Through The Lens: Tanja Grubner Long Read

Rankin and his team had the opportunity to speak with Tanja Grubner, the mastermind behind the revolutionary marketing for Bodyform and Libresse. As the Global Innovation, Marketing and Communications Director for Feminine Care at Essity, Tanja has led the charge in destigmatizing periods and has established these brands as some of the most innovative and creative in the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RANKIN: So you’re dealing with taboos, that shouldn't be taboos?

TANJA: What we try to do is really eradicate shame, discomfort and stereotypes that hold women+ back.

RANKIN: Were you surprised when you started by some of the statistics around the period and feminine care subject?

TANJA: Absolutely. When we started to look into what it actually means to have your period, how hostile society is to it and what impact it has on young girls growing up.

For instance, nine out of ten girls hide the fact that they're on their period. Labiaplasty is one of the fastest-growing surgeries in the world. It takes up to seven years to diagnose endometriosis because women+ aren’t just believed that their pain is real. 

RANKIN: And is that a worldwide phenomenon?

TANJA: Yes, globally it's the same. It might be more severe in one market or lighter in another, but ultimately, it's the same, which is really heartbreaking. But we do see that it's getting better.

RANKIN: So how do you even go about creating work around things that are taboo, on subjects that society is hostile to? 

TANJA: On the one hand, you really need to know what your brand stands for. So for us, that's taboo-breaking period and vulva care. Second, is knowing what your mission or your purpose is. For us, that is eradicating taboos, shame and discomfort. 

Then I think what's important when working with creative people is to not expect to see the expected, and also avoid creative development by committee because that just kills all creative work.

Finally, I think having the right creative partners is everything. Breaking taboos takes courage and you need to build trust to do that, you want to have the best creatives supporting you on that journey.

RANKIN: So is the mission to get people openly talking about it, or is it to empower women+ to feel comfortable with their experience of it? 

TANJA: At Bodyform and Libresse our brand line is ‘Live Fearless’. Ultimately, what we found is that actually our brand only found its power when we started to act fearless. So what we are trying to do is to push and start conversations, to open up topics. That means including men as well as women+ in the conversation, and also means involving those who have periods but don’t identify as women.

RANKIN: Yeah, it’s pretty fearless to go to your board and say ‘Hey, we need to talk about the exact stuff no one else in the category is talking about!'. How did that come about, was that your personal thought or an audience insight or a strategic insight?

TANJA: So when I joined the Feminine Care category five or six years ago, brands were adhering to all the clichés and stereotypes. The purpose at the time was to ‘be your best self every day’ and I thought, we don't need a period pad brand to put even more pressure on women+!

So we changed the purpose because the more we researched, the more we understood that providing products that absorb blood is not sufficient.

Women+ can’t put on a pad and be confident if the entire culture they’re in is very hostile against periods. So now it's a rallying cry that unites us across markets and across agencies.

RANKIN: Wow. That's so incredible. So before you came in they were using beauty stereotypes around the brand, and you came in and just saw that this isn't a beauty brand. How did you sell that across such a massive global organisation?

TANJA: When we changed the positioning, we worked closely with all our markets across the globe. But the insights we had were proving so powerful that it was resonating with consumers globally. 

So we put that all into a brand purpose and I had everyone sign it with blood.

RANKIN: Now that’s dedication! So it was quite clear to everyone internally based on the audience feedback that it was really resonating?

TANJA: Yes. But, when we started to do the first executions, when we launched ‘Blood Normal’, our first film that addressed the fact that periods are absent in mainstream culture and where we turned blue liquid red. That was when it started to scare the organisation, because all of a sudden it became real what we actually wanted to do and what our strategy was, and that took people out of their comfort zone.

RANKIN: How did you get through that? Did you just have to set your stake in the ground and back it up?

TANJA: We did face a lot of rejection getting it out. Some markets didn't want to air it, we had music companies who didn't want to be associated with a period care brand. Some TV stations said, ‘You're not allowed to put that on the air’, social media companies who said, ‘that's way too much’. Even lawyers told me that we're causing ‘widespread public offence’. But together with the agency, we just kept on pushing.

We didn't launch it on TV, but it became viral because women+ across the world resonated with it. So I think one of the learnings I had is just never giving up. 

Fast forward to five years later, there is hardly any feminine care brand in the world that is still advertising with blue liquid because it's just fundamentally wrong!

It all comes back to being consumer-led. In our research, we actually have one question that asks whether they feel understood or whether they feel offended by the ad. 

Before we did that research we had agreed that the level of offence that we didn't want to go above was 10%. So that also means that we accept up to 10% of the population saying this is too much for me, because ultimately we want to make progress.

RANKIN: That’s so powerful. How did you go about setting that level? 

TANJA:  We do a lot of social listening, but we also find ways of asking questions creatively and differently. For example, for our Womb Stories campaign, we went where no other brand has been before; inside women's+ bodies. To do that we asked people to describe their uterus if it was a place, or to describe it if it was a person, and doing that has opened up a completely new language and perspective.

RANKIN: It is a new language and perspective though isn’t it because both Womb Stories and Viva La Vulva included so many things that are never spoken about. 

TANJA: We are very sensitive to different cultures, our global team is based in Sweden or in Germany but we don't want to impose our point of view. That’s possible through how much we listen to our audience, but it's also about providing a choice. We don't tell people what to buy or why. That would be so wrong and just profit oriented. We want to give people the option of products and services they may need to feel comfortable to care for themselves during their period. 

RANKIN: That's such an amazing way of looking at it. In terms of the incredible success, how much of that was serendipity do you think? Was it the right time, right idea, right moment, or do you think you can engineer that to a degree? 

TANJA: I really believe it needs to be the right time and the right cultural moment.

But in terms of setting up the team to make really immortal work, I think you need to have trust. We've been working with our creative team for more than six or seven years, we have a brilliant strategy to lay the foundation and then we have a producer who’s just the best. So I think we have a very powerful team where everyone brings in what they know best and gives their best.

But it's really, really hard. One thing we've learned along the way from Blood Normal to Womb Stories is it doesn't get easier but we get so much better at dealing with it.

RANKIN: I think if it was easy, everyone would do it!

TANJA: If it doesn't scare you, it probably isn't that good.