Today I want to share the most infuriating advert I’ve seen this year. On this year’s Women’s Day, sports brand MAIA ACTIVE released an article titled “On Women’s Day, Shut Your Mouth.” with comments such as “Being overly feminist is not a good idea,” generating a lot of buzz. I was very angry when I read this article because I am also a consumer of this brand and I felt the strong disrespect of the brand towards women, especially still on International Women’s Day. I couldn’t help wondering: How could a female brand that is supposed to fully support its target consumer group, a company that is on the upswing and at the forefront of the industry, upset so many consumers and move a stone to hit its own feet?

Women strive for freedom of choice and independence, and men don’t necessarily enjoy being in charge. “Male gazing” and “pandering” have become the new dirty words, and there is no need to blindly divide people of either sex.

MAIA ACTIVE

MAIA ACTIVE: Chinese version Lululemon

Speaking of this brand many readers may feel very strange, let me make an analogy, MAIA ACTIVE is equivalent to the Chinese version of Lululemon. MAIA ACTIVE is a sportswear brand designed for Asian women, founded in Shanghai in 2016 with the design concept of “letting Asian women enjoy the beauty of sports”.

On the brand’s website, this is how MAIA ACTIVE describes their corporate vision We specialize in bringing comfortable sportswear to Asian women, not only for their bodies to enjoy the beauty of sports, but also for their spirit and life. They don’t have to dress, live, or act like anything because they can be any verb, noun, or adjective they want to be. MAIA ACTIVE encourages every athletic girl to be what she wants to be, find it, make it happen, and BE AS YOU WISH! But apparently based on this article, MAIA ACTIVE doesn’t think women can really be as they wish, or at least not freely express their views on gender issues.

A major setback for MAIA ACTIVE

MAIA ACTIVE was clearly caught off guard, deleting the article and issuing an urgent apology after the controversy arose. The letter states that the brand’s intention was “to call for less instruction and preaching to women and more space for women to express themselves freely on the Women’s Day. But in the production of article, there is a lack of more comprehensive thinking, in the expression and the tone of the line there is a loss of consideration.” It also ends with an email from the founder’s team to receive consumer comments and feedback.

The intent of this article attempted to call on readers to be less radical. It was supposed to be a call for peace. However, the perception that women are “too radical” has always come from men. It’s ironic that women are told to “shut up” in the context of Women’s Day campaigns. You can’t say something they don’t approve of when you’ve attracted many female users who are ahead of their time and brave enough to defy social norms. The founders once said in an interview that they often chat with their users about their daily lives and their confusion. I believe that if they had shown this kind of copy to real users before promoting it, they would have got completely different feedback.

I’m so unique, and you care if I’m pretty?

Before this article came out that angered so many female consumers, MAIA ACTIVE also had several successful adverts that created a buzz on the internet. Personally， I was most impressed by the advert they released in 2020 called I’m so unique, but you care if I’m pretty?

Youthful, beautiful, young, pretty… The external recognition and praise of women always focuses too much on ‘pretty’. MAIA ACTIVE says in the advert, “When mainstream aesthetics stagnate on the surface, seeing only whether the appearance is beautiful or not, the more MAIA ACTIVE wants to speak out, asking you to see the power deep inside.”

In the “I’m not pretty” brand video, the film was shot from real users of different ages and body types of women, to talk about their living out their own “pretty”, to oppose the conventional standards of judgement and aesthetic patterns. I really like this advert idea and also this advert has sparked a lot of discussion online with many users joining in the discussion.

A brand that contradicts itself

As Sarah Banet-Weiser argued in her book Empowered: ‘There are the spaces where feminism becomes popular, viewed by millions of users, so that there is an opening of space to hear, think, and feel feminism. There are also the spaces that enable visibility of the body, that ask users to evaluate and judge the body, that function as spaces for public shaming.’ In this case, MAIA ACTIVE is a very ambivalent brand. They release adverts promoting the idea that women can be unencumbered by beauty but need to be encumbered by speech. MAIA ACTIVE promotes both the idea that every woman should be powerful and individual and never just pretty, and that women are too radical on gender issues. Without going into how the brand came to the view that Chinese women are now too aggressive on gender issues, the headline alone is extremely disrespectful to the brand’s main consumers by telling them to ‘shut up’.

In my opinion, consumption is also a way to communicate with the world. Your consumption is a vote, and to some extent part of your personal identity. At a time when brand culture is becoming more and more prevalent, brands should pay more attention to the voice of the user and respect them, rather than preaching to them. At least for me, I won’t be buying MAIA ACTIVE anymore. In this consumerist world, there are too many alternatives that respect women.