How to use inclusive marketing to connect with your audience
LIVED EXPERIENCES ARE UNIQUE – LET THEM GUIDE YOU IN CREATING INCLUSIVE CONTENT
From our favourite cola to the tick on our trainers and the world’s most popular chocolate bar* in its seductive purple packaging, big global brands thrive on creating brand propositions that exploit universal emotions. But have these brands used inclusive marketing to reach their audience?
Historically, cultures and individuals have been homogenised to streamline product launches worldwide, keeping costs down for maximum profit. We were a world of ‘perfectly formed’ individuals with ‘standard’ anatomical proportions, holding the same beliefs, values, life experiences, challenges and tastes. Brands feigned accommodating ‘personal’ adaptations under the impersonal marketing mantra ‘think global – act local’. With 14% of the UK from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (and London having 40% of its population from these groups), change is overdue but happening. This growing sector of the population is predicted to increase to 21% by 2050 (according to the Institute of Fundraising 2019 National Council for Voluntary Organisations 2018). So there’s an urgency for brand content users and creators to think about how their stories can become more inclusive.
Why is inclusive marketing important?
Diversity and inclusion wasn’t historically part of the rhetoric in developing content (and even products), but with the increasing rise of the conscious consumer, brands are being held to account; people want to see themselves in the content around them and have their lived experiences understood.
We’ve seen brands take on the challenge of inclusive advertising to better reflect the world in which we live. Such examples are Dove’s pioneering The Dove Real Beauty Pledge, representing women of all shapes, age and colour, Maltesers featuring disabled actors in their TV adverts, and brands creating products that talk to cultural and religious beliefs.
Following the Nike Pro Hijab’s success, Nike launched its Victory Swim collection in February 2020 – a clothing range that brings performance innovation to modest swimwear that includes a full-coverage swimsuit.
And we know it works. A 2019 consumer survey by Google and The Female Quotient showed that 64% of consumers took action after seeing an advert that they considered diverse or inclusive. Inclusive content enables brands to resonate with people deeply so they feel correctly understood.
What is inclusive content?
Inclusive content involves using words and messaging to reflect the diverse communities in society – the audiences that a brand wants to serve. And for brands to truly benefit from it, their commitment to celebrating diverse voices has to be authentic and believable, with respect and thoughtfulness top of mind when developing the content.
If a brand wants to represent society at large, it has to consider whether the audience can engage with the material. At least 1 in 5 people have a long-term illness or an impairment or disability. According to Scope, there are 4.1 million disabled people in the UK (8% of children are disabled, 19% of working-age adults are disabled, 44% of pension-age adults are disabled). Physical impairments could affect their ability to understand a message, to hear or see it or to engage with the experience the brand offers directly.
Focus on the demographics, but don’t forget the cultural sensitivities linked to the groups. Amnesty International recently had to apologise to all its supporters after sending an email featuring an illustration that represented its diverse supporter base celebrating winning the lottery – only one of the figures was a woman wearing a hijab. As gambling is prohibited in Islam, they missed their audiences’ lived experiences.
Content producers have to follow core marketing principles. It’s not good enough to consider demographics or protected characteristics – age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation – as a tick-box checklist exercise: the audience needs to be understood holistically. Marketing campaigns now more than ever have to resonate with people from a variety of backgrounds, and there is no single image of what a ‘typical consumer’ looks like. Any population is a bundle of backgrounds, ages, genders, sexualities, nationalities, religions etc.
Read our guide to inclusive language.
The principles of inclusive marketing content
Whether you want to know how to make a website have universal appeal or learn to understand your audience, these tips will help you create inclusive content across your messaging.
Avoid assumptions and dig deep in understanding your audiences, which is nothing new to marketing. Go back to basics, but be exceptionally good at it. Understand the cultural environment and its filter for decoding messages, symbols and so on.
Don’t just tick-box your content – if it features a woman or man, of black or white ethnicity, a young person or an older person or LGBQTI, for example, know why each is being featured. Understand their stories and lived experiences. Content tailored to one audience doesn’t necessarily exclude a broader market. Consumers may still connect to messaging that elicits empathy or humour and a wider cultural understanding.
In making content inclusive, there is a range of guidelines from organisations working to promote equality among those with protected characteristics, from charities such as SCOPE to the RNIB and Mermaids UK. Of course, you must consider the principles of the medium for which the content is being created. Simple rules include:
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Be empathetic: think about the impact of the content on the user.
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Avoid jargon: whether it’s link text on a website or trying to explain a tax policy, write in plain English to suit your audience’s reading age.
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Rethink your descriptions: reconsider how you could describe your product or service. How would you change or present your message differently to make it accessible to blind or deaf audiences?
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Be clear: tell your audience what you want from them in a way they’ll understand. People learn and process information differently: some prefer words, others symbols, moving images, and if you have stills, you may also need to explain the message differently.
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Provide contrast: an inclusive website should have different elements of content. These are the ‘signposts’ to help your audience navigate your content and message.
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Back to basics: put yourself in the mindset of your audience.
The importance of authenticity for inclusivity
Messages need to be authentic and part of the organisation’s DNA, running through all processes and not confined to a one-off campaign.
Just as the socioeconomic environment is a dynamic one, our approaches to audiences must also be flexible. And we must remember that there is no single homogenous persona. Marketers cannot be complacent; there is a need to regularly check if your audience profiles are accurate.
While diversity and inclusion are essential, you can’t incorporate them into your content marketing with a checklist or an image. The industry needs to embrace the opportunity to think differently and value diverse voices to create inclusive content.
Look at the team developing your content – does it reflect your audience’s diversity? If not, how can you make it more inclusive? Maybe your next hire can help bring in a new or unrepresented perspective, or the freelancers you use could offer that opportunity. Inclusiveness can also help squash any potential cultural mistakes, and having a diverse team delivering your projects increases your chances of not falling into biases
Read about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Inclusivity at Hoxby
The Hoxby community champions inclusive work, fulfilling work and fairer work. The Workstyle Revolution, powered by The Hoxby Foundation, believes in the transformational force of workstyle to refresh the world of work, changing all lives for the better. Their goal is to replace the traditional 9-5 system with workstyle, fitting work around life and not the other way around. This approach is not only better for people but for businesses and society at large, too. We believe inclusivity enables diverse thinking which, in turn, generates true creative thinking that’s not limited by bias and barriers.
Working with Hoxby offers its clients the chance to work with an expansive network of freelancers worldwide, giving you access to diversity and collective intelligence, our unique differentiator. We could be your valuable strategic partner in helping you create and deliver inclusive and accessible content and strategies. To broaden your #CreativeDiversity, why not get in touch at hello@hoxby.com? We’d love to hear from you.
Shoba Mistry is an experienced marketer, working in the non-profit organisation management industry.