The #AerieREAL Campaign: Changing Women’s Empowerment … One Bra at a Time
Introduction
The #AerieREAL Campaign is a campaign created by clothing brand AEO (American Eagle Outfitters). An offshoot of American Eagle is the Aerie brand, which focuses on apparel, active and swimwear for women. Aerie’s goal is to promote body positivity and make women feel good. They were able to emphasize this even more through the #AerieREAL campaign.
The Aerie campaign launched in 2014 when CCO & Aerie Brand President(Chief Creative Officer) Jen Foyle joined AEO and brought creation and passion into the company. She created a campaign to show off Aerie on everybody — not just on models who do not have realistic body standards. Since 2014, Aerie has reached over a billion dollars in sales since the campaign release. The campaign spans social media, advertising campaigns, influencer marketing, and so on. Aerie is AerieREAL because it is an ongoing and active campaign for the brand.
The goals of the campaign are to allow women to discover clothing that works for them and they feel comfy and sexy. The campaign aims to challenge traditional standards of beauty and wants to empower women to be confident in their bodies. Aerie strives to be optimistic, unique, and passionate.
Over the years, the REAL campaign has evolved into using UGC and brand voices to display the realness of Aerie, and the brand’s true strive to promote body positivity and women empowerment. Now, Aerie has REAL Voices, Real Talks, AerieREAL Role Models, AerieREAL Changemakers, and more. They even have a Real Good line, that offers super comfy and casual clothing and underwear. Now, Aerie and their campaign are almost synonymous — a true testament to how serious Aerie is at promoting their goals and values.
Campaign
Aerie’s campaign spans multiple platforms including Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Aerie does have a Pinterest account, but they do not seem to post about the AerieREAL campaign on the platform. The campaign spans other media forms too, for example, a blog and website, influencer marketing, brand ambassadors, and TV ads.
In its early stages, the AerieREAL campaign was focused on advertising through print and media ads. In more recent years, the AerieREAL campaign can be found across marketing/imagery on their website, on their social media platforms, and through advertising. In 2023, the campaign has an overarching theme across their mediums and is concentrated in their UGC.
One main source of the campaign is the company’s YouTube channel, where Aerie has produced many REAL campaign videos over the years. The YouTube videos introduced the AerieREAL ambassadors & Role Models, REAL Voices, and what AerieREAL is. The campaign videos focus on a range of topics, from videos from brand ambassadors to promoting women’s empowerment. For example, some of their most popular videos are AerieREAL campaign videos, such as “#AerieREAL Adventures With Iskra” which has 1.6 million views and was made in 2017. The videos promote their campaign by utilizing brand ambassadors and real people to talk about the brand and what AerieREAL means to them.
Social media also dominates the REAL campaign. For instance, Aerie’s Twitter does not post about the campaign often, nor do they post on the channel frequently. On occasion, Aerie will tweet something regarding the ongoing campaign, but it is nothing of significance. On Instagram, Aerie posts about the REAL campaign frequently, with the height of the campaign being around 2018. Since Aerie released a new comfy underwear line, that has been one of the main focuses on their social media. However, Aerie still releases videos and graphics regarding the campaign. Interestingly, Aerie does not use the hashtag as frequently, but singular stores with social media profiles will use the hashtag on occasion. On Facebook, Aerie will post the campaign with the AerieREAL hashtag but the posts are sporadic and very sparse in between.
Between the channels, Aerie tends to post the REAL campaigns in video or Reel formats. If they are not videos, the campaign is a quote or a graphic in a carousel format. On YouTube, the videos are horizontal, but some of the REAL Talks and REAL Voices use vertical video formats. Even with this discrepancy, they still create beautiful backgrounds for the videos so the videos do not look sloppy or unprofessional.
Outside of social media, the REAL campaign is common on Aerie’s blog “Real Life”. The blog contains user-generated content and blogs circling the main idea of the Aerie Real Campaign. On their clothing site, they have a page titled #AerieREAL, where there is a constant feed of UGC where people can be shown on their website when using the hashtag.
The target audience for the campaign is women and is geared towards younger women. Despite being geared towards younger women, Aerie does promote its clothing to older women — shown through using older adult models! Aerie’s main goal is to promote comfy and cute clothing that will look good on anybody. Generally speaking, Aerie’s target audience is 15–34-year-old women. Aerie strives themselves on promoting to every race and ethnicity and making their clothing on more affordable side, as they have sales quite often. Gen X and Gen Z are generations who care about truthfulness and authenticity in a brand — and feel more strongly about promoting body positivity. Aerie is on average affordable and does provide sales year-round for their brand. They truly want to promote clothing that is affordable, realistic, and accessible to every woman. Aerie’s main focus is in America, but they have stores all across the globe and even take on international influencers for their content.
Over the years, Aerie’s social media presence has grown and expanded over the last decade. As of 2023, Aerie has:
Instagram — 1.5 Mil followers
Facebook — 1.99 Likes & 1.95 Follows
Twitter — 92.8k Followers
YouTube — 43.6k Subscribers
TikTok — 203.3k Followers & 1.7m Likes
According to Fool.com, Aerie had about 1 million followers on Instagram in 2019 (Sun, 2019). So over 4 years, Aerie has gained approximately 500,000 followers.
When doing some research, Aerie fluctuated when posting the AerieREAL campaign. In 2017, the Instagram posts focused mainly on promoting clothing / their brand, with sporadic and few posts regarding the campaign. In 2018–2019, the increase in campaign posts almost doubled.
In early 2018, Aerie focused a main portion of its Instagram posts on Aerie Role Models and Ambassadors. After a few years of more “quiet” campaign branding, Aerie decided to amp it up a bit to remind people that Aerie is a force to be reckoned with — and a brand dedicated to all women. For the rest of 2018, the REAL campaign posts are sporadic and farther in between.
Then, around mid to late 2018, Aerie releases #AerieREAL Talks to promote what being a woman is like. This campaign segment lasts only for August but gets brought up occasionally, especially on their YouTube and Blog. The Aerie REAL Talks usually did significantly better than the regular posts, with upwards of a thousand like the difference between regular posts and their campaign posts. At the end of 2018, Aerie gently reiterated its campaign mission statement to remind people what Aerie stands for, and what the hashtag means.
In 2019, we start the year off with the REAL Superpower segment of the REAL campaign, which was a procession of posts about women of all kinds. On average, these social media posts were getting upwards of 10,000 likes for each post (of 12 posts, the campaign segment accumulated approx. 125,000 likes). This campaign subsegment then drifts into weekly video series about women talking about their superpowers. The posts get decent engagement, but most would perform less than the posts surrounding them.
In a similar fashion to 2017 and 2018, the campaign posts are very sparse, until they launch a new subsegment — and in this case — their Lifestyle blog. This video got 77,000 views and 7.9k likes. The end of 2019 onwards follows in a similar fashion, where about two times a year they showcase a new segment of the campaign, such as the Aerie Role Models in January 2020 and Real Positivity in May 2020.
In early 2021 Aerie promotes REAL messages from Aerie lovers, and posts these quotes once or twice a month up until March. Aerie launches Real Voices (on Instagram) in August with only a few posts for the next few months.
In 2022, they created the PSA AerieREAL vlogs, discussing positive scrolling actions to promote better social media health. These posts got only a few thousand likes, while the posts around them got up to 10,000.
Mid-2022 up until the present, Aerie shifts its focus onto its new “anti-shapewear” line, SMOOTHIEZ. Despite the new product line release, they post sporadically about the campaign — but through searching their Instagram we can see that the Smoothies product release has taken precedence. Since 2023, which has only started, there have been very sparse posts regarding the campaign and its subsegments. We begin to see a pattern in Aerie’s campaign launches, and how they are all segments of the general REAL campaign that was initiated back in 2014.
Results
Through research and digging on the company’s social media, Aerie has done a great job at melding its campaign over the last 10-ish years. When looking at the social media, I noticed that they promoted offshoots of the campaign, which all had the same premise but appeared in different forms. I believe this is a great way to promote the campaign without boring users with the same information over and over again. The brand was successful at creating a massively overarching campaign that made women comfortable in their skin and happy to promote Aerie’s brand. In 2021, Aerie reached $1B in sales (AEO Inc, 2021).
If I were to count failures, I believe in the very beginning Aerie “failed” at promoting true body positivity. In 2014 ads, Aerie started the REAL campaign and promised to never create photoshopped or retouched photos of the model. The photos of the women in the ads, though not photoshopped, still showed the models in an almost oversexualized way. I believe this had to do with the standards of a lingerie line back in 2014, but Aerie has evolved since then and shows women in a more empowering and “female gaze” light.
Instagram and YouTube receive the best engagement by far. Despite having 1.9 million likes and followers on Aerie’s FB page, the posts get about 15–20 likes and a few comments. According to Strataj, Aerie gets on average 7k likes and 95 comments, with an engagement rate anywhere between .05 and .45. On Twitter, they have 92k followers but similarly low engagement. On YouTube, Aerie gets on average 1k views on their social media posts. On YouTube, they focus on REAL campaign posts and lifestyle videos.
Discussion
I believe AerieREAL has been a successful campaign and a long one in the works. AerieREAL reached its peak around 2018 until AerieREAL and Aerie were synonymous. Now, the brand is the campaign and the campaign is the brand. Since it is an ongoing campaign, Aerie has the opportunity to create a new campaign that is separate from AerieREAL. However, because the campaign is a decade old and has many offshoots, the success of a new campaign might be short-lived. Aerie does a great job and being inclusive and promoting diversity. It is shown through their social media, their brand voice, and their mission.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Aerie has been one of my favorite brands for a long time. I grew up on the AerieREAL campaign and found a love for their clothing when I was in high school. AerieREAL helped so many women feel confident and empowered when its competition seemed to try to bring women down (such as Victoria’s Secret). CCO Jen Foyle came up with an idea and has had a hand on its pulse ever since. She saw a vision that was relatable and true to women. Many brands aim to shoot down women and make them feel ugly and worthless. But Aerie prevailed — and showed women what it means to wear a brand that was made for them. Now, Aerie is a powerhouse in the industry, with its sibling brand on its heels. Other brands have been slow to catch up to Aerie’s new standard of clothing, models, and beauty. What will be next for Aerie? What will be next for the fashion and clothing industry? We will wait and see, and we won’t go unnoticed!
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