Part of the reason Women in SPAM took off has very little to do with the acronym itself.
For years, women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics had STEM. More than a label, it became a widely recognised identity that brought together people working across different disciplines under a shared banner. It gave people a sense of belonging and a simple way to describe a community that was larger than any individual job title.
Women working in social media, PR, advertising and marketing never really had an equivalent. More often than not, they were grouped under labels such as “marketing girlies.” While the term was often used with affection, it also had a habit of making a broad and influential profession feel smaller than it really was. The people building brands, shaping conversations, managing communities, influencing culture and driving growth were often described in a way that felt lighter than the work itself.
It is perhaps no coincidence that, in recent years, there has also been a growing tendency to repackage marketing in language that sounds more technical to make it more appealing to men. Marketers have become growth architects, brand engineers and demand generation specialists. Some of those titles reflect genuine specialisation, but they also reveal how we think about work. The closer a role sounds to engineering, systems or operations, the more seriously it is often taken.
If marketing already influences culture, drives revenue and shapes the way organisations communicate with the world, why does it sometimes feel the need to borrow the language of other professions in order to be taken seriously? That is one reason Women in SPAM feels significant. It gives the women doing it a shared identity and, in doing so, suggests that perhaps the profession never needed a more impressive-sounding title in the first place.
What fascinates me is how little resistance there was to the name itself. Marketing is an industry that can spend months debating positioning, messaging and perception, yet the arrival of Women in SPAM was met with an enthusiasm that seemed to bypass all of those usual conversations. Nobody appeared particularly concerned that the acronym shared its name with junk email. Instead, people recognised it, shared it and immediately understood what it represented.
I think this is because names rarely carry as much weight as we imagine they do. Marketers often talk about branding as though the perfect name is the foundation on which everything else is built, but the opposite is often true. Meaning tends to flow toward communities rather than the other way around. A name becomes valuable when people decide it describes something they care about, and once that happens its original associations begin to matter less and less.
If the goal had been to create the most feel good acronym possible, it is easy to imagine a different outcome. We might have ended up with something like PRISM (PR, Reputation Management, Influencer Strategy, Social Media and Marketing) – a name that sounds thoughtful and carefully constructed. It would have looked impressive in a presentation deck and translated beautifully into conference branding. It also might have disappeared into the long list of perfectly competent professional initiatives that nobody remembers ten months later.
SPAM succeeded for reasons that have very little to do with conventional branding wisdom. It arrived at a moment when a large group of people were ready to claim an identity that felt larger than a job title and more meaningful than a stereotype. Once that need existed, the imperfections of the acronym became part of its charm rather than an obstacle to its adoption.
The internet has always had a tendency to embrace things that feel human over things that feel carefully put together. Women in SPAM doesn’t feel like a carefully engineered brand and that’s exactly why it is The Internet’s Favourite.
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