Marketing communicates a company’s culture and brand values. If the diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) statement is a true reflection of your company’s culture and values, then the DEI statement must also be threaded into all the marketing deliverables.
This is not only important from an external perspective to satisfy your clients, who are becoming increasingly more interested in buying from diverse companies; but it starts with your company’s overall messaging in your internal communications too. They should acknowledge your diverse employees’ lived experiences as well as their innovative, out-of-the-box solutions and contributions.
When you start considering how you can reflect your DEI statement internally, you are essentially reinforcing a culture that demonstrates how you are listening, empathizing, and taking action to create a culture of authentic belonging which can be easily and authentically translated to understanding the lived experiences, personal preferences, and pain points of your customers. This then results in the human experience of being included in driving a company’s vision and feeling a sense of belonging with the brand. According to Vision Point Systems, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Therefore, you will miss out on a majority of your customer base if your company’s marketing does not align to your organization’s principles, priorities, and policies reflected in its DEI statement; and implementing tangible change internally as well as in its marketplace.
Get your leadership team involved in the overall marketing strategy
The first step to aligning your marketing collateral with your DEI statement is getting your leadership team involved in the overall marketing strategy to consider the cohesiveness between it and the overall company’s strategy. Your leadership team is responsible for the success of the overall company’s goals. Therefore, they must consider that the achievements of the marketing team’s strategic goals also have implications for the overall company’s success.
Usually, companies have the marketing team and the leadership siloed, which means even if your leadership is applying initiatives that operationalize DEIB to the overall strategy, it may not trickle down to apply to the marketing strategy. Getting your leadership team involved in the overall marketing strategy means that they can work in partnership to create marketing strategic goals that align with the overall company’s goals to operationalize and thread their DEIB statement, and create marketing messaging, experiences, and collateral reflective of those goals. Building pipelines between business operations, business development, marketing, and DEI leaders helps ensure strategic goals, messaging, and performance metrics are working in tandem.
Company leadership can also understand their marketing team’s needs to accomplish their goals, providing resources, i.e. adequate budgets, to the team. They can implement accountability markers and track the marketing team’s progress in real-time to see if they are threading the DEI statement and goals into their marketing strategy. The marketing team also has more accountability to deliver a strategy and materials that truly reflect the values of the company, and are more likely to provide consistent messaging that has a DEI impact. Think about the power of storytelling when your DEI commitments are not only featured on your company website, but also in the way diverse skill sets, voices, and lived experiences are shared through internal communications platforms. Simply, there is increased awareness and collaboration when your company’s leadership is working in partnership with its marketing team.
Identify action-based commitments in the DEI statement that can be carriers through messaging
Good examples of DEI statements specify your DEI commitments to your customers and employees. Your DEI statement must be able to convey your company’s approach to DEI even if your organization is not quite there regarding its DEIB goals. You can leverage these action items to be featured in presentations, videos, social media platforms, websites, news interviews, and more.
If one of your commitments is to increase opportunities to listen to diverse voices, genders, abilities, and identities, your marketing team can begin planning ways to include diverse voices, genders, abilities, and identities in its strategic planning. It can even reflect intersections of representation across all marketing verticals.
Target is an excellent example of this because its DEI statement is as follows:
“At Target, our team rallies around a single purpose: to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. That purpose and our inclusion of “all” directly connect to our inclusivity value as a company. We leverage our purpose to champion a more inclusive society that provides a fulfilling place to work and enhances engagement with our guests, communities, and suppliers.”
Target links its company’s value of inclusivity to champion a more inclusive society. Last year, Target created an advertisement called “Bring Home Support.” It was a great reflection of their marketing collateral reflecting its DEI statement because it demonstrated their commitment towards inclusivity not only in their stores, by promoting the products of marginalized groups’ owned businesses. It also celebrates inclusivity in society by emphasizing the importance of supporting local communities.
Maintain your DEI commitments within a culture of consistency and integrity to effectively translate your organization’s values in your marketing strategy
It cannot go without saying that brands such as Target that uphold inclusivity are facing pushback against DEI for their LGBTQIA+ friendly merchandise featured during PRIDE month. Even Bud Light experienced short-term sales declines after facing backlash for partnering with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender social media influencer. I consider these examples of how brands can’t go chasing the most compelling event to garner market share.
Bud Light, in particular, has been celebrating PRIDE, producing commercials celebrating gay marriage, and donating money to LGBTQIA+ non-profit organizations since 1995. Yet, in response to the backlash, Anheuser Busch InBev’s CEO Michael Doukeris said they will pivot to focus their efforts on campaigns that work everywhere and have wider appeal. Essentially, the company’s leadership has decided to ignore its DEI statement and squander their commitments, which states that they intend to honor inclusive futures for all people to be their authentic selves; and rather than prioritize the dominant group and deny belonging to the very people who are often left out and excluded.
You must consider that most backlash events, especially in the current divisive socio-political climate in the U.S., are short-lived. Though Target and Anheuser Busch have lost money due to initial backlash towards their marketing campaigns upholding their DEI commitments; there are actually other factors that could also be affecting their bottom line. For Target, retail stocks have been dropping across the board with even Foot Locker and Children’s Place both losing significant market value, caused by “general retail jitters” and an indication of a buying shift of the consumer. For Anheuser Busch, like most mass-produced beer companies, their sales have been declining over time because of an overall shift in consumer preferences towards craft beers and other alcoholic beverages.
Not to mention, particularly in the Anheuser Busch case, choosing to run after the “hype” can create a massive misstep in your marketing strategy, making both conservative and liberal customers distrust you, taking months, if not years to build back that trust. This is perhaps another reason their sales have trended downwards longer than expected.
Ultimately, if brands are going to thread their DEI commitments through their marketing strategies, they have to hold firm to those commitments and speak to their audiences who share their belief in inclusivity and belonging.
Reinforce a culture of data and learning to demonstrate how listening can lead to empathy and action
Make sure the marketing deliverables reflect how the statement is working in action, assure that progress will be measured, and the work will be indicative of diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Appealing to the loyalties of future customers may require brands to demonstrate their commitment to their DEI statement in the form of metrics embedded in their marketing materials. In fact, brands that have a 10% or more annual revenue growth, i.e. high-growth organizations, are those that demonstrated key performance metrics for DEI to their customers and employees. This has been particularly effective when high-growth organizations establish and share key performance metrics around talent retention, hiring objectives, community investments, and brand messaging and imagery.
It is equally important to reflect your company’s true progress in its marketing in a realistic and attainable way. Your marketing team must not be afraid to hold your company accountable in its messaging to your customers and employees. It can demonstrate the difference between your company coming off to your customers and employees with good intentions versus actually doing the work to create great outcomes, which realistically takes time, trial and error, pivots, and revaluation.
Ultimately, even if your company does elevate your DEI statement in your marketing deliverables, your marketing team should still include employees with diverse lived experiences to listen and learn from them with empathy and feature their, and customers with similar perspectives, in your marketing efforts. People want to buy from companies that look like and understand them. In the US, the White population has declined for the first time in history and people from marginalized communities are growing. Plus, in 2021 people who identify as LGBTQ have risen from 3.5% to 5.6% in 2020. Your customers are looking a lot more diverse. Therefore, in order to appeal to their needs and values, you must incorporate diverse voices internally, to reflect that authentically externally.
