Marketing is notoriously an afterthought in most large organizations’ priorities. It is typically the last order of any business presentation and is treated as a business necessity that perplexes analytical leaders.
The truth is marketing has the power to impact change, evolve and shape our culture, and demonstrate how an organization can benefit people’s lives. If executed in a meaningful way, marketing can be used as a tool for organizations to present the value of their brand and introduce their products and services to a diverse audience.
Since most large organizations tend to think of marketing as the last order of business, marketing and communication plans tend to lack purpose, do not represent shifts in consumer sentiments, target poorly to specific audiences, and don’t effectively execute the brand value in a tone and voice that resonates with all of its consumer base.
Therefore, it is important for large organizations to ensure that marketing be at the table for every stage of an organization’s and its departments’ strategic planning. That way their marketing and communications plan is created in alignment with the organization’s vision and objectives in mind, and executed in a way that resonates with its loyal, and most likely diverse consumer base.
What do organizations struggle with the most in getting their message across to their audiences?
- Non-cohesive marketing plans
One of the biggest faux pas I’ve noticed is that large organizations tend to not have a cohesive marketing plan that aligns strategies and goals across all departments. Marketing leaders hold a great responsibility to make sure everyone interprets the collective marketing objectives across the organization. They must listen to all department leaders and seek to understand how the organization’s marketing strategy can best support their work; and convey to customers, participants, and the end-user the value and impact of their work. This takes marketing leaders to collect feedback, test messaging with the end users, and collect that feedback in order to synthesize all the information into overarching themes that can be categorized into goals. Then, marketing leaders can craft a marketing strategy around those goals in an effort to support all departments cohesively and drive impact.
As a result, the organization’s marketing team can deliver campaigns that are simply the creative expression of those goals. But it is important for marketing teams to be mindful that too much creativity and uniqueness can drive certain consumers away because the goals get convoluted in the framing of the messaging. So, it is important to create a balance between captivating storytelling and considering who your audience is and what is going to resonate to them the most. Determine which voices and communities can best help express your vision and goals in a way that authentically resonates and compels your audience to say yes to the brand promise.
- Applying a check box approach to diversity marketing
A lot of large organizations tend to be quite careless in the way they market to diverse audiences. They tend to apply a one-size-fits-all, check-boxed approach to their marketing campaigns that target certain demographics through stock imagery of diverse faces.
No real person identifies with staged faces. Neither do they relate to marketing campaigns that try so hard to be “relatable” to a certain demographic; so much so, that they are often tone deaf or trivialize their experience. (i.e. The 2017 Pepsi commercial that severely misappropriated the Black Lives Matter police brutality protests).
If your organization is overlooking or taking for granted, the buying power and intelligence of diverse audiences; and they don’t have a strategic plan that factors in their actual lived experiences, it’s going to be very apparent and ostracizing. Therefore, it is important for any organization’s marketing teams to have diversity and inclusion, as a value, built into the overarching strategy of its marketing plan. DEI must be threaded throughout the brand storytelling. The brand’s story needs to be multi-layered and its values aligned with telling true stories that can relate to real people’s lived experiences.
It starts with your organization’s research and makes its way into your community outreach efforts. Consider focus groups. Toy companies have usually done this by reaching out to kids to get their perspectives on their products. Your organization can apply this same curiosity and ask various demographics to engage with your brand to see how they feel. It is really about connecting on a human level to your audience rather than seeing a homogenous and often stereotypical perspective that molds together and engages in group think. Not only is that incredibly dehumanizing to members of your diverse audiences; it also creates campaigns that are disingenuous to them.
- Lacking a diverse and inclusive workforce to tell the story
The reason why a lot of marketing campaigns fall short when trying to appeal to diverse audiences externally is because they do not have diverse and inclusive teams internally. Organizations cannot authentically reflect diversity marketing if they do not have a diverse workforce. To limit your marketing creativity to a homogeneous point of view is to blatantly disregard the varied experiences of your consumers.
It truly comes down to investing in the right people who can lend their perspectives of their own lived experiences to be able to craft a strategy that more accurately reflects the organization’s diverse audiences. Otherwise, organizations’ marketing campaigns can lend themselves to being performative.
And this must extend to an organization’s leadership as well as their employees. Diverse leadership can ensure that your organization’s marketing strategy can be understood and communicated more broadly and comprehensively across all departments. They can ensure that there is more cohesiveness in the brand messaging despite working from different regions, cultures, and languages; which translates to more success in attracting a global consumer base. A prime example of this is L’Oreal Paris’s multicultural marketing strategy.
The truth is a diverse workforce is better at solving complex problems, is more innovative, and makes better decisions 87% of the time. (Korn Ferry) And, organizations with a diverse workforce tend to outperform ones that don’t in audience engagement by 46% to 58%. (Fast Company) It pays to have a diverse workforce; not only from a revenue perspective but it is frankly honest and resonates with our shared reality.
We all are not the same in our society, so your brand should not reflect this traditional notion of majority thinking and majority ideals. Celebrate nuance and normalize identity and all the intersections that come up with who we are, both inside your organization’s structure and teams; and externally, to your audiences. This is especially necessary and true when considering large organizations with a global reach both in their workforce and in their consumer base.
