So, what do you do? I work in marketing....

By Sophia Thomas, Account Manager

When I tell people I work at marketing agency the common belief is that I spend my day scheming about how to get people to buy more of our clients’ products and at the end of the day we only care about driving consumerism. While of course there is an element of truth to that, the reality is we don’t just use creativity to increase sales and fill your homes with endless ‘stuff’; we also use our skills to highlight health and social issues.

What we do isn’t just about creating something visually stunning, exciting or different, it is about shedding light on insights and existing human behaviours and then figuring out what we need to do to challenge held  and create beliefs and incite action.

One of my favourite examples of a campaign that highlights a fantastic cause is last month’s UN for women campaign which demonstrated how something as so seemingly simplictic as, Google,  can become a rather effective tool in revealing some startling insights. The campaign was based on actual Google search results which revealed the widespread prevalence of sexism and discrimination and downright opposition to women’s rights.

Not only does this campaign demonstrates how we combine creativity with insight to catch people’s attention, but it also shows that we aren’t just in the business of communicating products and services to consumers; instead we are in the business of starting conversations.  Sometimes that conversation is about your choice of toothpaste, but other times it is about a women’s right to be equal.

So next time I tell someone I work in marketing, before they let their imagination runaway with thoughts of evil plots, I’ll make sure to remind them that we aren’t villains we just simply want to chat.

Want to get further involved in the UN for Women campaign?  Join the conversation on Twitter by using #womenshould