The National Football League (NFL) released a new commercial to get fans excited about the upcoming football season kicking off. The spot is filled with a broad diversity of football lovers, including people of different races, cultures, genders, people with disabilities, and people from different countries around the world. It even features people who don’t play football, but who love watching it.
The ad overall is super inclusive, and does a lot of things right from a representation standpoint. To some marketers, this well executed ad may be the goalpost they look at for success when it comes to creating inclusive campaigns.
However, when it comes to delivering inclusive marketing, there’s more than one way to approach the campaigns you produce.
It’s also important to note that from a customer experience standpoint, consumers will evaluate how inclusive they think you are based upon a variety of different touchpoints they have with you. That’s why it is important to be inclusive in all the campaigns you produce, so you’re able to demonstrate over and over with your marketing, that your brand is inclusive.
Here are three categories of inclusive campaigns your brand can and should produce as part of your body of work of marketing communications.
Campaigns Designed to Reach People From Underrepresented and Underserved Communities
In many instances, it is important for brands to “invite” consumers from marginalized communities to be their customers. There are a number of ways to do this, however at its core, inviting consumers who are used to be ignored by brands boils down to “seeing them” and demonstrating to them that they belong with your brand.
Creating promotional campaigns that speak specifically to consumers most brands ignore is a really effective way of communicating to people from these communities that your brand recognizes aspects of their identity that make them different, and wants the opportunity to support them in the problem they have that your brand solves.
Here’s an example of how Google made a Super Bowl commercial designed to “invite” the disability community to be customers of its Pixel 8.
And here’s a campaign by KitKat Canada that designed a campaign to invite Muslim consumers to be customers.
It is important to note that just because you create a campaign with one community in mind, doesn’t mean that people who don’t hold that identity will feel left out, or like the brand “isn’t for them.” People who care about others with marginalized identities will appreciate you making an effort to be inclusive and invite people who aren’t quite a part of what is considered to be “mainstream”.
Mass Audience Campaigns That Feature Talent From Underrepresented And Underserved Communities
Representation matters. One study showed that 74% of consumers say that representation matters for the brands they buy from and engage with.
There are many ways that brands can incorporate representation into its marketing. One effective way is to feature people from underrepresented and underserved communities as lead characters in mass market campaigns, rather than just tokenized sidekicks.
Good inclusive marketing doesn’t mean all your campaigns have to be segregated.
While campaigns designed to speak to specific communities has a place, as mentioned in the previous section, that shouldn’t be the only place where people with marginalized communities appear.
People with identities that make them a minority should be main characters more often. We live in an integrated, rather than a segregated world. As such, people with identities that make them a minority have appeal and influence with mainstream audiences.
The team at Amazon Alexa leaned into featuring Black talent for this commercial that debuted during the Super Bowl a few years back. While Black consumers felt seen and loved the representation, the campaign was also well received by people who are not part of the Black community, who are part of Amazon Alexa’s target market.
And this commercial from State Farm is also designed to reach the mass market, while featuring diverse talent as leads.
Mainstream ads can and do perform well with talent from historically underrepresented communities.
One thing to highlight about these type of campaigns, is that the lead characters from underrepresented and underserved communities — are just people with the problem your brand solves. Success with these type of campaigns isn’t necessarily about showcasing culturally relevant elements to make people feel seen. It’s more about “normalizing” that people from underrepresented and underserved communities have the same needs, challenges, fears, frustrations, desires, and in a lot of instances lifestyles, as people in the “mainstream”.
Mass Audience Campaigns Featuring Talent From A Variety Of Communities
The NFL commercial works so well, because it includes a range of people with a number of identities in a way that doesn’t feel forced.
Often enough, brands create campaigns where it feels like they are going through an identity checklist as they try to incorporate as much diversity with their talent that we see on the screen. In many instances, those types of ads don’t work so well, because they feel inauthentic and forced.
The NFL ad didn’t have that issue, because everyone in the ad was a main character. Communities were represented in a manner that was true to their identity, and everyone was able to be threaded together in an authentic way because collectively, everyone there has a genuine and deep love for football.
Nike took a similar (and effective) approach with an ad it published. There were a broad diversity of athletes featured, and all of them were the main character. The various identities were threaded together with a common attitude and track record of winning, excellence, and being among the best in their fields.
Both the NFL ad and the Nike ad found ways to showcase the diversity of their customer base by highlighting their differences and similarities in a way that unified the group, and that was aspirational for the people watching.
This type of campaign can work for your brand as well, but only if it is executed effectively. The story and unifying thread must be about the larger message you are working to communicate, with the diversity of the main characters you feature being authentic proof sources for that message.