18/03/2022
AUTHENTICITY INCLUSIVE MARKETING
Essentially, consumers want to support brands that represent them and their values. And organizations that have made DEI efforts a core priority also recognize that it’s just as important to feature representation in front of the camera as it is behind the scenes.
How can marketers do this? There are multiple ways across an organization’s ecosystem, of which we’ve highlighted three:
📍 Ensure teams and suppliers reflect your market.
Teams — both internal and external—that closely reflect the markets they serve can reduce the cultural and demographic distance between the brand and the consumers they aspire to reach. “It’s not just who we hire internally, but who we work with,” says Marissa Solis, senior vice president of portfolio marketing, partnerships, and media at Frito Lay. “We want to make sure we’re working with a diverse array of content creators, agencies, directors, and producers to influence the industry and be culturally relevant in how we convey those messages—in an authentic way.”
📍 Bring diverse voices back to the organization. As chief marketing officers are often the first line to the customer, they should use that position of influence to continuously monitor and bring the needs of underrepresented communities to their organization — and feature those voices and faces in campaigns.
For instance, global beauty and personal care brand Avon surveyed 8,000 women across the globe to understand what issues were impacting them most during the pandemic. When Avon found that 41% lost confidence during the pandemic, it partnered with models of various races, ethnicities, and abilities to drive awareness on its “My Story Matters” platform — a space to give women a chance to share their authentic, unedited stories.
📍 Make your commitments measurable. Ultimately, no amount of messaging can help a brand overcome the hurdle of being labeled disingenuous. One way to solve for this is
to make sure your DEI goals are not just checking a box but creating real, measurable outcomes.
For Laura Curtis Ferrera, global chief marketing officer of Scotiabank, artificial intelligence (AI) helps to audit messaging and ensure there is always accountability. “We’re really investing in representation—inclusion by design—at all levels,” she says. “We tried to do it manually, but it’s really time-consuming and you may miss things. And when you add a human, you add bias to the process. So now we do it using AI; then we have someone whose actual job title is around managing the inclusion-by-design mandate.”
In the end, future generations and growing populations of diverse communities are expecting more. Simultaneously,
the highest-growing brands are reducing the cultural and demographic distance between the makeup of their teams and the markets they aspire to reach. Marketers can help their organizations not only hone their messaging but also support a company’s transformation to a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive organization, thereby underpinning their brand messaging with authenticity.
Some of the materials used in this post are taken from the Deloitte articlehttps://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/be/Documents/consulting/Global-Marketing-Trends.pdf
