Brands and Inclusion: Myths and Urgent Challenges

Brands and Inclusion: Myths and Urgent Challenges

Originally published on Cooperativa.cl

By Andrea Garderes, Partner at Almabrands

After decades in which we have been able to witness and celebrate progress in the area of inclusion, today, women and girls around the world, as well as other communities, continue to face enormous gaps in equality. Wars and conflicts, climate change, growing inequalities, and the failure to respect human rights and freedoms—including bodily autonomy—are creating a sense of regression today. This is an issue too serious to be addressed only at certain times of the year; it must be tackled on an ongoing basis.

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

To begin with, he 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, which lack empirical support or scientific evidence, have become commonplace and suggest that there are adverse consequences for brands that adopt this approach.

This is how efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in the global advertising industry slowed down between 2022 and 2023. Over the past year, more traditional and stereotypical portrayals were identified in advertising content.

At the same time, the Geena Davis Institute’s analysis of the shortlisted and winning films at the Cannes Lions and Film Craft Awards from 2006 to 2023 also highlighted the underrepresentation of people from the LGBTIQ+ community and people with disabilities, as well as a significant decline in the representation of people with diverse body types 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 the short term and 16.26% more in the long term; in addition, they are considered and tried more often (62% more likely to be the consumer’s first choice).

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

More data that, in this case, does indeed debunk (scientifically unsupported) claims: inclusive advertising practices lead to greater customer loyalty. They are 23% less likely to be abandoned after the trial period and show 15% higher loyalty. These brands are also more highly valued by consumers: they have 54% greater pricing power and higher brand value (8.3% more meaningful).

This information comes at a critical moment to refocus attention on the challenge of achieving equality and the work toward that goal, before the deadlines for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, the Beijing Platform for Action in 2025, and UN Women’s Strategic Plan for 2022–2025.

A couple of examples that underscore the importance of this challenge:

Mars has partnered with the Geena Davis Institute to assess the diversity of characters in its advertising. That’s how it discovered that the higher the percentage of women in an ad, the better the sales performance. For one of its stereotype-free chocolate products, the company explored the challenges faced by women having their first child; this honesty, delivered with humor, earned the brand its highest sales rate in over three years.

Guinness advocates for inclusion and women’s rugby—the largest underrepresented group in the sport—through its “Never Settle” program. In 2021, when only 4% of media coverage in the United Kingdom and Ireland was devoted to women’s sports, Guinness leveraged its partnerships with Meta and Wikipedia to grant players in the Women’s Six Nations blue verification badges and their own Wikipedia pages to bolster media coverage. Impact: That year, 33% of rugby coverage was dedicated to women’s rugby; since 2022, Guinness has increased its brand value by +5.5 percentage points and gained market share in the hospitality and retail sectors in Great Britain.

Things are happening around the world. Yes, sometimes local issues prevent us from getting a clear view of the global picture—a picture that, in some ways, is burning as we watch initiatives promoting diversity and inclusion come to a standstill due to fear, prejudice, and a lack of information.

I want to issue an urgent call to brands in Chile—both domestic and foreign—to remember that while embarking on the path to inclusion a few years ago is important, it is completely and utterly insufficient. It is merely the “starting point.” We must continue to move forward and deepen our commitment to this path; as the data show, doing so not only brings us closer to the kind of society we want for future generations from a moral and ethical standpoint, but also from an economic one.

Let’s not give room to ignorance or 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 the daily construction and representation of who we are socially and culturally.