Recently, I’ve seen the rise of “Women in SPAM” — an acronym designed to bring together women working in Sales, PR, Advertising and Marketing. The intention behind it is clear. It’s trying to create a collective identity for industries that have often been dismissed as “soft”, “fluffy” or somehow less valuable than more technical professions. In many ways, it’s attempting to do for creative and commercial industries what STEM has done for science and technology
And I understand the appeal.
Marketing, PR, advertising and sales professionals have spent years fighting against stereotypes. We’ve all heard the comments. Marketing is apparently just posting on Instagram. PR is just sending emails. Sales is just chatting to people all day. The idea of creating a banner under which these industries can unite and champion one another is a positive one.
My issue isn’t with the movement itself. It’s with the name.
Because if there’s one group of people who should understand the power of branding, it’s us.
Marketing Already Has a Credibility Problem
Whenever I tell someone I work in marketing, the response is usually something along the lines of:
“So you make social media posts?”
No disrespect whatsoever to social media managers. Anyone who has managed a social account knows just how much work goes into it. But it always strikes me how quickly people reduce an entire profession to a handful of Instagram posts.
The reality is that most people don’t really know what marketing is. In fairness, that’s partly because marketing is such a broad discipline. Depending on your role, you could be working in strategy, research, analytics, communications, content, paid media, brand development or customer insight. It’s difficult to define because it looks different everywhere.
What surprises me is how often that lack of understanding becomes a lack of respect.
I’m not even two years into my marketing career and I’ve already been asked whether all I do is go to networking drinks and pretend to work.
After four years at university. A dissertation that ruled my life for the better part of nine months. Hundreds of job applications. Multiple final-stage interviews. Finally landing a role at a growing agency.
Apparently all of that was preparation for “pretending to work”.
The best part? The person saying it had a parent who worked in marketing.
So when people tell me I’m overthinking the SPAM acronym, I can’t help but think they’re missing the point. Marketing already spends enough time trying to convince people that our work creates real value. We don’t need any help undermining ourselves.
And Women Don’t Exactly Get the Benefit of the Doubt
I think this is especially relevant when the conversation is specifically about women in these industries.
Whether intentionally or not, we have a habit of softening women’s expertise through language. “Girl math”. “Girl dinner”. “Girl boss”. Even phrases like “like a girl” have historically been used to make something sound less capable, less serious or less competent.
Most people don’t mean any harm by it. But that’s almost beside the point.
Language shapes perception.
We know this because it’s literally our job.
Women in business are still navigating situations where confidence is interpreted as bossiness, where ambition is interpreted as being difficult, and where expertise is questioned more quickly than it is for male counterparts. Things have improved enormously, but that underlying credibility gap hasn’t disappeared completely.
That’s why I find “Women in SPAM” such a strange choice.
If the goal is to elevate women working in strategic, commercially valuable professions, why are we attaching ourselves to a word that already carries overwhelmingly negative associations?
The Problem With SPAM
The issue isn’t the acronym itself.
The issue is what the word already means.
Unlike STEM, which arrived as a relatively neutral term and built its reputation over time, SPAM comes with decades of baggage attached. Most people don’t hear the word and think of strategic communication, commercial growth or creative excellence. They think of unwanted emails, intrusive advertising and irrelevant messages clogging up their inbox.
Spam isn’t neutral.
It’s something people actively avoid.
It’s something businesses invest money in filtering.
It’s something consumers delete without reading.
It’s one of the few words in digital communications that is almost universally associated with annoyance.
Within the industry, people understand the joke. They understand the irony. They understand that SPAM is being used as a clever play on an existing word.
The problem is that clients, consumers, CEOs and CFOs don’t live inside that industry bubble.
When they hear the word “spam”, they aren’t thinking about talented professionals driving growth, building brands and creating meaningful customer experiences. They’re thinking about something unwanted – and that matters.
One of the first lessons in branding is that you don’t get to choose what people think when they encounter a word. You can only influence it. The strongest brands understand this and work tirelessly to build positive associations while avoiding negative ones.
Yet somehow, as an industry, we’re voluntarily embracing a label that already comes loaded with negative associations.
We Should Know Better
What I find most surprising is that this conversation is happening within an industry that spends every day advising clients on positioning, messaging and reputation.
If a client came to us wanting to launch a campaign around a word that was already synonymous with irritation, interruption and irrelevance, we’d challenge it. We’d talk about audience perception. We’d discuss brand associations. We’d ask whether the attention generated would actually be the right kind of attention.
We certainly wouldn’t tell them to lean into a term people actively pay software providers to block.
And yet when it’s our own industry, we’re willing to make an exception.
The irony is that “Women in SPAM” was created to help industries escape the stereotype of being fluffy, superficial or somehow less valuable than their technical counterparts. But in trying to move away from one stereotype, I worry we’re walking straight into another.
Because “just posting on Instagram” is frustrating
But “unwanted and annoying” is arguably worse.
Good Intentions Aren’t Always Good Branding
I have absolutely no doubt that the people behind Women in SPAM had good intentions. The desire to create a stronger identity for women working across sales, PR, advertising and marketing is admirable, and the conversations around visibility, networking and support are undoubtedly valuable.
But good intentions don’t automatically make good branding.
As marketers, advertisers, sales professionals and communicators, we spend our careers helping organisations control their narrative. We understand better than most that words matter, that perception matters and that brand associations matter.
Which is precisely why I struggle with SPAM
Marketing already has a credibility problem. Women in business often face an additional credibility hurdle. The last thing either of us needs is to voluntarily adopt a label that reinforces the idea that our work is intrusive, unwanted or easy to ignore.
If we’re asking the world to take our industries seriously, calling ourselves SPAM feels like a very strange place to start