, it felt actually like it was trivializing the service that we offer.
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So it's really interesting to hear about how it landed for people.
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I just want to finish this little section, which is really about the objections, by talking about another theme that came up quite a lot, and that was, is the BACP really spending my membership fee on this?
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And obviously they are.
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They've used our membership fees to actually pay a PR agency to do the work for us.
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Whether or not you think it's worth your membership fee depends on what you actually thought of the advert.
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Some people are asking, why am I paying my membership fee and it be used for this?
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Because they didn't like the advert.
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But I think it's important to remember, as I said at the start, that this is one of the BACP's charitable aims, is to get therapy out there to educate the public about it.
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So I think in terms of getting it talked about and it being out there, that definitely did work.
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But I think for some people, their reservation is that it didn't actually promote what therapy really is.
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So I think it's really interesting just thinking about that and holding those two different viewpoints together and thinking to yourself, where do I land on this?
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What did I think about it?
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And I've certainly read all the comments and thought, oh, it's just really interesting to hear what people are saying and we really have to think about what do we think worked means.
Speaker A:
So from a PR point of view, what we have to say is that it did get covered by national media, it did have a strong visual hook, it did have a clear call to action because it asked people to take a look at the therapist directory and it definitely caused public conversation.
Speaker A:
As I say, I saw Ashley James sharing something about it on Facebook.
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So in terms of drawing attention, it certainly worked.
Speaker A:
And drawing attention to the subject actually does mean that people were talking about therapy and that could lead to further education.
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But I think certainly for some of the therapist comments that I was reading, that visibility actually felt uncomfortable because it didn't really present therapy as the way that many people who are therapists would see it.
Speaker A:
So what can we make of it?
Speaker A:
What can I make of it in this episode that I'm finding somewhat uncomfortable to record?
Speaker A:
Where do I fall?
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I'm sure you're sort of thinking, oh, she's hedging around here a bit.
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Well, I think there's a.
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There's really two points and I think this is really.
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It's difficult to hold them together because on the one hand, from a marketing perspective, I do think that it was.
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Was an effective campaign in terms of getting people to talk about therapy, in terms of getting therapy into the national conversation, and in terms of getting women's needs talked about.
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I did see someone who said, well, what about men?
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And I think that's a perfectly valid question to ask.
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But I think from marketing terms, what it comes down to is that you, you don't try and market to everyone all at once.
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Last year the BACP did focus on men.
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This year they're focusing on women over 50. Who knows what they'll do next year?
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Perhaps they'll focus on anxiety in children or something like that.
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We don't really know.
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But when you are doing marketing, it is really, really helpful to niche because it makes it much easier for you to produce something that isn't bland, actually generates a reaction.
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I think it's really important to remember that sometimes producing a reaction, even if it's not necessarily the reaction you're after, can be a good thing.
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So, for example, I've been watching TV recently and they've had this, what I thought was a really stupid advert.
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I couldn't work it out.
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And it's the Financial Services Authority telling you to be careful before you give away all your money.
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And it shows a seal slapping people around the face just as they're about to sign up to a service.
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And I couldn't make head nor tail of this.
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Couldn't work out.
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What was it?
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You know, was it a whale?
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This is because I don't recognize my sea animals.
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And my husband had to explain it to me.
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He said, it's a seal.
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And what they're trying to say is before you seal the deal.
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And I thought, oh, now I understand.
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So it is sort of like quite an irritating advert.
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But it was irritating enough that I actually had A talk about it with someone and I now notice it more.
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And I bet you if you've seen any of the coverage of this BACP advert, you probably are noticing it because it did sort of annoy you.
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But having said that, is that what we want therapy and adverts about therapy to be doing?
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Do we want them to annoy people or not?
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And I think there's this part of what sits uncomfortably and that's to do with what therapy is.
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Is therapy something that excludes people?
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It makes it such a difficult thing.
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And I know from reading some of the comments that people felt it did exclude certain women.
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But.
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And it is a big but.
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If we did reach the women who aren't seeking out therapy, who do tend to put on a stiff upper lip and it did speak to them, then did it work?
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So it's thinking about what did we mean by it working?
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Because in a crowded space, it's when you're very clear that the message can cut through.
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Yes, it's controversial, just like I didn't want to record this episode.
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But sometimes having a reaction actually shows that the ad is working.
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If we go back to the group that we were actually thinking about targeting, 64% of women are struggling with mental well being and 87% admit to hiding it.
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So if that campaign worked in terms of getting people to think about not hiding it, that actually it was quite an effective campaign.
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So niching towards people who have a particular problem can actually work.
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So it is really worth thinking about your niche, thinking about writing for that niche, even if it means that you might come in for criticism because you're ignoring other niches.
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Like the comment we had about men.
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Before I finish, I wanted to mention that niching can feel very uncomfortable for many of us.
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The reasons being that we worry about getting it wrong or we worry about excluding people.
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So it can feel really risky and it can feel like you're narrowing yourself down too much.
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But what it's all about is being really clear.
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It's being clear with yourself and clear with other people about who you're trying to reach.
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And that helps people to find you.
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It's something that we are talking about and working on in therapy growth group at this very moment.
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So if you're listening to this episode, this is actually our niching week in therapy growth group.
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Now is a brilliant time to join.
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You'll be able to talk about niching, you'll be able to learn about it, you'll be able to get your questions and concerns answered.
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And most of all you'll be able to get feedback on whether or not your niche will work.
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So please do check out Therapy growth group in the show notes and come along and join us and let's get that niche sorted.
Speaker A:
Now let's get back to the end, end of the episode.
Speaker A:
Sometimes people will disagree with what you're doing and certainly that's what BACP experienced.
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It doesn't necessarily mean that you're wrong though, and I know a lot of you do worry about being criticised for what you're doing, but if you're clear about who you're trying to reach, criticism can become information, not actually a verdict.
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And I think we often do tend to see see it as a verdict rather than something to learn from and grow through.
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So it's worth reflecting on feedback.
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But I don't think we should just disappear because someone objects.
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So that's really what I've got out of thinking about this episode.
Speaker A:
That niching can be a very effective way of getting a message, message across.
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And it certainly did work in terms of getting the message across about women having a stiff upper lip and that therapy can help with that.
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I think the jury's out on whether you agree with me on whether therapy can help for those of you that felt it excluded some women.
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But for me, I think the coverage that it got will actually have helped to generate more conversation and perhaps generate more thoughts about it.
Speaker A:
I think what this campaign does is it was done on a large national scale and as with everything, it's really difficult to bring nuance into a big conversation that's getting a lot of coverage and getting a lot of people talking about it.
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It's difficult to bring in, you know, the fact that some women might see it as masking.
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It's just a nuance that might be hard to bring in.
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So visibility sometimes means having trade offs.
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You might not reach everyone that you want to reach and clarity and being clear about who you're trying to reach can exclude others.
Speaker A:
So in closing, I guess what I'd like to ask you is not to say how do I avoid criticism, but if I'm criticized, am I still willing to be clear?
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Anyway, so there's a little thought for us to finish on.
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I hope you found this helpful to think it through.
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Love to know what you think about it.
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As I publish the episode and publish the blog, do get back to me and let me know if this has spoken to you at all.
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And thanks very much for listening.
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Bye for now.
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Thanks for listening.
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Do come and join my Facebook community.
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Good enough.
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Counsellors.
Speaker A:
And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please Visit my website, JosephineHughes.com if you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app.
Speaker A:
And in closing, I'd love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dream.
