Torch - Fall 2016

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| FALL 2016 • TORCH 17
What are real girl things?
If you guessed that they are the struggle
to balance good grades with the
extracurricular activities that stand out on a
university application, you would be right.
But if you guessed daring to choose karate
over ballet just because it’s more fun, you
would also be right. And although you may
not even have considered it, real girl things
even include secretly liking how powerful
your voice sounds when shouting out slam
poetry or how that new haircut really suits
your face shape.
The point is that the idea of real girl
things, the phrase (and now hashtag
#RealGirlThings) behind Havergal’s latest
outreach campaign, is about validating
girls and everything they stand for. Rather
than seeing a girl as the great student, the
superstar athlete or the bravest dancer, it’s
about seeing her as all of those things.
Actually, it’s more about her seeing herself
as all of those things.
How to build this confidence in our girls
is a key question for teachers and parents
alike. In publications from the Harvard
Business Review to Psychology Today,
experts have written about how the well-
intentioned tendency to praise girls for their
talents over their efforts can inadvertently
suggest, consciously or otherwise, that skills
are innate rather than feats to be pursued.
Because they mature more slowly, we cheer
the boys’ efforts and so, by contrast, boys
learn early that persistence is the key to
success. Traditionally, society has implied
that good girls grow up playing it safe and
sticking to their original skills, rather than
trying new and challenging things.
All of this insight was top of mind for
Antonietta Mirabelli, Executive Director of
Communications & Marketing at Havergal,
as she set out to find ways to create
conversations around real girl things: to
break through the traditional placid image
of the smiling girl in the overly starched
blazer. The first step was to recruit the
creative input of Matt Litzinger of Red Lion,
Havergal’s marketing agency.
Inspiration for the campaign came from
all over, but especially from Havergal itself.
Litzinger says he was particularly inspired
by the first speech of First Principal Ellen
Knox posing that fundamental question
What are you going to do? to the first
graduating class. “To me, that question has
never been more relevant than it is now,
because I think even though the landscape
has changed, the opportunities that exist for
women today are tenfold what they used to
be,” says Litzinger.
Litzinger says he was also inspired by
the girls themselves and their real-life
challenges, echoing Mirabelli’s view that
traditional marketing has mostly been
reminiscent rather than realistic. “Being
a 17-year-old girl is one of the toughest
things there is. I think what we chose to
do was not look at it through the eyes of
an adult, but actually look at it through
the eyes of students. These challenges, they
shouldn’t be dismissed. They aren’t small.
They do matter,” he says.
Making such big ideas concrete meant
moving beyond the conventional. Yes, the
campaign included print ads; however,
the images are no longer shiny-faced girls,
but edgy celebrations of complexity: a
girl taking a selfie behind the headline
“calculus tutor” or another holding up a red
lipstick under the headline “rock climber.”
Each features a real girl with a real life at
Havergal, each with the alluring tagline
“Where does real confidence come from?”
In moving beyond print, Litzinger and
Mirabelli sought to reach girls in the spaces
Continued
where does real confidence
come from?
Her outfit or her latest performance? At Havergal College,
we believe real confidence comes from within. That’s
why we’re encouraging girls to share the things that
really matter to them: #RealGirlThings
See more at
One of the four advertisements in the #RealGirlThings campaign.