Brands and Inclusion: Myths and Urgent Challenges

Brands and Inclusion: Myths and Urgent Challenges

Originally published in Cooperativa.cl

 

By Andrea Garderes, Almabrands partner

 

After decades in which we have seen and celebrated progress on inclusion, women and girls around the world, along with other communities, still face enormous inequality gaps today. Wars and conflicts, climate change, growing inequality, and the disregard for human rights and freedoms, including bodily autonomy, are creating a sense of regression—an issue far too serious not to address continuously, rather than only at certain times of the year.

 

I take up this challenge after reading a study released a few weeks ago by the Unstereotype Alliance Secretariat at UN Women, in partnership with Saïd Business School, the business school of the University of Oxford, England.

 

To begin with, it says, there is a growing perception that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including inclusive advertising practices, could be harmful to companies culturally, socially and economically. These claims, lacking empirical support or scientific evidence, have become commonplace and suggest there are adverse consequences for brands that adopt this approach.

 

As a result, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts slowed in the global advertising industry between 2022 and 2023. In that last year, more traditional and stereotyped portrayals were identified in advertising content.

At the same time, the Geena Davis Institute’s analysis of Cannes Lions and Film Craft Awards shortlisted and winning films from 2006 to 2023 also highlighted the low representation of people from LGBTIQ+ communities and people with disabilities, as well as a significant decline in body diversity in 2023.

However, everything changes when we look at the numbers.

 

According to the study, brands with more inclusive advertising practices sell more: 3.46% more in short-term sales and 16.26% more in long-term sales. They are also considered and tried more often (62% more likely to be the consumer’s first choice).

 

This global report includes an analysis of the impact of inclusive advertising on 392 brands over a four-year period, from 2020 to 2023. The brands in the study span 58 countries across every region of the world and represent a wide variety of product categories.

 

More data that, in this case, do debunk narratives (lacking scientific support): inclusive advertising practices enjoy greater customer loyalty—23% less likely to be dropped after trial and 15% more loyalty. They are also more highly valued by consumers: 54% more pricing power and greater brand equity (8.3% more meaningfulness).

 

This information comes at a key moment to put the challenge and the work for equality back at the center, ahead of the deadlines for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, the Beijing Platform for Action in 2025, and UN Women’s 2022–2025 Strategic Plan.

A couple of cases that reinforce the importance of this challenge:

Mars partnered with the Geena Davis Institute to audit the diversity of characters in its advertising. That’s how it discovered that the higher the percentage of women in an ad, the better its sales performance. For one of its chocolates, free of stereotypes, it unpacked the complications faced by first-time mothers; that honesty, delivered with humor, earned the brand its best sales rate in more than 3 years.

 

Guinness champions inclusion and women’s rugby, the largest underrepresented group in sport, through its “Never Settle” program. In 2021, when only 4% of media coverage in the UK and Ireland was devoted to women’s sport, Guinness used its partnerships with Meta and Wikipedia to give players in the Women’s Six Nations Championship blue checkmarks and their own Wikipedia pages to support media coverage. The impact: that year, 33% of rugby coverage was devoted to the women’s game; since 2022, Guinness has improved its brand equity by +5.5 percentage points and gained market share in the hospitality and retail sectors in Great Britain.

 

Things are happening in the world. Yes, sometimes local events keep us from seeing the global forest clearly—a forest that is burning somewhere when we see diversity and inclusion initiatives stalled by fear, prejudice and lack of information.

 

I want to issue an urgent call to brands in Chile, both local and international, to remember that having started down the path of inclusion a few years ago is important, but completely and utterly insufficient. It’s the “starting point.” We must keep moving forward and go deeper along that path; doing so, as the data show, not only brings us closer to the kind of society we want for future generations from a moral and ethical standpoint, but from an economic one as well.

 

Let’s not give room to ignorance or to a lack of appreciation and understanding of the world we live in. As we become more interconnected, diverse and socially conscious, brands must recognize the need to reflect these values in their advertising and marketing communications, which are essential to building and representing, day after day, who we are socially and culturally.