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alright so while i was living in buenos aires often enough when i was out eating at restaurants the waiter would bring over an english menu most often because they heard me speaking to one of my friends in english now just in case you don't know the official language in buenos aires in argentina on the whole is spanish now the outback steak steakhouse in az asia which is the international airport in buenos aires they even went as far as to print their menus with three languages spanish portuguese and english because those are the most common languages of the passengers going through the airport so we've got a number of restaurants who've got a separate english language menu and then you've got a outback state house who has all three languages on one menu let's contrast that with observations from the us i live in florida where twenty two percent of the population speaks spanish as their primary language and i'm super hard pressed to think of a single restaurant that i've been to that offers a spanish language menu i even remember one lunch where i a random customer had to step in as a translator for a spanish speaking couple because no one on staff spoke the language now i find this as a really interesting contrast among my experiences in these two countries in particular and this isn't just a restaurant and hospitality issue or even about language it's a business issue it's a marketing issue it's a customer experience issue and these are all issues especially for brands who want to grow why because if we look at things in the us the latino community isn't just growing they're reshaping the market one in five people in gen z are latino when we look at jen alpha the generation after gen z it's one and four but most brands are still missing the mark when it comes to authentically showing up for this powerful audience so in this episode i sat down with claudia rom ed ceo and founder of the we are all human foundation who shares eye opening findings from her two thousand twenty five hispanic sentiment study and what they reveal about where brands are falling short and how they can do better when it comes to engaging the fast growing and super powerful latino community you will hear my conversation with claudia after this short break you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better hey claudia thanks so much for joining me today how are you i'm great it's so excited to be with you oh my pleasure i'm so excited for this chat alright before we get dive in let the people know who are you and what do you do oh i'm claudia aroma ed i'm the founder and the ceo of the world human foundation hispanic star and a i'm a social entrepreneur and an entrepreneur getting ready to launch a so brand which is the next week thing after with tequila na very cool very cool i know a lot of people are gonna be interested in learning more about that one of the things that we i wanted to talk to you about today is that you and your team just published a report that you all presented the results at the can festival a couple of weeks back and as i was looking through the report one of the things that it said like in the opening was that you talked about the most significant growth opportunity for brands over the next four decades and i was like wow talk about like a show stopping headline can you talk about like what is this opportunity why is it the case why do brands need to be paying attention absolutely so what we're talking about is the results of the hispanic sentiment thirty twenty twenty five this is a consecutive survey report that we do starting in twenty eighteen so we've been we've been able to measure the sentiment of the us hispanic population from twenty eighteen and start actually comparing it this year we were able to include the opinion of non latinos about latinos so that we can start measuring the sentiment about latinos of latinos okay the incredible headline is that this is a four point one trillion dollar opportunity that represents growth over the next four years and i'm gonna break it down and i'm you know that's a statement that i'm not saying because i'm a super at a statement because it's back on data right four point one trillion dollars is the size of the economy that means if if you take the us hispanic population which is compounded by twenty six different national approaching whether you are argentinian mexican colombia all of us are called latinos or hispanics or latin by the way we don't care about how you wanna call us as long as you pay as ball that's fine but so this group if you put it as a stand economy would do be the fifth largest economy because the ice of the economy that we produce is four point one trillion dollars so that's a fact okay and then we say about that in the next four decades because of the age of latino so seventeen is the most common age of sixty five million latinos in the country so if you start looking at median mode and average average is twenty seven years old twenty six years old that's a decade younger than the rest of the population but the most which is the most common the most common age of sixty five million latinos which represent twenty percent of america today is seventeen years old that's a shows stopper but then you compare it to the mode meaning the most common age of non latino whites and that's sixty three so the seventeen to sixty three is four decades four decades of growth four decades of people that are gonna be able to pay taxes that are gonna be able to buy products that are gonna be able to go to work so so that's why we're saying this is secular growth the firm growth for the next four decades and today is the size of four point one trillion dollars as an opportunity that it's untapped and outperforming in whatever industry you are so we're like went to the can advertisement festival this year saying like okay latinos are on top outperforming and ready for love so this is the size of the economy and it's gonna be secular for four decades yeah it's it's an exciting opportunity whenever you like you said like you're looking at the numbers and understanding it i am particularly close to this in because my daughter is a right and i want to i consider her as a part of this group of what you're calling the new latin latino of course she's young but you talking about how this is an overall very young population can you talk a little bit about what is the new latino at you as you all have referenced senior report and how should brands be thinking about it like is there a shift in the way that brand should be thinking about this younger generation of latinos versus how they might have traditionally thought about this community absolutely and your daughter is a perfect poster child of what i'm gonna say so latinos were young right i just said the youngest cohort in the entire country twenty percent of the gen sea that everybody wants to reach is latino twenty five percent of alpha the younger you look the more latinos you will find so that's the that's a distributor number one okay but and that has been the case right like that has been the case and you have been seeing it the projection of population growth what is new is that these latino this this group of sixty five million people are all of a sudden awake they are self aware of their own power so these dramatic awareness race that we have seen in the hispanic sentiment story that in twenty eighteen was only fourteen percent of the latino population that had a clue of how many we are how young we are how much we produce how much do we have a power in the voting and in the elections this group has grown their awareness about themselves but also about their own influence from fourteen percent in twenty eighteen to forty two percent in twenty twenty three and this year in twenty twenty five seventy seven percent that means seventy seven percent of latinos are understanding their own power and we don't have anymore the distorted mirror mh east which was looking at ourselves so small because media and everybody was telling us like oh yours you're you're you're not very powerful you're weak you're small that's already understood through the election that we are through the election and through the work of organizations like mine and through the awareness racing that we have about the power of latinos we realizing by seventy seven percent that we're influential the problem here if you're a brand is that and your daughter's is perfect for this example the problem is that you don't see that others are seeing it that the people in power are seeing your influence or reflecting your influence so you're starting to wonder not starting to wonder you're really peaking on on how whether brands and media are reflecting your values and are reflecting your influence the way that they have and that is pretty much i think that the message we want to come to say which is this is an untapped and outperforming opportunity with a group that all of a sudden is a new latin latino because he's self aware and empowered and he's going to start making choices because what is clear is that there's a disconnect between our influence and our external representation and we don't see our values reflected by big brands and media and we're gonna start taking action against that yeah that was gonna be my next thought was how do you feel that brands are doing and maybe what is a data show about how brands are doing with engaging authentically this community from where i sit it's still feels like it's very stereotypical but i'm i'm curious to see what your thoughts are and what the community has to say about it i'm gonna give you a big graph right okay how you speak for like to tune that's a way in which we're growing population economically socially the the number of people that are graduating the amount of jobs that we are able to create the latinos are growing this way our awareness of ourselves has actually started going this way what is not going that way is how brands and media are portraying us representing us and investing in us and that is this these two contradicting grass is what's causing a recession and i'm not talking about an economic recession i'm talking about that recognition recession where we feel that a brands have actually decreased their interest and the reflection to us where we're seeing less latinos sin where we're seeing less representation at the higher level so while everything else is going up this number latinos spill ignored in trust in brands pulling to fifty four percent to just thirty two percent in two years so twenty points drop in two years means that latinos again this contradiction of like wait a second i am saying clearly now and now i can see that how ignore i am and this recession that i was talking about this recognition recession truly we don't wanna get into a recognition prices because that would bring a breakup up and if there's one thing that latinos are one is that were many two we have a purchasing power that is of the size of three point eight trillion dollars that went from one year to four four point one trillion dollars that means the size of our wallet is increasing by the minute every time we're buying and we have a purchasing power that is higher ten years ago we were the most common product that we bought was oil today lipstick so we're we're going from basics to more locks luxury and then in the future but the one piece that happens when you have a breakup when you let a recession get into a crisis is trust and loyalty right and those are the pieces that latinos have traditionally living being rated at when you're a brand loyal like we are because we use the creams that we saw from our hour lead right like yeah i i keep on actually using the pieces that come to me because i'm loyal to my brands i'm loyal to my employer i'm i'm loyal to the pieces i do but when you break up with someone then you are gonna allow for latinos to be exercising their purchasing choices which is what's happening right now we see on the data from the hispanic sentiment study that from sixty six percent to now eighty two percent latinos are saying i'm gonna start making sure that my purchasing choices are reflecting the investment that brands having my community yeah so every time more this new latino that is more self aware i'm empowered is gonna start making new choices and that is why we're calling the attention for brands and companies to start acting and investing in latino in what matters to was us in our priorities and the pieces that are gonna be intimate to us in the community we don't care so much about the you know like external fan safari i said that what we care about like having companies and brands accompanying us in advancing in our future advancing in the cost of living fears that we have advancing in the health care issues the safety issues the or the priorities for latinos yeah where would you recommend that brands get started if they're saying alright i'm looking at the numbers i see that this is a community that we should not be ignoring or putting on the back burner any longer is it in representation is it in other parts of their overall marketing mix like where do they need to be thinking or pod focusing their energy in a way where the community can feel it so there is this incredible pushback against diversity inclusion happening corporate paralysis is a reality wait and see all these things and at the end of the day i think that while those corporate efforts might be stopped the latino consumer is not diversity getting inclusion the latino consumer is gonna keep on consumer we're gonna keep on buying toilet paper we're gonna keep on going and so my first advice to everybody's is like don't confuse terms don't get parallel paralysis where you don't need it this is all about business growth and a business opportunity and the reason why a known for profit activist like myself is talking to brands and two companies is not to make sure that they increase their bottom line is to make sure that by engaging in the latin latino community in what they care about they're gonna be able to grow and that is going to be a triple bottom line a wing win win because latino communities need that investment in their schools where they operate in the communities where they are and because latinos don't want charity latinos what they are looking for is opportunities the most trusted institution for latinos he's not media is not government is not even the church she's my boss and my family so employees have a dramatic role to play when it comes to the latino community so brands need to recognize and companies need to recognize that your community trust you only because you employ them or because you know like you're talking to them so don't confuse terms this is not a a diverse inclusion invest in the market and invest in a way that is relevant to latinos in their priorities so we don't need to be again we don't need to be doing things you know like out of context but you need to be looking at culturally relevant growth loyalty and cultural leadership that is focused on our priorities i would say culture for campaigns real stories of resilience entrepreneurship board mobility latinos with this imagine that we're not asking ourselves whether we're working anymore we wanna know where is that worthiness is coming from we wanna know that other people see us as worthy so everything that you can tell on storytelling positioning latinos as an integral part of the team as opposed to someone that is bench is going to be important particularly if you if you start looking at the data that indicates latino don't wanna be isolated we want to be part of the mix right like so when you're looking at ads when you're looking at investment in the communities it's it's just we don't wanna say like give it to us and not give it to anybody else it's just like we're part of the mix so i i would say that keep on investing taking small bets is like you take out what you put in right like if you're like doing little investment that's what you're gonna from this community so i think that even the numbers i would just say trust the data dig into the data start looking at numbers like seventeen is the most common another number that i always wanna make sure that brands didn't understand when what they're looking at market an investment in the market and the consumption is the lifespan value of consumers right like so if you start looking at the lifetime value of non latinos is thirty eight years so a brand has a consumer for thirty eight active years in which it can start say like you're gonna start buying and then you're gonna end buying from me and i wanna have your loyalty for thirty eight years yeah for latinos because we start earlier and then we am there earlier because we we don't have no choice right it's fifty so that is twelve years added that you can have one consumer you can have sonia sonia daughter as your consumer for fifty years which is twelve years younger than the rest so i would say for brands get the data get the insights both cultural go authentic go community very cool very cool the numbers don't lie and they tell a very compelling story okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's marketing against the grain hosted by kit button are and kieran flanagan and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals so if you wanna know what's happening now in the world of marketing what's ahead and how you can lead the way then this podcast is for you i listened to an episode a while back that i love so much i sent it to some friends in a mastermind that i'm a part of and it was all about how to rank number one when ai is taking over featuring ross simmons definitely worth a listen if you like cheese may like i do you might wanna have a listen to the episode where they covered did hubspot lose eighty percent of its blog traffic here's what actually happened in another recent episode that looks super interesting than i actually wanna make sure that i take some time to listen to is how to rank number one and chat gp results ai seo strategy listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts i'm curious because i've seen brand struggle with this as well is the whole concept of language and how they should be using language so often i've seen whenever brands are thinking about the latino community their default is old that means we need to translate content and my personal view viewpoint is it's so much more than that but i think that people are getting kind of hung up with the idea of language should it be in spanish should it be in english should it be in span right like what advice would you given what is the data say about what consumers want and expect it's so interesting what's happening to language and in language it's fabulous and the data is is incredibly rich sophisticated making it complex and right making complex but just like let's put data around there's five hundred and seventy seven thousand at seven million people that speaks spanish in the world there's more than fifty seven million spanish speaker in the countries eighty percent of latinos are bilingual thirty percent of latinos do not even speak spanish so it's already a you know like a complex right but vast marked if you start looking at that is like fifty five million people that i could be talking to talking in spanish what is interesting is number one there's a trend to latin that there's a reclaiming latin latino that trend so people despite all the political migration attacks and and people are feeling a bit scared they are scared about their safety not about their identity so nothing is gonna shake up you know like nothing no one is not gonna feel proud of being latin latino know like that's done what is happening is that there's a push from people like your daughter to their parents that maybe accumulated if you're fifty years old the likelihood is at your parents if you were like first or second generation told you mi hit don't spanish like a age agent like try to me like everyone else so you didn't learn the language and your kids are pushing you and so there's a retro latino movement that is making duo other platforms explode right like there's there's an increase from twenty eighteen the usage of language as a tool that brands can use sixty six percent to seventy six percent to eighty five percent this year so people are like talk to me tell me tell me that you love me in esp right like there's there's that there there's a sense of that is something that connects me with my passion number two is how it is almost like a cultural piece as opposed to it's like cultural not not so much bilingual but by cultural as well and so that means that for example people that are spanish big are more optimistic we saw it in the data that people that were only one language were less optimistic about the american dream or spanish speakers that are more optimistic about the american dream so if you start taking that as an inside you're like wait a second so i could i could be talking to you in different times and in different moments and i could actually appeal to different emotions to you yeah which is quite interesting so i think that language overall and then there's also the other piece which is the non latin latino learning spanish where you have me model being the number one beer are sold in the country not because latinos are drinking more is because it's trust sending the latino valley trust sending you have bad being the number one you know like in the top charts where he's spanish speaker and people willing to go there so there's something cool about language and being latinos that is only not only transcend not only latin latinos but transcend sending into mainstream so the entire concept of language and when and how and where is super interesting for example for us we definitely are english based with a spanish touch okay and we do most of the things that we produce with it in two languages understanding that for some people it's a matter of time it's a matter of moment it's a matter of emotion where they're gonna be using the different tools yeah for me i think it just means for brands they have to be much more strategic and have a lot more cultural intelligence it's not just oh flip the switch send this off the translation which that wasn't the right approach before i think it was a much more lazy approach but it it just means that their need to have a greater degree of intimacy with the people that they wanna serve to understand how they should communicate and how they should talk to them in timothy intimacy is a keyword that we saw in the hispanic sentiment study going again and again that's why we're like triple indexing in reddit because it's intimate those kind of conversations and platforms where we are like loving it and and feeling that we are able to be like the times in which you could just like splash google translate all ami going into anything that they were doing with poly political or you know like a brand are gone and people need that yeah but you need to be in culture and you need to be intimate i think that those are the key towards yeah what recommendations do you have for brands to get into culture of the let latino know in the us so we and again the organization that i leave the world human foundation with the initiative the hispanic star has for eight years now has been collecting data insights collecting shared share best practices for more than three hundred and fifty companies so wow pretty much i think that i would say join organizations like hours that are on network of networks where you can get insights where you can get data come to events like the hispanic leadership summit that happens at the end of october so that you can start not only getting access to strategic partnerships as to start to strategic information data and insights but also to the network of the people that are making making a difference right now everything in the latin latino community is growing so absolutely fast but it is very important actually to be in touch yeah a culture is part of the road map that consistently has been anchored in values and preferences right so latinos scare dramatically about their family at like values and what are the latino values hard work responsibility this year responsibility and i was authenticity where the two values at latinos are are spiking the most contrary to honesty which was something that you know like is going on sliding down in the area so the care about the values of responsibility so anything that is related to hard work to optimism them to being able to have ambition to buy a house for my no she she gave me so much through my mother and now i wanna pay it back so everything that is looking forward is on on value that is related to responsibilities one i think that on values family matters we over index and we'll will continue to do so in social media consumption and social media sharing so anything that you know like anything that is related to us being a better member of a family and connecting and and and gathering people around and and understanding that at work for example it doesn't mean that we're social is a bad thing social is a great thing when you are latino because you're gonna be able to lead like a mother right like not let anybody else get out so you can you can start leaning towards those those values and i think that the other piece that is related to it's this culture which is sports music food we're dramatically proud of our language as i said before so if you start looking at that that's a road map talk to me about the things that i care about invest in my community and go with my passions which are related to my culture and the pain points that you can help me solve are related to in are related to the barriers that i have in order to continue progress which is really the one identifier of everyone not language not religion not political affiliation what really unify sixty five million people today is our desire to get to the american dream wow wow one other quick question for you before we switch gears you mentioned earlier that it's twenty seven countries represented among latinos in the us and i've heard brands thinking like oh this is too like we can't we can't talk to this many different people these different mini segments isn't it necessary for brands to think about talking to different are are they should they be thinking about individual communities or are they thinking about a community as a whole or does it matter on whenever possible should they be segmenting based upon like a community that's in a local area you're so good i mean like you're literally asking the inside questions after like okay i know no alright look so that's pretty much the reason why it started the world human foundation eight years ago was because i saw a hyper fragmentation of soft cultures that were not only the twenty six different countries of foreign but also the vast diversity that is contained in the latin latino community as a por that would never allow for anybody to access anyone at this time and being you know like a humanitarian and worker care or like oh my god if there's pandemic or if there's something that happens as an emergency there's no way that you can really send a message and take action for so many people there's a fragmentation that is a a achilles heel of this community and i'm gonna work on unifying okay and so i started looking at it's not only twenty six different countries of origin is that you know within the latin latino community you have every form and every caller at every point twenty two percent of the latino community identifies as lgbtq well in every four latinos east native american there's more than seven million latinos there's more than seven million latinos in within the community so you can see whoever all of it and there right right there there's asian latinos a latinos latinos the columbian and so that fragmentation is hard if you don't find the common ground mh that allows for you as an organization and as a company to be able to talk to them otherwise you're gonna be saying like okay so i'm gonna do a campaign for puerto ricans from nova york which is different to puerto ricans that are in miami which is very different yeah impossible so what i started doing was to elevate the sense understand why if someone is poly us latinos why are we not taking it what does it mean and why people not want to latinos and how do we elevate and create a brand of it and like leader platform that is convenient to us and it does it it was twofold that one it was the peer to losing roots so if you're a mexican from v and you're live in new york you wanna keep your and origins because you don't wanna betray your your family and you're are little are there by becoming american and i'm being being latino and so on but the number two is that it's not convenient like being a latino is punished in this country because you're seeing as low you're seeing a stake not maker you're invisible and not visible and you're negative and not positive so it was about changing the question and say wait if we make the brand of latinos as positive contributors to the country as stars then it's gonna be easier to address us to unite us and to be working together and i think that the hispanic sentiment studies has showed that from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty five latinos are by far more unified by far more to be latinos by far less less conflicted about understanding that we can be a two hundred percent of a person or a three hundred percent of a person i can be mexican and i can be yeah latin and i can also be american right like we can be that and that i think that that sense of maturity of the identity something that is not new to this community has gone you know historically through there and so i would say right now for brands i would appeal to the positive side of latinos which is uniting us in our pride the way that back bonnie in the way that culture and music is doing it he's not talking only about one group is talking to us as a culture and we pride and do it understanding that the pieces that disconnected us from that are our our fear to lose ground with our roots but also that it was not good to be latino and when brands talk about like what is good for latinos is good for america i think that you gonna appeal to everybody yeah very cool very cool i've learned so much during this conversation so much really wonderful data i wanna switch gears a little bit and find out from your perspective as a consumer can you tell me about a time when a brand made you feel like you belonged well i mean like i i've been involved the i've been involved so many brands in the creation of so many brands that are like connected to community and too good i'm gonna say for example product and i was obviously biased because i think that that's a set of brands but the idea was to provide the consumer with a choice between one brand the other between one product and the other one is gonna do good but not only do good to someone else it's gonna make me feel believe that i belong to the champions of the world if you know what like yeah oh wow if i buy if i buy this t shirt top gap that is red or if i buy those that phone of apple that is red then i'm gonna be part of bon and chris martin and you know like a bunch of great guys that i admire the the the good guys of the avengers of the world so i think that that's the the idea of belonging that red was able to create and i was able to create to me as well yeah very cool and it also kinda helps you feel like you're you're part of the solution like it's values a very values aligned type of type of yeah approach where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work and all the resource that you've done and if they wanna come to the hispanic leadership summit at the end of october and come to gala october thirty where celebrating the owner of cirque sole who is latino i i knows he's our gala in cirque sole so where can they find me at spanish star dot org or we are all human dot org and my handles in every social media outlet are claudia and rom ed oh very cool i will drop links to all that initiative so people can access it easily any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders who wants to do a better job of tapping into this opportunity but you said the most significant opportunity over the next four decades of really just doing a better job of engaging this latino community i would just repeat the same the latino community is an on untapped outperforming and with higher demands market segment with a new latino that is self empowered and at risk of entering a recession mission recession waiting for your loss so the time to act this now take the bit bet i know that there's a lot of challenges out there but just keep calm and live with latinos very cool claudia this has been so fantastic thanks so much for stopping by you're amazing thank you so much thank you claudia had so many interesting things to say in some really really fascinating and noteworthy data points i'm curious are there any data points in particular that stood out most to you that may ultimately have an impact on the way in which you view the latino community in particular as a consumer group that you want to serve for your brand let's talk about it i wanna continue this conversation it was just so fascinating to me and i just wanna hear how it's landing on you and the way in which you're thinking about it if you enjoyed this show i would so appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review for it in your podcast player of choice it really does go a long way towards helping more people discover the show and i like to think it helps more people practice inclusion helps more people feel like they belong also are you getting the inclusion and marketing newsletter each week i send news resources stories voice of the customer information all kinds of good lessons and takeaways for you to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse and fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i'll also drop a link for that in the shown notes so you can access it easily until next time remember everyone deserves to have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect a power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

customer experience is in linked to include of marketing you can't do one well without the other however customer experiences are notoriously under for people from under underrepresented in underserved communities oh i've got stories for you most of the time those experiences are cobb together and very much feel like an afterthought no bueno so one of the ways i recommend marketers and business leaders increase their capacity to consistently deliver experiences that make the people they serve feel like they belong is to diversifying their circle of influence this is one of my five seas of building an inclusive brand and it's all about being intentional about gaining experiences and tuning into sources that are outside of the traditional ones you are accustomed to so in this episode i was thrilled to sit down with patrick fa a behavioral scientist and data psychologist who spends an entire year doing one new experience each week we had a really lovely and fascinating conversation and while you don't need to go to the extremes that patrick did there's definitely lots to learn from his experiment so after this short break you're gonna hear my conversation with patrick you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better hey patrick thanks so much for joining me today how are you hi sonya thanks for having me i'm very good thanks alright well i'm i'm really excited to chat with you you did a really cool i don't know if experiment does the right word for a year but before we get into that because it's it's super juicy tell people who are you and what do you do so i am an applied behavioral scientist so my day job like say turn minds into money meaning i take the academia and the science of psychology and think about how to actually use it to make adverts more effective websites get people to click on that buy button that kind of thing so that's what i've been doing for my career which is okay yeah i mean it's not the most soul nourishing job i have to say as much as i to enjoy parts of it but one client that i had was i did a project on experience marketing and what makes experience is psychologically effective and that combined with some research i did for a book made me realize just how powerful experiences can be so the book was about brainwashing and how not to be brain and like c author kind of forced me to go to sort of c in the woods for a weekend which was very interesting and i was dread it a lot but actually it was great and i suppose pretty much people do say that but it was great and it was really transformative and it just made me realize especially coming out of lockdown downs and and spending some time on a screen it made me realize just how important experiences are yeah and so that kind of inspired me to do this experiment i think experiments definitely the right word where i did one new thing for every week of the year like i went to a my different pony convention i went bungee jump in i went to the middle east for the first time i my first fab and all sorts of other things and it was very illuminati and kind of life changing in some ways i can imagine i can imagine okay i wanna i wanna dig into this more this experiment but i'm curious about applied behavioral science that we said it yeah are there any sort of i guess core learnings i guess you would say from from some of this work that you feel like maybe not enough marketers are using or in their marketing to be more effective so the the key kind of learnings from behavioral science are that we're all cognitive mis meaning we will have limited brain power we're paying attention to the world and engaging with experiences we're not really paying attention we don't really care about brands most of the time yeah and so you have to make things yes very simple but also emotionally engaging yeah and there are certain techniques you can use to make them more persuasive so for example if you say something is yours people are more likely to then buy it or or take it up because they feel like they own it already and yeah if you say something popular people are more likely to do it i think a lot of marx are somewhat aware of these techniques where they could very much improve i think in understanding their audience specifically the psychology of their audience i don't think brands in my experience are the best at that i mean a lot of time when i do an audit for a client and i ask or can you share the research you've done so far they're like we we haven't every search we've done nothing yeah so they i don't think they've really understand that audiences as well as they could and that's very important for designing experiences right when it comes to designing experiences have you found that that's based upon different identities that people have you know there's a broad diversity and there's so many dimensions of diversity right yep but because there are so many different identities that many brands have as part of their customer base is it necessary that have you found your work to sort of adjust for those different identities and the experiences that brands are designing yeah absolutely identity is interesting so i tend to look more at psychological features like personality of course they're very much tied to identity but funny example that goes around a lot is if you take prince charles or kin charles i and oz has born the prince of darkness on paper identity wise they're quite similar and that they're both the same age they're both from england they both yeah live in the castle they're rich famous they have two adults married twice two kids so in some ways they're very similar but psychologically they're i mean i don't know them obviously yeah but they're probably very different so oz one's is probably more disagreeable more of a dark personality king charles is probably more organized i would guess less open to new things more conservative and so how you would talk to them would be very different if you design experience for them and that is the kind of thing i i do advise clients on is how to create experiences that are tailored for yeah different identities a different psychological groups like if we have some people who are really social and outgoing you need to have an experience okay yes it's more social it's a bit obvious but also has brighter to warmer colors that influences them by saying something's popular whereas if you have say an older or more organized or more kind of serious type of customer then you would influence them more with commitment nudge or familiarity nudge and you would have more sensible symmetrical traditional aesthetics etcetera etcetera yeah fascinating stuff i i think we could probably go down a bet a bunch of different rabbit holes about like all the different things but what i love this in just the title of it is it's a science right if we think about this more is like science of how do we learn more about the different people that we want to serve so that we can better deliver experiences that make them feel like they belong to help them achieve the success that they're looking for that would make us all much more effective in the work that we're doing alright so i wanna switch gears a little bit it's very much connected what would you say is the role of having these new experience like you have fifty two new experiences for a whole year how did that change you in your perspective at all well it made me poorer number one because i spent a lot of money on them but it it changed a lot i mean one thing is that i now endeavor to do something new as often as i can and get out of my comfort zone mh even if it's just going to bird world with my family mh my wife and kids for the weekends just make sure i get out the house and do something new because yeah it's so important for productivity yes but also mental health and mood and happiness and that's that's what life is when you look back on life it's not really about months and days it's about events you know weddings parties going to birth wealth whatever it might be and so i do that i also learned a number of things about myself for example i had a health issue with my mouth i had kind of a tingling and numbness in my tongue sometimes mh i spent a lot of money or private doctors and he told me i i said to him i have a weird feeling in my mouth and he said that i have all anesthesia which means weird feeling in the mouth so i i of plants three hundred pounds gross but then for this experiment i went to an ac and he said that i have a hot mouth too much fire energy and i need to drink more water and he was actually right about the water i drank more water and it's kind of gone away so there all these kind of little things i learned from unusual sources just from getting out of my comfort zone and engaging people i might not have otherwise yeah yeah also and it's probably something will come back to what made me a lot more empathetic because i went to kind of groups of people that maybe i had a two d kind of superficial view of and i actually got to meet them as real people and see what they were like and understand their motivations in their fears and their dreams and whereas i may not have kind of agreed with them before i may have you know my little pony is a goods example over to my little pony convention where which is full of what's called bro and peg sisters so adult fans of this children show and in my mind i kind of saw them as a two dimensional joke if i'm honest yeah but then like meeting them all are they're real people it and so i kind of find it a lot harder to view people in that two dimensional way now i just think i'm a lot more aesthetic and open which is good yeah yeah no i one of the things i have a a framework on how to build an inclusive brand of five c framework and one of those c's is diversifying your circle of influence right just because i find that so many people have a very limited view of the world mh or the or and or if there's people who aren't like them they have that to d sort of experience and perspective so if we start putting ourselves in different opportunities to try new foods you know go to different types of events eat different learn from different types of people like an ac punch versus a doctor right like yep it sort of expands our view and it helps us like you said be more empathetic which is extremely helpful from a marketing perspective to sort of put your self and shoes of someone else i'm curious if this experiment has changed the way that you were have have have you been able to translate any of your learnings from that into your work yeah it i would just also add to that as well i know that vr r and have really interesting tools from this kind of empathy perspective we're getting to know your customer mh they've been used in research for social campaigns so for example people empathize more with refugees if they see their life through a through a via headset but i know that some companies do that for brands as well so you can actually like live your customers life and actually get know which i think a lot of brands kind of struggle with because we all live in a public of sorts but you know marketers tend to live in cities and tend to be like educated etcetera etcetera so they're they're in kind of a bubble and yeah this technology can help them get out of it but absolutely with respect to your question yeah i developed a model of kind of business useful things that i learned from the experiences that i call smile as an for alternative slime but i think i'll i'll go a smile for now and the these are things that i learned which make experience kind of effective a matter basically so s really interesting one s is for struggle which is about the fact that a lot of the most memorable and transformative experiences were really difficult or or awkward upwards so for example i went to a cuddle workshop or i had to for example hold a strange man's face in my hands and staying his eyes for a minute so i'm an introvert but i absolutely hated it but yeah it was it was transformative it was very memorable my wife also says it's the funniest one so far of the ones i've written up so yeah if something was awkward or difficult or i have to put everything in it was it was more impactful and there's psychological research behind that the effort justification effect where people have to put effort into something they actually value it more afterwards is so from a business point of view i think there's a case to be made here that a lot of brands and tech companies try to make our lives easier all the time but maybe actually making it a bit harder in some ways through experiences just making people actually do something or feel some friction they can actually be some positive benefits from a a brand perspective because it will be more memorable valued more the m was for min shy which is about how a lot of the experiences what made them special was quite small things so for example i went to see my first sunrise or or watch my first sunrise rise yeah it's not really that bigger deal you know it happens every day but i'd never done it before right but what me it really special was the little details like i was crunching my boots in the ice and i i saw a lonely pheasant and i saw these birds kind of flirting and dancing with each other there's very small things actually made it stand out in my mind so yeah and in psychology there's something called the daily uplift theory where small positive boost like a complement or the weather being mice these can actually have a big psychological effect so as a brand it's not necessarily about making huge brand experiences though there's are effective of course but also it's just the small things often that count an innocent a great example of this where they have this fun copy on their package sometimes so innocent drinks on the bottom of one kart and it might say if you look at it it says stop looking at my bottom these kind of small cute things can actually be quite powerful yeah i buy something just because it's said that right so like like it lights a little smile at the end right they they had huge success actually so i don't know if you have innocent in the us it's a fruit juice brand but they had huge success putting like little wool hats on the bottles oh that's cute yeah a very small thing but that had a big effect it was like three hundred percent sales increase i think so the i for illusion which is about the fact that experiences even they weren't all that authentic even if they were a bit crap they was still good often and sometimes it was at lack of authentic authenticity which made them special like for example i met psychic and she asked me do you know someone called george who's died recently and i was like i have a friend called george but he's not dead as far as i know that he didn't look very well last time i saw him but no i don't think so she said no he's going through some bad times i said he's not but a different friend is and she said yes yes that's the one so she was well i don't think she was authentic but she she likes the ac she gave me actually some good advice about my friend and about business and so even though it wasn't authentic it was still quite powerful and so we know in psychology there are cases where and imagined fear for example is as powerful as an experienced fear so it's not always about being authentic and real but just kind of creating a bit of an illusion is still powerful yeah and i think from what you're saying like it feels like the different experiences allow you an opportunity even if the initial promise of the experience isn't what you might have thought or what you were expecting yep there's still something to be gained from it because the experience itself might cause you to reflect or to have a different point of view on something that you prior previously thought of differently absolutely yeah and i would say yeah i don't have it in the framework but reflection actually is a really important part of wool because yeah i'm writing all of these experiences up to release once week just do stuff dot c dot u uk yeah and actually reflecting on them and writing them up has made them part of my self identity and my narrative in a way yeah i think that's something really powerful as well as if you're doing these experiences you're meeting new people to to to be more inclusive actually reflect on it maybe write it into a story or something so you integrate it into your life narrative it's like and it helps you process it and it works within your frame right your framework is smile and now you're just smile alert or slime slime they both work they both work absolutely and then okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's marketing against the grain hosted by kip and kieran flanagan and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals so if you wanna know what's happening now in the world of marketing what's ahead and how you can lead the way then this podcast is for you i listened to an episode a while back that i love so much i sent it to some friends in a mastermind that i'm a part of and it was all about how to rank number one when ai is taking over featuring ross simmons definitely worth a listen if you like cheese made like i do you might wanna have a listen to the episode where they covered did hubspot lose eight percent of its blog traffic here's what actually happened in another recent up episode that looks super interesting that i actually wanna make sure that i take some time to listen to is how to rank number one and chat gp results ai seo strategy listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts the the l is for love which is and i'm not really kind of breaking any boundaries saying this but social experiences were way more memorable and transformative than once by myself and there's later search showing this for example some research shows even chocolate taste chocolate when you're eating it was at someone else so oh experience is general just more effective and i found yeah bungee you're jumping for instance you think it would sound really cool and memorable but i just got pushed off ledge and that was it really whereas some the cuddle workshop was far more interesting because of the people involved and under this is also a strong degree of empathy as i said meeting new people going to to new situations isn't actually getting to know them and seeing the world from that point of view i think that was probably the most transformative part of the whole yeah experiment for me and then the final one the e is for escape which is that it's not always about what people going into with the experience but what they're running away from and so i really found this in a flotation tank where i was left alone with my thoughts for an hour problem being my thoughts were horrible and they're were kind of like anxieties and stress yeah but facing up to them was was good for me yeah but i think a lot of people when they're going to an experience is potentially because they're they're looking for escape and distraction and so something to remember what it's not just what you're creating for people or what they might be trying to escape that's true like i think sometimes as marketers we try to compartment minimize people a little bit like we're only thinking about the people that we're serving in the context of the problem that we're trying to help them solve mh but there's so much other things going on right in their lives and the background and so and sometimes like you said those things they might need a bit of an escape from and so while they're getting you know the thing that you're helping with them from a brand perspective if it also provides that escape that can be super beneficial transcend for people in terms of like really helping them develop up a deeper degree of loyalty with you so i did an interview with someone a couple weeks ago and he said that the leaders who were the most effective at leading diverse teams and engaging inclusive leadership are the ones that did something very similar to you who have intentionally put themselves in scenarios that made them uncomfortable because they were different they were outside of their quote unquote norm mh in i'm curious if you have any thoughts on i know we talked about empathy but are are there other recommendations that you would have for leaders in particular on how intentional discomfort or stepping outside of your comfort zone might be beneficial to sort of maybe it's a pattern interrupt maybe it's just one that just helps them like are there are there any things that you would say or observations that you've had in your reflection about how this might impact people in terms of their ability to do better work yeah absolutely i think the philosopher nietzsche said that nick that doesn't shed its skin will die meaning if you don't like you you have to try new things you have to break out and and grow otherwise you're not gonna go anywhere yeah and so yeah empathy is part of it but it's so key to to do new things if you don't step out of your comfort zone you're always gonna be in the same space and you're never going to growth so it's actually it's completely necessary for growth i think to to get out of your comfort zone and be uncomfortable there's also the concept of anti fragile where you have to kind of stress test and break yourself a bit if you want to grow you know if you go to the gym and you lift weights you're kind of breaking your muscles a bit so they grow back stronger yeah i think it's the same for leadership or anything really but you need to kind of testing break them push to the the limits so they've come back stronger and that's all about getting uncomfortable yeah and then finally pattern interrupts is really interesting we're putting it as well so i know from my research on brainwashing there's this technique called disrupt and frame okay basically you bamboo or people a bit they're more vulnerable to new ideologies okay this is why for example army spouses tend to be a bit more likely to go for pyramid schemes because they're constantly moving location they have they're less kind of settled and anchored likewise naomi klein has a work called the shock doctor about how even on large scale countries are more likely to go for a new ideology or something if they've just been through a pandemic or a war or financial crash but on a day to day basis yeah if you can get out of a your habit or thinking if you can break that pattern just kinda shake yourself up a bit you're more than able to build something in the new so this just kind of old easter esoteric principle called dissolve and be built so if you want to build high you have to dig deep that kind of thing you need to break stuff apart before you can build it again so yeah growth is all about breaking things down so then you can rebuild it stronger and better and that'll comes from being uncomfortable i think love it i think that's a really smart principle that not enough people follow right like it makes sense but and people understand it in the realm of the example that you gave like lifting weights and fitness but i think it's just something that feels different and harder in and other parts but it's the same principle that we need to make sure that they're applying it and i i really love it in a i'm mental total agreement so it's great to know that this is backed by science as well so humans must notice is from your podcast trying to grow the audience you my limited experience extremely difficult but growth literally growth and new comes from trying new things trying new channels strength things you haven't done before it right yeah yeah absolutely so and figuring out like what works and sticking with it and then trying something new so it doesn't get stale and stagnant so yeah yeah all things that are applicable on a lot of different parts of running a business what if somebody wants to kind of engage in these new experiences diversify their circle of influence try new things to step outside their comfort zone are there things that you would caution them against like are there are there any watch outs that you would say for people who might be thinking about doing something like this well i mean often and obvious you know don't do anything that's gonna hurt yourself or others other than that not really i mean nothing but i did and i did some quite out there things nothing had a a negative impact on my life okay i would just save if you want to do it which i i'd very much recommend don't feel overwhelmed because obviously there's infinite things you could do yeah if you could start a list you could do it very small it doesn't have to do one new thing a week it you could be one a month or it just be one new thing for stuff yeah so you can just start small but just give it a try i would say yeah well what was interesting about what you just said is that the risk involved with stepping out of your comfort zone to do these things seems smaller mh right and i think maybe sometimes people don't do things because they feel like it's risky to do something that's uncomfortable but it sounds like as long as you're not doing something that's like dangerous there isn't necessarily an inherent like catastrophic risk associated with with doing it yeah and so one of the things i really wanted to do but logistically is difficult is good cage diving with sharks because i'm terrified of sharks is my biggest fear but i think if i can do that i should be able to do anything in life i have no excuses and actually it's strange but i take cold showers now sometimes that's as much as i should but just before i'm about to plunge into the cold shower i'm thinking i'm kind of thinking with this stuff that i haven't in life that i might want to do but i haven't you know with work and those frustrations and i just think okay if i can go into a cold shower i can do those things as well so i think training yourself to just immediately like just do it just do that stuff that's difficult currently follow through then positively and all sorts of other areas yeah very cool this has been fascinating patrick let's switch gears for a little bit i'm super curious about your answer for this given all the work that you've done in experience can you tell me about a time when a brand made you feel like you belonged no no not really actually i had a so i did a piece of work for media company while we were looking at the pillars of the human experience and it's quite similar and one of them was social and when i was presenting that they had a question of which pillar of brands the worst that and i do think it's social i think brands are very bad at connecting people and making people feel like they belong and you know all i can really think of is coca cola share a coke campaign or something or some kind of social media tag a friends campaign i i you know maybe there's like harley davidson not for me but for some people you know feel part of the harley davidson tribe or something i think there's examples of few of far between and i think people actually have a lot less attachment to the brand than than we think they do yeah so i yeah i can't really think of a time where where brand maybe for i've belong which sounds bad but i actually i think it's a huge opportunity france can get it right yeah is this something that you feel like can be they can use the principles of behavioral science to help them with yes for sure i mean understanding your audience would be the key thing so who are who is your target market and what are the like psychologically and then using that to design things that resonate with them so there's all sorts of resonance variables that depend on audio psychology like if they are extroverted your your audience or extra are very reward focused so they respond better to positive language and positive imagery whereas if your audience is creative they're more tolerant of ambiguity so you can ask more questions you can have jazz and real art or whatever so it's all about understanding the kind of psychological dna and then designing things that resonate with that very cool very cool where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work and see these write ups of all these experiments that you've done and see like what their your full list was yeah absolutely so just do stuff dot c dot u uk is where i'm releasing these stories every week last week i went twenty four hours without using any screens at all mh and this coming week i wrote a letter to a serial killer although he didn't respond i guess probably for the best so that's just do stuff dot c dot u k and for a more commercial point of view if you're interested in using behavioral sites or doing psychological research you can find me at patrick fa dot c dot u uk i will have links to all that and shown notes so wait have you completed your fifty two weeks of different activities or you're still in progress well i've done them all but i'm now releasing them each week got it gotta gotta it got it alright patrick any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders who wanna do a better job of delivering remarkable customer experiences to the people that they're serving you have to have the customer in the room so to speak so make sure you understand them and and live their lives as much as you can and get out of that marketing bubble and yeah yeah have a look at it from a psychological point of view how psychologist like me ideally me specifically but un pick with dna psychological of audience i think is key thank you patrick this has been super eye opening and insightful and so happy that you're able to step like likewise thank you so much i love this quest that patrick went on and i just wanna encourage you to wherever possible be intentional about stepping outside of your comfort zone to embrace new experiences points of view and people to learn from it'll open up a whole new world for you and really it'll have a great impact on expanding your perspective and will help you do a better job both as a leader and as a marketer if you like this show i would so appreciate it if you would share it with a friend's colleague and network it really does a long way towards helping more people discover the show and i like to think that helps more people practice inclusive marketing and while you're sharing i would love it if you would also leave a rating and review for the show in your podcast player of choice another quick question for you are you getting the inclusion and marketing newsletter each week i send news resources insights voice of the customer and other hot topics all designed to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse and fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up and i will also drop a link to that in show notes for you below until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect a power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listing and talk to you soon

a core principle of delivering both authentic and effective inclusive marketing is c creation c creation with the people who are part of the communities you want to reach is a best practice in marketing inclusive but unfortunately not enough brands are doing it and definitely not as part of their core marketing approach that's why i was thrilled i mean i was really thrilled whenever i learned about the hair care brand got to be leans really hard into c creation as a way to better engage with the people that they want to serve i always love it when i have opportunity to bring you a chat with a marketing leader who is in the trenches with inclusive marketing so there's so much to learn from the experiences in trial and error of others that will hopefully help shorten their learning curve for you so in this episode i sat down with luis val senior brand manager forgot to be at the global level so after this short break you're gonna hear my conversation with luis you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better hey louise thanks so much for joining me how are you good how are you i'm doing well i'm so excited to chat with you i knew from the first time that we met i wanted to have you on the show because the work that you and the team are doing is really wonderful so before we get into all of that tell the people who are you and what do you do sounds good so i'm luis val i'm working at the got to be international team so i'm a senior brand manager and i'm responsible for color collaboration and master rent topics maybe somebody else from my side so i was born and raised in mexico city and relocated to germany seven years ago so since then i'm i've been working from this country that it's now my chosen new home and maybe also something that i've learned with the and humanity that i'm now try ever so often to do is to acknowledge my land so yes i'll give it a try so my home back back home in mexico was a land of many pre hispanic cultures one of them being the culture which is in mexico city so and this is a a land that was conquered in fifteen twenty one so that's my country where i continue oh wow i i know this is something that's very common that teams do in canada not so common here in the us but i do need to go and investigate because it is a really wonderful practice to just acknowledge where we are in that like you said atlantic acknowledgment so i'm gonna go and investigate on florida end i'm curious i know your homeland is in mexico for an race in mexico city yep what is it like working in a completely different continent a new country branded everyone speaks english but like outside you're dealing with like what what is it like it's a big cultural difference i imagine definitely so i think in germany you find a lot of moments where people are open and also able to communicate in english but for a proper integration you do need to learn german and it's not a language that i started to learn since i was little so it took a bit of effort but i it's not impossible and slowly but surely i've managed to to find ways to communicate i wouldn't say i'm one hundred percent fluent or able to to operate yeah four seven in german but i found my way and i think it really helps to be in the country to have opportunities to practice and and to also stay curious watch tv listen to to radio and in the language so i'm i'm getting there yeah yeah as someone who is imperfect fluent in spanish and i speak spanish every day i can't imagine working in spanish like that would be something that would be a completely different it's a whole new level so kudos to you and so many fronts alright so what does inclusive marketing mean to you i would say it's marketing that aims to touch the lives of as many consumers as we can with full awareness of their diversity of lyft experiences so i think that the aim of every brand we want to reach as many consumers as possible but the moment when you plan this thinking about those different paths of lives yeah and what can entail then it it's that's to me in terms of marketing who what would you say is the states of inclusive marketing today in the consumer packaged goods industry wherever where you work i think in our industry we have made some progress when it comes to that to inclusive marketing and i think in some sub subcategories we are further up within our inclusion intuition journey mh but i think a facilitating factor is definitely that contrary to other industries where you have maybe digital services or or a service provider here we give tangible physical goods and i think that allows in its own possibility to have physical interactions to think inclusive design or to also do communication narratives that are depicting different characters and different people so i think that really makes it easier for our industry but i wouldn't say it's we're fully done we're on a journey but i'm i'm positive for where we stand in our industry i'm curious if consumers are more and more being vocal i've seen a lot of different things on the beauty industry and i know when it comes to things like makeup consumers have a lot of increasing expectations around inclusion are you finding that it's that same way in hair care as well yes i would say it's it's a similar phenomenon in hair care and concrete completely in her styling for forgot to be but it's also to some extent similar to sustainability i i think it's being democrat amortized it's almost as if consumers expect brands to take into consideration i don't think it's any more a differentiating factor or or maybe it is but not for the reasons we hope it would be into both but i think consumers face inclusive marketing with a with a positive reaction and and and then on top up comes the added benefits from from what the brand brings to the table for sure for sure yeah okay so how do you currently work to infuse inclusive marketing into the work that you do for your brand it got be so i think one way we do it is with the acknowledgement of what we don't know so the global team where i work not everyone has the lived experience of the communities that we are trying to serve yeah so i think the first step is we are humble and not enough and honest enough to acknowledge when we don't know when someone is not a member of the lgbtq plus community or at textured hair consumer it's okay it's just about acknowledging and then also getting curious and eager to learn about what that community needs and that's where active listening opens up and that's where you start to to gain more awareness on those topics and i would say secondly our brand values are very strongly cemented on so it comes very organically forgot to be our tagline is for whoever you want to be yeah in its own it gives you a a very big springboard to them foster inclusive marketing so those two reasons i think it's what helps us to infuse inclusion in rd yeah i think that's a beautiful way that acknowledgment is super important and i'm curious if this was part of the got to be brand values from the beginning or was this something that you all evolved to include more of over time i would say it evolved we are as with every brand we've gone through our our our communication eras for lack of a better world or or or relaunch and if you look back to where it got to be started and where we are right now we were more in an aspirational kind of position where we wanted to be that brand that edgy revel brand that people would strive or or hope to be and and you would see that in in the way we would depict our consumers and the way we would interpret this for whoever you want to be and then at some point in time that i i wasn't even part of the team something clicked or maybe we looked into what was happening in the world that we realized we had a brand that could serve that higher purpose of of being more inclusive of depicting different lifestyles of of celebrating self expression and then we gradually move to where we are right now as a brand so it's not something that happened from the beginning and and the launch of the brand we have been learning and evolving throughout the years yeah one of the things that i really enjoyed about the work that you all doing we've got to be is your commitment to c creation can you talk a little bit about that in terms of why you arrived at this place to lean into c creation which i've always say is the best a exclusive marketing best practice right so can you just talk a little bit about your journey to c creation and what the impact it has on the brand i think for many years we've called ourselves trend setting brand and i think we realized or we we acknowledge that if you want to set the trends or if you wanna jump into a trend you need to listen to the people who are asking for this trend or initiating it and there where c creation came into place because yeah it's not sufficient to only get together as a group of market tiers and try to understand what would a gen z consumer want for hair styling it's easier to go and ask them and that's where where c creation came into place and it was in actually in twenty twenty one where the brand started to foster this this practice and we started in one form of c creation and we've improved through iteration through various workshops with the with the c creators that we work with and i think it has really taken the brand to places we we didn't think we would get and and being really leaders in in in certain categories within styling that that we are we are very proud of yeah are there any specific lessons learned that you would say that you all have discovered as you've been going through this process over these last four years i would say for sure staying consumer centric and trusting the process because a lot of times as brand owners you get very strongly opinionated and you want things to happen your way and you have a vision for the brand and you know where you wanna take your brand so there have been sessions local creation where you realize that the audience and the consumers don't necessarily see it the way you do and then it's that moment of letting go of maybe your own personal agenda and then leaving the the space for what the consumers want for the brand yeah and i think it requires the tremendous exercise of humble miss of of of really thinking that it is in a way at democracy and it's the voice of the majority of your consumers and it shouldn't be your own decision on where you want to take the brand and that's where i think creation has taught us a lot yeah i think it's a beautiful practice and i'm thinking about a question that might be in the minds of marketers because again we recommend c creation in a lot of instances but the way you all do it it's not c creation with just one identity of consumer you're doing c creation with multiple different identities can you talk a little bit about how you're balancing that or is that that democrat amortization that you had just mentioned no i would say it actually goes back to when the concept was embraced by the brand so we built a c creator squad okay which was a representation of who the got to be consumer is so okay these are not influencers they are not models they are they are our consumers they are brand lovers they are a theme to got to be to our values they are either impactful stylus or there are also creators of habit that just want to self express and recreate whatever look wanna do yeah but we started with a a set of of creators and then the more we scrutinized it the more we realized we are not representing as many lift experiences as we should and this is where it has evolved so it's like a an entity that never ends to to change and we shape it and we bring new faces to not only to refresh it but also to to make it a broader representation of our consumers and i think there is where we have we have untapped i don't know products or trends or topics that we have disregard for several years to name an example textured hair yeah but at the beginning we didn't have as many creators as we have right now who are type three type four so i think that's just one example where we are we are i think getting to places where we should with the c creation squad yeah very cool yeah what would you do you have any advice to marketers and brands who are like oh this quotation thing like maybe we should give it a try what would you what advice would you give them to sort of get started our best practices that they need to keep in mind as they're starting to embark on this journey i would say trust the process because as i said it takes it it moves away from the usual way we do marketing in marketing needs very much as i said our own ideas our own vision and then we go and test and with c creation you start from the very beginning bring into the equation the consumers and the and and your the ultimately the people who will be buying into your product so my biggest tip would be to not be afraid and trust the journey because it really pays off in the end but you'd need to go through it fully from the beginning of the execution of of the idea yeah have you ever found in your c creation process that once you've adapted the ideas of the team and you you know working with your internal team that the broader market had like other thoughts or opinions that differed a little bit you mean out of the c creators spot that mh yes yes we we've also experienced that and maybe that speaks to the to the notion of we have a a limited representation no of the product audience so it also opens the the room for questions like are we having too narrow of of a target audience when it comes to age or or other variables so we don't take this as a as a failure let's say case it's rather it it triggers questions on how we can further improve yeah yeah continuous improvement is like a core tenant and i think so there's always things that we can be doing better in learning so i think it's a it's a it's a wonderful learning practice okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's marketing against the grain hosted by kip and kirin flanagan and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals so if you wanna know what's happening now in the world of marketing what's ahead and how you can lead the way then this podcast is for you i listened to an episode a while back that i love so much i sent it to some friends in a mastermind that i'm a part of and it was all about how to rank number one when ai is taking over featuring ross simmons definitely worth a listen if you like cheese may like i do you might wanna have a listen to the episode where they covered did hubspot lose eight percent of its blog traffic here's what actually happened and another recent episode that look super interesting that i actually wanna make sure that i take some time to listen to is how to rank a number one and chat gp results ai seo strategy listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcast okay you are not necessarily in inclusive marketer by training right this is something that you've been leaning into and i hear a lot of marketers we want to do a better job of marketing inclusive but sometimes they just feel like you know what i this is not my competency i don't know where to start i'm afraid of making mistakes and that fear kind of keeps people suck a little bit and i i would love it if you could just share a little bit of your journey to ups skill and and deepening your degree of confidence in inclusive marketing alongside your your skills overall from you know managing brand i think once again i have to to acknowledge the brand because got to be allowed me to have the platform to then go deeper into inclusive marketing so within within our our company we are a brand that is at the heart of of of inclusion so we as i said stand for for whoever you want to be so when i joined this role it also came with this passionate side hobby of being an inclusive marketing ambassador for our organization so there i i think the company allowed me to have a platform to upscale to learn and then at the same time as you were saying i was immediately facing certain even personal drawbacks of hesitation on am i using the right language should i express myself in this way and at some point i just realized it's just okay to ask i mean what's the worst that can happen that you make a mistake but then the next time you won't make it and i think finding that bravery within myself made it very easy to go deeper and deeper into into learning more about inclusive marketing and then at the same time it it had to come with a personal curiosity so i think it it is part of my my values how i grew up so the moment i had a chance to go deeper into that path then i i didn't hesitate twice to say yes and and it's been very rewarding and i also see how much impact i can make through my brand so yeah it's very cool very cool what has been your biggest surprise about leaning into inclusive marketing as just kind of the way which you all practice marketing it got to be i think i've reshaped my critical eye and also as i said the level of confidence in curiosity so it has unlocked this eye this critical lens in the sense of i'm not saying all the time nothing is okay or everything is bad but rather what else can i do or or where can i have a an non untapped potential that i can look into and i also have encountered polar opposite with the people that i work with on one side people that are also very eager and very curious to learn about it and also people that question why does it matter why do we bring more complexity why is this important so yeah it's open for debate and and and discussion and i think that's for me the the biggest surprise that there are those polar opposite views but at the same time that i want and i'm willing to go into those conversations and and and exchange with people yeah i think that just kind of further reinforces that it's a transformation and it's a transformative process that's not like you flip a switch overnight and we go from we weren't practicing inclusive and now we do you know it's it's a journey that everyone within the organization has to take to be able to get there over time are there any other recommendations i there's this phrase that i i picked up that's kinda stuck with me a years ago from someone that i follow online she's like i'd rather you learn from my battle scars rather than having to get your own and i'm curious if from like being in the trenches with c creation and you know leaning more heavily into inclusive marketing are there any wash outs that you would have for other marketers who are you know at the beginning journeys at the bin bidding phases of their journey here yeah i think this notion of low hanging fruits or quick quick wins i would encourage everyone to stay away from those concepts because that's not the way that you should treat inclusive marketing so i'm not saying we did this but if i look at the work that we have done year on year with our pride campaigns and with the work that we're doing in that territory as an example now it's a very consistent cohesive manner in which thought is doing it across various touch points outside of priorities and so throughout all year long and we are we're even not there yet so there's much more that we can do as a brand as an activist brand and this only works as we always remind ourselves that we are not doing it for for a performative action or because it's a quick win is because we really believe that it's at the heart of the brand value so i would say that's that's the the the mistake that i think many brands do and if i look at the work we have done we were not doing it perfectly at the beginning we're getting only better and i would encourage other brands to think in that way and other people who are managing the brands yeah very cool very cool alright i wanna switch gears a little quick real quick as we i'm start to wrap up can you tell me about a time when a brand made you feel like you belonged yes actually one brand comes to my mind and now i'm going to disclose my age but i'm a millennial and so i went through the time where there was this abe chrome fit h hype and i wanted to to have access to that brand i think everyone had this aspiration to be able to buy it it it was it was a trend and it was very hip but i physically didn't feel represented by the brand and i also couldn't find the clothing that fit me i was not as tall enough i was not as fit enough or a slim enough though i didn't feel represented but at the same time there was this frustration of i want to have access to that brand and maybe now i reflect and it being more being older but if i think of gap for example that brand was always there for me and i always felt like okay i cannot access this brand but there's gap and i felt save i felt happy i always found the clothes that make me feel comfortable it fit my needs so it's very funny that i only wreck i only think of the brand like this after the years went by i mean and we and we saw what happened with abe cro and the documentaries and then how they they learned from from their marketing practices right with for me interestingly it would be gap and maybe i'm not even sure if gap is doing it on purpose or we're doing inclusive marketing but in my particular case it it touched me in that manner no said yeah yeah yeah i i talked to someone who used to work at gap yeah and and marketing years ago in europe and i remember her saying that that was some intentional choices that they've had made so i'd be curious to see is that part of their a through line that they been doing for years are they still doing it today so i'm gonna go and investigate that thank you so much for sharing luis this has been really cool any parting words of wisdom well before we do that are there anything that you want people to pay attention to specifically that the got team is doing that you'd wanna like hey like you know check this out i would say i mean right now we're in the midst of our our global pride campaign so stay tuned it's it's active in in around fifteen markets and then beyond that there's news to come beginning of next year think it's always like new new launches that we are doing and i said we we want to continue to be that brand that creates a space for everyone to be safe proud and themselves whoever they want to be so we'll continue doing that and and i'm super proud to be part of that brand nice nice luis this has been great any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders who wanna do a better job of being inclusive with their marketing i would say we see a lot happening in the world and in many different outlets and as brand owners we have platforms to to touch consumer's lives so i think there is an eager as in a willingness from from the world to receive positive messages and with the brands you can create narratives you can do storytelling you can touch people's lives so i would encourage people to to try and find those moments where they can use the brand platform amplify positive messages because consumers don't forget and i think they will remember those times that you stood behind them but you will besides them but you will they will also not forget the times that you turned an eye on them so i think that would be my my my two cents for any listening saying too very wise words very wise whereas those two cents are worth a lot thanks so much luis for stopping by this has been a lot of fun and super insightful thank you tanya luis had so many cool things to share and i hope you took some really great insights from what he shared that you can apply directly for your brand if you are enjoying this show i would love it if you would share it with a friend colleague and or your network it really does go a long way towards helping more people discover the show and if you're feeling extra generous please do leave a rating in review for the show any your podcast player of choice that also helps more people discover the show and i like to think it helps more people practice inclusive marketing well which leads to more people feeling like they belong other quick question for you are you getting the inclusion in marketing newsletter if not like really what are you even doing each week i send news resources insights voice to the customer in and all sorts of goodies to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i will also drop a link for that in the show notes for you as well so you can access it easily until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect the power to ensure more people do like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

inclusive marketing perm through every single part of your marketing mix i've been convinced this fact for a very long time when i love it when i get the chance to sit done with experts who continue to prove the point brand partnerships is this topic of the day and of course there are ways to make your approach to brand partnerships even more inclusive so to dig into that i sat down with jake sc berger head of brand partnerships at bee h and we talked about how some brands are going about using a more inclusive approach to brand partnerships to reach a broader diversity of consumers so after this short break you're gonna hear my conversation with jake you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better hey jake thanks so much for joining me today how are you i'm good thanks for having me excited to be here totally my pleasure alright so i'm excited to learn from you today before we dig into our subject matter tell the people who are you and what do you do i'm jake i currently work at dia i run our ad solutions team so anything that relates to advertising monetizing a newsletter i work and cover those products we have a sales team we have a product team and an engineering team and then on the side i work on a this is new sonia i don't think we've talked about this but or over email but i run a community called urban iron basically like in a very nice race challenge similar to like hi rocks or or tough mud wow very cool i've done a few no iron that's not the same thing as a triathlon i'm much more extreme wait wait you so you've done triathlon i've done a few like mini triathlon right but i think they call them sprint triathlon yeah but yeah it's spend some time but yeah you know it's definitely not on the same level as iron ironman no no yeah the the urban iron it's like a it's an eight mile race modeled off of a triathlon okay we just use the name iron because it was kinda sounds hardcore it is it is all of it all of it alright so i wanna make sure everyone is on the same page what are brand partnerships in the context of what you do and how you're helping creators and the brands that you're working with yeah so what bee is just to set the stage there bi is a platform that enables publishers newsletter writers media companies to write and produce and monetize email in newsletters very similar to like a sub or a mailchimp we just have a little bit more of a robust platform what we do with brands is we'll go to an advertiser or an advertiser comes to us and they say hey we're looking for a new channel to advertise our solution or to get our product in front of the right people most of the time they've run a lot of ads on meta or google or they've worked it's like the sci or morning brew mh yeah they're trying to they're trying to open up a new channel and they want to try out newsletters as a channel what we do is we help those advertisers basically sponsor a thousand different newsletters that are on the platform so they can do that scale don't have to talk to each and every one of those thousand newsletters and do all that back and forth so the partnership is really us as a technology making that connection between the advertiser and the right newsletters at the right time so we can help them drive their business and also on the publisher side help these publishers that might be an individual writer who has a hundred subscribers yeah first dollar on the internet or it could be a time magazine who's running their newsletter with us who wants to fill their ads ad slots yeah yeah i so i just recently completed a course all about building newsletter oh because i'm i'm leaning hard into my inclusion in marketing newsletter and in the course we have the course creator recommended behind and so a lot of the people who were in my cohort were using bee hive and they were just starting out and they were like oh my gosh i just got this you know big name brand advertiser who you know wanted to sponsor their newsletter and they were talking about it and they were talking about all the i just made my first two dollars i mis made my first ten dollars and like just the joy that people had with being able to experience that not only getting like you said their first dollars with their newsletter but also feeling seen i guess you would say by some of these bigger brands who they might have felt were out of reach so i love that what you all are doing are sort of breaking barriers that might have been or felt like barriers to entry for a lot of people that that happens a lot we see in the marketplace so very cool that you all are doing that yeah i think there's actually there's two things there one is like breaking the barriers enable enabling like newsletters that are just starting out to monetize and partner it's a big name brand like a roku or netflix i'm not sure which one we're referring to but we just launched both of those and then there's also the legitimacy c factor so one i think one aspect that the publishers that we work with especially the publishers that are just starting out kind of forget it's not a bad thing it's just easy to forget when you're so close to the newsletter is that when you're reading a newsletter the readers of the newsletter don't know how many other readers there are yeah and there's no reason why you would read a newsletter and be and have the mindset of like oh this is a new newsletter it's not that important or it's not that valuable and when we're talking to these publishers and helping them monetize sometimes publishers don't want to run an ad because they think it's too early they think they're a little small mh what's there's a missing i think i'm missing piece or i've busy like logic there where if you do run netflix as an ad in your newsletter and you have fifty subscribers those fifty subscribers see your newsletter is being sponsored by netflix which yeah completely legit your newsletter yeah hinges the perspective that you might have and the readers might have of your newsletter yeah i think it's a it's a wonderful psychological boost for both the reader as well as a newsletter operator it's it's really it's really a beautiful thing i i feel like we're alluding to it a little bit but i'm curious on how you would say that brands can use partnerships as a means to reach a bigger and more diverse audience yeah i'll try to answer their question like broadly and then also like what we're doing but sure so i think of one of the issues that brands typically have is kind of what i actually alluded to earlier was that brands come to us and they say we run with meta we run with google around with morning brew not their fault but they're constantly looking for the most efficient way to do something mh they just don't unless they have a team of a hundred people they're not gonna be able to go out even if they wanted to work with newsletters that were extremely diverse themselves or just like a diverse set of newsletters yeah they're probably going to act like water and just go to the process that is most efficient yeah the reason why i think it's important to have a layer like what we're doing what we're building is because it evens the playing field what you were saying earlier it evens both for that brand if the brand comes to us and they say this is what we're trying to do then we can then make it very easy for us to open up access to all of these five hundred or thousand or ten thousand newsletters and we can make sure no matter who that newsletter is reaching they're getting access to these advertisers and these advertisers are able to sponsor and work with them yeah so i guess there's like if there's an advertiser that wants to create partnerships that kind of touch more and more groups but they don't have the resources to do it having a platform that enables them to do that and cuts out the concern of efficiency yeah that shouldn't be a reason why a brand isn't inclusive that is ridiculous yeah it just comes down to like don't have enough people to do it right and having a platform that enables it makes it really easy it takes a lot of the like you said it takes some of the excuses out for them there's this concept in the world of marketing as well as specifically inclusive marketing all our diverse owned and operated media and a lot of times what we'll see is brands who want to engage specific communities they'll do it with a big platform such as meta or other media properties where the funds aren't necessarily going to the people who own the audiences or the platforms that they're trying to reach right so if i'm creating content on instagram i'm not getting any of the ad revenue or anything from from access to the people who are going to instagram specifically to see my content or whatever but this one helps brands do a better job of investing in media that's owned by different communities particularly diverse owned media because they're tapping into audiences that the individuals have created and a lot of times those audiences will be like them in some way shape or form so i think that this is a really innovative way for brands to tap into at scale more diverse owned media and giving the investment directly to people who've built these audiences in these communities and who people already have a strong relationship and trust because kinda like what you said oh netflix is advertising in my favorite newsletter about i don't know gluten free food i would like netflix cares about us in this little community like it it just kind of feels like it gives a different impression even of the advertiser that they are speaking to these different communities and identities and not only sticking to the big names that we might all be accustomed to totally yeah yeah yeah i think there there is a big difference between like on a feed based platform like a meadow or an instagram or tech tiktok i don't know tiktok well at all i don't have it i can't really talk about it else prices and it does make sense but if there's content creators that you follow on instagram and then there's ads slot it in between those you're right like those content creators have done all the work to create the content that brings the audience and the advertiser pays in instagram instagram yeah profits and the advertiser gets to be in front of the right audience because of what the creator ad has done in this case with newsletters yeah the the business is directly between ga advertiser and the creator and the creator is directly benefiting from like continuing to to hone and craft aircraft and to build their community and that's there are ways where like there are platforms that help by creators that are on instagram or podcast are similar to newsletters to work directly with advertisers and we support publishers in that way as well i know i alluded to that technology layer that kind of distributes yeah versions but yeah those platforms that help advertisers work directly with publishers they they support that creator directly as well very cool what would you say from your perspective is the state of the industry of brand partnerships as it relates to inclusion or is it like on the cutting edge is there a lot more to go or you know how would you rate the industry as a whole i think it depends on the medium so i think brands are always looking for new channels they're always looking for new ways to do things that are easy that's the annoying part and i think slowly things are getting a little bit as like more and more platforms like the platforms i mentioned that make it easier for content creators to work with brands mh the reverse come becomes true as well like brands have a much easier time compared to like five to ten years ago finding content creators to work with directly that align to their goals of if they want to be a little bit more inclusive in their marketing it's much easier now for them to find publishers or creators content creators of any kind that kinda fit those goals yeah been it five years ago it's not the easiest i think it's still the ar for what like inclusion means still falls on the brand at the moment which i don't know if it's a good thing mh i don't know if we as a platform should be that ar out either but right now it definitely is up to the advertiser or the brand to decide like how do we define inclusion or diversity and then let's go out and use one of these platforms to by these publishers that represent what that definition is yeah the the part of that equation which is like the search and find those folks that is easy and that is definitely solved in a certain way the definition part is not yet so okay i think what has been solved also is measurement so unfortunately like all brand partnerships they fall under advertising advertising even if it's branding advertising somebody is measuring like is that working and is it driving business results that has been solved and so it's very easy for a brand to say like hey we we tried this new angle let's see if it actually worked if it did something yeah and with that with like search with measurement it's very easy to tell like okay this this new approach is actually working really well but i think still needs to be solved is like that i don't know if ar is right word but like helping a brand understand like what does inclusion actually mean and what does it mean to brand and how can you do it in a way that's really genuine to who that brand is yeah so okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's marketing against the grain hosted by kit and kieran flanagan and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professional else so if you wanna know what's happening now in the world of marketing what's ahead and how you can lead the way then this podcast is for you i listen to an episode a while back that i love so much i sent it to some friends in a mastermind that i'm a part of and it was all about how to rank number one when ai is taking over featuring ross simmons definitely worth to listen if you like she's made like i do you might wanna have to listen to the episode where they covered did hubspot lose eighty percent of its blog traffic here's what actually happened and another recent episode that looks super interesting that i actually wanna make sure that i take some time to listen to is how to rank number one in chat gp results ai seo strategy listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts so with what we were talking about before a lot of what a wonderful benefit to your platform is it takes away like this these barriers to entry right so these big brands can advertise on a lot of different newsletter platforms no matter their size right and that's a real benefit and what we've also talked about is like the creators are getting the direct benefit of their audiences our brands able to say oh like i think part of what it works is there's these industries but are they able to say oh this audience is heavily gen z or this audience is heavily asian and i want to make sure that i'm reaching this particular marketplace or these particular you know eyeballs that are reading these newsletter are we able to do that or not yet or is that where you were talking about with like being the ar yeah on newsletters not yet okay right now we have proxies so at least on bi we see what all the publishers write about and we try to build like some profiles of like who do we think this this audience is yeah and then what we will start doing is building out like standardized polls so newsletter writers they constantly just like send polls and questions to their audience to try to who they are so they can serve them better we haven't yet standardized that so we can understand as a whole across like the twenty thousand newsletters who is reading what type of newsletter yeah but we're slowly starting to do that the content that folks write about that's enough to get us to like maybe level one yeah levels we need to yeah we're not there yet with newsletters you can do that on like a facebook meta google etcetera mh the i i we need a better word than ar with the ar equipment was like more thinking through that step where an advertiser decides hey i want to reach a more inclusive audience how do we define what that means like do we want to okay reach more gen z or gen yeah like what is the answer to that question that could be because they actually built built a product that solves the gen z problem or they just recognize that they don't have that much brand awareness within like this age bracket but helping like a brand to really define what that question is or what the answer to that question is and then transferring that answer to the platform is i don't think it's been so got it got it okay what mistakes have you seen brands making when it comes to trying to reach a broader diversity of consumers just specifically as it relates to brand partnerships yeah it always comes that the answer to that question always comes down to the creative so like the actual ad and like what the copy is and what the image is they think like hey if we're trying to be broader they make something that is really just like static and boring and doesn't like doesn't like capture the hearts and minds of any of the groups they're trying to get in front of yeah and so they have even if a brand has done so much research to answer that question we were just talking about or really understand who they're trying to get in front of and they come up with ten different groups than when it comes down to creative they don't invest in that and that's a problem because that's actually what the whole the whole coin to the partnership is and if you could yeah people at the right time with the wrong message then nothing's gonna work yeah that happens quite a bit and what especially and maybe it's because newsletters is a channel and this is where i see most of this it's kind of new it's hard for a brand to justify investing in a test on a new channel yeah but what they'll do is just say like hey this worked on instagram or worked on tiktok so let's just see if it works on newsletters yeah and that's where that whole equation breaks down yeah no i totally get that because like if you're trying to market to gen z for instance you find these newsletters that are great fit but you're creative very much weeks of older millennials it's it's not gonna be it's not gonna resonate so much like who are these people for sure for sure what recommendations or best practices do you have for brands who wanna use partnerships as a way to be more inclusive and reach a broader diversity their ideal customer yeah if i guess two ways if you're working if a brand is working directly with the creator so one on one doing kind of like the research to what we just talked about like really understanding either really understanding what is the content that the creator creates and building your copy and creative in your message in your campaign that aligns to how that creator creates or just saying like just take all creative freedom give the creative freedom to the creator the creator yeah so much work to understand how to build their audience that's what their aircraft is that's what they're really and people follow them because they like what they talk about yeah that creator actually doesn't really need the brand to help them share the message if the brand just provides the platform provides the message says like this is what i'm trying to do talk talk to your customers and the way that you feel comfortable and you think would resonate that's yeah powerful and it's also the most empowering for the creators and i think it'll ultimately result in the best results for the business if you're working with a platform like us where you're doing something a little bit more scaled talk kind the same answer but a little bit more like lean on the platform invest in the creative invest in the actual whole end to end of the campaign yeah and don't take the easy way out of just like taking whatever work on instagram and slapping it on the new channel you're trying yeah no i love that i love that basically it just met like you said matching the message to the audience and yeah and basic marketing principles well that's one of the things that i kinda get whenever i'm talking about inclusive marketing i feel like i always need to remind people that it's really it's just marketing right like it's just good marketing so if you apply the same type of principles there it really does go a long way in increasing your effectiveness so you're just talking about they do basic good marketing practices which works in different channels right so really exactly yeah those creators have i've already done all the work to understand like how do i talk to this audience you don't need as a brand you don't need to do that unless you already have that expertise and right understand that audience lean on the creator that's why you're working with them yeah yeah and which is part of the benefit of working with investing in diverse owned media right like it's it's by design it's you know gonna speak to these particular communities that you've identified that you wanna serve alright well let's switch gears a little bit tell me about a time whenever a brand made you feel like you belonged oh wow i'm trying to remember this exact ad it was a mother's dad ad i think it was in the olympics okay does that general of memory is it wasn't nike maybe shoot i might have to come back to this question during the olympics i think it was in an olympic ad it was either like oh i know what you're talking about i do i do do i do basically they were showcasing like all the olympia who were winning and they would go up and show mom and they would show all the sacrifices that their mom made to help get them there is that right yeah it was was either that there was also like there was the olympia was about to like perform some thing at yeah they were doubting themselves and then they had a flash home just saying like just keep doing it just keep going yeah i it's the bad answer to the question because i don't remember where the brand is i'm pretty sure it's nike but i just remember that moment i was it was like he has just been mother's day i was thinking about like what should i get my mom what should we do for mother's day and they weren't like selling me a product they were just selling me like the relationship of like yeah on the son for me yeah and just like really digging in that like this is an important bond and it's really special and you should cherish it and you should do something about it especially on mother's day i think that was like that was really nice that clearly like the message resonated yeah and it was less so around a specific product or service that was fine well i've been talking about this with a a couple of different people lately and just how sometimes with brands in general trying to market to different consumers they focus so much on the brand and the core brand messaging that they've they in the core brand messaging doesn't always have that emotional connection so what you're talking about is that emotional connection that just really resonated with you and it stuck with you right all these years later and if you can connect your brand to that that's wonderful but just a brand message alone isn't always going to to do that which is why as you mentioned linking it and having those creators do it in the way that resonates with them it kinda adds that level of emotion and connectivity because we already understand like you said who it is that we're talking to so like full circle moment it's all come of back they're linking together where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work i'm relatively active on twitter or x somewhat active on linkedin and then company is bi so b dot com sweet two eat two eyes spelled like a start up i'm gonna link it all in the show so people can access it easily and follow along any parting words of wisdom jake for marketers and business leaders who wanna do a better job of connecting with more consumers from underrepresented and underserved communities yeah i'll kind of go back to what we had talked about earlier especially because i'm coming from like the creator landscape in the creator world as a brand just doing a good job of really understanding what communities are trying to get in front of and finding the folks that have done a good job of doing that already and allowing them to have their freedom on a building creative building the right messaging because they've already done that work they understand it it's their world and that partnership will be really smooth if you allow them that creative freedom very cool thanks so much jake this has been really a lot of fun and super insightful yeah no worries thanks for having me that's it for today's episode if you are enjoying the show i would love it if you would leave a rating and review for it in your podcast player of choice it really does go a long way towards helping more people discover the show and i like to think it goes towards helping more people practice inclusive marketing and more people feeling they like belong quick question for you are you getting the inclusion and marketing newsletter if not bailey what are you even doing each week iceland send news resources pop culture word on the street what consumers are saying and other good tidbits to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse in fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i'll also drop a link to that in the show notes for you so you can access it easily until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon to

one of the most important elements in your ability to market inclusive is your team the actual marketers who are working on the products services communications and experiences you deliver to the people that you serve and want to serve but having a team and having a team that is actually able to be effective with inclusive marketing are two different things it doesn't happen automatically that a team is able to tap into the various of identities to be able to deliver a better product to the people that you want to serve and understand their needs effectively many leaders and as a result their teams struggle to create the kind of psychological safety and culture that create an environment for people especially those who underrepresented in underserved communities to let their voices be heard and if people feel like they have to assimilate to be accepted on a team they are even less likely to speak up no bueno not because this is such an important topic i sat down with john graham an authors scholar and employer branding strategist and consultant to weigh in on this topic this is more of just a really good chat conversation between john and i on a topic which i've had a lot of questions about i thought about it a lot john recently had a post on linkedin about this and a lot of people i a lot of people had a lot of comments about it in particular i'm gonna link up to that post that sparked the reason why i wanted to chat with john today in the show notes for you because i definitely highly recommend that you have a look so after this short break you're gonna hear at my conversation with john graham the two thousand twenty five inbound conference is coming up i'm gonna be there and i'm hoping that i will see you there as well it's september third through the fifth at the mo center and san francisco not boston it's gonna be in san francisco this year come and get actionable insights so you can implement immediately to grow your business also you can join a community of forward thinking professionals who are shaping the future of business i was at the inbound conference back in two thousand twenty three and i gotta say it was one of the most if not the most inclusive conference i have ever been to this year you will be able to engage with a broad diversity of industry leaders like marquez brown lee dominique k amy poe and others who are breaking barriers and creating new path to success across technology culinary arts and entertainment you can engage with san francisco diverse tech community that's working to ensure ai development reflects and serves all communities demonstrating how inclusive technology drives innovation and market growth visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today hey john thanks so much for joining me today how are you oh sonia in the moment i'm well says thank you so much for having me how are you totally i'm doing well i have to say i think this conversation has been a couple years in the making we've been meeting to talk and the other day i saw a linkedin post that you posted a week ago and i was like wait a minute wait a minute it stopped the presses like we have to talk about this now yeah it got that kind of reaction from a list yes yes so before we get too deep into this let the people know who are you and what do you do oh my gosh who i am i am a husband a father an only child but a brother to many i am a brand builder founder entrepreneur consultant i'm i'm a lot of things i do a lot of things but i'd say at at minimum i'm a connector as well as a community dia community center brother trying to trying to help restore our prominence i totally get it well we're thankful for you and work that you do i know okay that part of the work that you do day to day is helping brands build employer brands and i am curious well i i love if you could just explain for people who don't know what or who may even have a different like not fight the right understanding of it what is an employer brand yeah well i think it's a great question i think first of all there's no curriculum for in any college university or b school right so when you think about your traditional marketing marketing or branding functions for consumer products or services and so forth that's really to amplify or a spouse or express the the value of the brand or the product or the service right well employer branding is the same thing but specifically focused on the employers culture the value proposition and benefits of working with said employer versus their competitor another in the industry and leveraging all of the tactics of traditional marketing but specifically applied to the talent and recruitment marketing space so yeah and then you have sort of the employer brand element of it so that's the narrative the aesthetic of the culture of a of a company any other the recruitment marketing aspect which is the tactics used to express or amplify that brand to attract engage and retain talent okay given and we're in the us and i know there's quite the environment that we're in right now which is changing the face of recruitment and a lot of a lot of things i am a product of a diverse recruitment function i went to an as we were talking before and whenever i graduated with my mba i like there were brands who were coming companies from all over the place i had a number of internships etcetera under my belt why because these companies came to our school that had i believe lots of top notch talent right but they came to find us because it helped them fish were the fish were so to speak right if they wanted to diversify their base is that type of thing still happening is it still relevant is it still legal like you know is it a way for people is it still a reliable way to kinda fuel recruitment or strategies for for brands yeah yeah so there are i'll say this is is sort of the umbrella statement and then i'll drill in at highest level what i see is that companies are still doing the things they're changing how vocal they are externally about it okay and they're repositioning how they're speaking about it right okay so so certainly a volume turned down a little bit right yeah a lot of bit in some cases if you're a government contracting corporation yeah but then even the rebranding of the work that they were doing and now softening it redirecting it with different words that don't yeah trigger right certain responses from certain government entities so yes they are still in partnership and recruiting from no they're not going full throat in the marketplace saying they're doing this yeah so yeah that's that's kind of the the running theme is you know i hear companies literally say no we're doubling down on our efforts or it's business as usual nothing's changed but then you look at who's doing the work if the work is still being done at the same level the funding behind it and all these other things so yeah it's yeah it's kind of a double double edged conversation right now i hear you what would you say is the states of inclusion when it comes to employer branding well it's so when when we look at i look at it in a couple of ways one is what is the aesthetic representation right what what is the visual representation of diversity in your brand marketing what is the who are the voices that you're highlighting or spotlight lighting for their lived experiences i'm still seeing that being done right like there wasn't this broad sweeping okay we need to remove everybody who's non white cis rendered able body and male which from from our from our talent ads or yeah our brand marketing what what i think they did was and let me be clear there were some companies who pulled all of their you know cultural heritage month post pulled all of their their ads spend around diversity recruitment all of that stuff like that did happen but by and large when you look at their career sites when you look at their presence at conferences their investments in certain conferences i was just at render aco i still saw all the big names there okay there's not like this sweeping removal or ratio that i think some people might think is happening right again it's just how loudly are they saying it alright so from an inclusion perspective which i think is different than the diversity or the visual representation perspective i don't know that that has changed much and i say that vaguely enough to to to infer that it wasn't great before yeah it's not worse now but it's but it hasn't improved either so yeah yeah inclusion is kinda of it's one of those things that i have a very i don't wanna say unique take but it's i made i made a post i went back it's funny i i made a post on tiktok years several years ago but it was like twenty one twenty two so we're right in the height and the thick of post george floyd execution the the the rush to to fund and make these big commitments by companies and i said d doesn't center who you think it does mh and what i went on to explain was that diversity requires a a measure of standard by which you judge difference yeah right yeah and then we know what that standard is yeah and then equity meant that somebody in a in a dominant group position has to create opportunity for those who aren't in the dominant group and we know who that dominant group is and then inclusion means that the in group allows the out group to participate in in group activities mh so there's always somebody at the center of that allowing these things to occur and oh by the way throughout human history anytime you've had a dominant group in human civilization they've never given that position of willingly yeah right so so i'm i'm i'm a p in that sense that i'm looking at the human nature aspect of this and it's undefeated yeah so i'm i'm tempered in my i don't say optimism but in my in my perception of what was possible in the first place yeah optimism is a good thing right and i think that sometimes we're met with a lot of great disappointment sometimes whenever we we encounter our systems that seem to be they're just bigger they're not they're they're designed to not be broken or or have cracks in them so that kind of brings me to this post that you mentioned the other day and that i was commenting on i'm gonna link it to in the show notes so people can go and and see for themselves and there's an important video in the middle of it that i was like oh so anyway my experience with corporate america was nine years after i finished business school and i knew from the first year that i did not belong there i knew in year one no i stayed nine years right like i just kept trying to make it work in the different care say they were dangling and all these different reasons and i finally left because my soul could not stay right and so it was one of those things where i just knew it wasn't for me and try as i might i could not assimilate in a way because ass simulation is what i really had to do to make it work even to the point to where i was like in a leadership program it was coached to do this without saying those words right but it it just wasn't who i am i did not be belong there right and so my question for you is one if you can just kind of set the stage what is simulation and what is the impact on brand culture like do people need to assimilate and if you don't assimilate you don't like what is your what is the connection with all of this well first i love that you shared your experience and and i appreciate that because i think your experience is a lot of black professionals experience it's just some don't ever reach that point of accepting that it is not sitting well with their spirit and they can't go for right you you you figured it out after nine years and you're like look the money's is good but my soul yeah i need that yeah so so i i i do a lot of speaking engagements with black employee resource groups and i do a speaker session called the cost of the client okay it's actually the it's part of the source material for the book i'm writing currently my second book called the cost of declined from enslave to executives when you say ass simulation what we're talking about is this notion of conformity mh and integration into dominant group behavior and you'll hear me use that term dominant group a lot because it's rooted in a psychological theory called social dominance theory effectively suggesting that anytime there is a human civilization society a natural hierarchy forms based on those who control access and access to resources essentially and then that derive power and then privilege status and it has happened throughout history so it's not just a race is actually one of the sub of social dominance theory point being it starts with age dominant groups usually are older than younger groups alright so we we have more power and authority than people who are younger than us and then at middle age you have more power and authority than younger people as well as elderly people in a western construct who assign value based on your productivity then the next is gender as far as the subset of social dominance theory which male dominant female subordinate in this theory not my belief but then thirdly is what they call arbitrary set which collects a bunch of man made constructs whether it's raised with geography religion orient orientated like all of these things point being in the corporate construct it is built on hierarchy right and that comes from many centuries worth of infrastructure building to support the dominant group's position and make maintenance of that position so by virtue of us is black professionals going into a dominant group construct as members of subordinate group right let's put that out there what you find in this theory is that even the subordinate group has a longing desire and support of dominant group status we contribute to it we aspire to get to it and so anybody and this isn't just racially but anytime you're a part of a subordinate group and you see a dominant group enjoying benefits enjoying access enjoying lifestyles enjoying whatever the case may be that comes with being that group you tend to do what's necessary to get into that yeah what we face is black professionals is once we get into that the requirement is that you shed your sub subordinate group identity to maintain status in the dominant group and so we hear terms like all you sold out or oh you forgot where you came from or all of these things but reality is these are the requirements if you want access to what's behind those doors and so i always ask if you knew what was behind those doors would you still not and that's a question we don't ask ourselves because we've been programmed by our four parents that you're gonna go to school you're gonna get this degree you're gonna work you're gonna get a good job you're gonna work thirty years retiring and die right like yeah that's the mantra but we never questioned because they didn't have frame of reference for what was behind those doors they never had access we're the first generation of black folks in this country with access right born into what i should say yeah yeah that explains a whole lot right like it's china force a square peg into a around hole right there's a number of different i guess responses solutions to this right mh because of course i firmly believe in inclusion but more so what i really esp is belonging and i want people to find the place where they belong not try to force themselves to belong in a place where they really don't right but i think part of what feels like the soul sucking experience that people might have is that there isn't this degree of psychological safety to speak up about things that they want to speak up for or that they see or right and that there aren't right or or whatever it is they just feel like they have to temper what they can say and i'm wondering what is the connection between psychological safety and an inclusive culture where people feel like they belong well i think i think ideally in in a perfect world you would have both right yeah the psychological safe environment would lend itself to you feeling a sense of i can be myself and that others would accept or make space or whole space for yourself right yeah unfortunately it was never designed that way like i think what's lost in the sense of history right as an african studies major i've looked at the world pre european invasion right of of the continent they're pre colonial all the way through to modern and what you notice is that anytime you have a a construct that's designed based on exploitation mh then humanity was not involved in that construction right and so it's it's interesting to to to think that yes we are in a a more evolved expression of colonial capitalism but it make no mistake it is still exploit alright mh and and and that's no more evidence based by then when you look at the significant the grand canyon s gap between executive level compensation and frontline mh so then so then what you start to see is there's a lot of programs and initiatives designed to make you feel better about the exploitation it doesn't remove the exploitation so when we talk about psychological safety you'll hear a lot of folks say well you know maybe you shouldn't bring your whole self to work right whoever made that statement didn't live through a marginalized experience because that's a liability to bring your whole self right yeah but then that also ensures that you need to suppress the things that you visibly can't control and reduce threat perception by whether it's code switching or assuming a different posture or different hairstyle or yeah all of these things to reduce this notion of threats so psychological safety is not necessarily baked in yeah right therefore belonging also i i always had a challenge with that word it's even as a in a in the d professional space because i remember when we actually belonged to people oh i get it yeah yeah right okay right so so so i'm saying if we're not thinking in terms of how do we own and control the outputs of our labor yeah right as as as black folks and i'll specifically hone in on us then we keep trying to belong to somebody and that undertone of psychology is not is not by accident yeah okay no i totally get it like which is important right like it's so it's very important okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals joe po and robert rose are two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space and they're talking about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain and customers one of the things i really enjoy about this show is how they do a commentary and a discussion on current events you know i love some current events the episode that i'm listening to right now that they are doing that in all about thou shalt build on rented land anyway i think you're gonna enjoy this show listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts okay so in the context of all of this mh we talk a lot about diverse teams and the benefit diverse teams there's data that shows that diverse teams outperform their peers that aren't diverse but the benefits of having a diverse team background thoughts experiences points of view cultures etcetera it's not automatic just because you've got diff these different types of people in the team i've always felt like you need people who are comfortable to be themselves at work to lean into the aspects of what makes them different that's how you get the benefit of it and you have to have a type of culture that nurture and foster that type of thing how would an organization that wasn't necessarily designed to do this how would they be able to create this type of benefit or team or powerhouse team that has all these different identities on it that is able to tap into the power of having all these identities on it and maybe a context that organizational that that might not be the way the organization is set up yeah it's a fair fact no it's a great question i i think you know and and for anybody who's listening this far and i promise i'm not all doom and gloom what what i think is very important for us to shift our thinking to is a humanity practice okay let go of this notion of bringing difference together and thinking that that is the solution because at base level you could have different looking people different experiences and backgrounds and still they're very much in support of in inhumane approaches to solving problems yeah right so i don't want that to get lost i think if if your culture as an organization is centering the human experience centering the fact that people at base level regardless of what you look like or what your background is require and deserve dignity yeah in the work that they're doing that their humanity is honor that their perspectives and their capabilities their abilities are embraced yeah that they are given fair chance fair opportunity and they're given access to be truly who they can be right under the right conditions then i think we're having a different conversation than saying did we hit the the right number of diverse representation or do we have enough women in leadership to make it look good for shareholder or value or consumer perceptions right yeah this is when you start to build cultures that people wanna run through brick walls to get into yeah right and i don't know that there's a lot of companies that on the basis of their culture people are lining up around the block to to put an application in versus the prestige that a little add to their resume or right the the the the compensation potential or whatever those cases may be so it's interesting that you talk about this at a humanity level i live in my everyday world is a culture clash where we're trying to find a way to outperform right or to make things work yeah my husband is from argentina i met him we got married a while i was living in argentina and he is an immigrant now here in the us and we speak spanish in our home and this morning i was telling him about the interview that i'm this this conversation that we were gonna have and i was telling him is explaining to him fumbling through it because i'm explaining this in spanish and it's not these aren't concepts that i will on these are not not normally concepts that i have on my in my day to date in spanish right so there was at one aspect of it but as i was explaining to him what we were gonna talk about i was doing it front it from the standpoint of race and in argentina they think about those things differently of course he understands in the us it's very different right and for him things are often led with a race difference from the way we think about things and so he was listening and he was getting it but he didn't fully grasp it and then i started to explain it in more of a conceptual term and he's like oh and he he referenced the very thing that we were talking about he thought about it in terms of a friend that he had in argentina and said oh this happened and then he was easily able to relate with it and now we were able to have this conversation because it clicked and what the reason why i'm bringing this up is because i think that a lot of times people on teams aren't necessarily willing to spend the time to figure out how can we make an idea at concept relatable because our perspectives our points of view are different and so the way we process things are gonna be different the way we view the world are different the way we understand challenges or not are different and once we take the time to recognize that nobody's really should have to assimilate we just are trying to find a way that we can all exist and tackle problems that might exist in a way i think that is more of a i feel like that's more of what you're trying to say is where we need to shift to which is a much more humanity centered approach versus like this is black and white this is about this culture this is women gender right like and so that kind of makes us get hung up am i kind of explaining this or processing this correctly i think so i think so you know no no it's it's it's an apt concept connection and i i'd i'd love to hear the details on on what clicked for your husband for sure yeah right but but i think what what it comes down to is when i when i say humanity practice what i'm saying is the things that we all deal with regardless and really comes down survival right yeah and the challenge is we have competing and clashing ethos when it comes to survival for instance historically when you look at europe not i'll just single out europe here set thousands and thousands of years of scarcity based you know living right whether it was food scarcity whether it was you know land scarcity political insecurities food insecurities plagues and disease like there's a whole lot of factors that shaped you know european cultures and the and the ways in which they engaged with each other well now you you you j oppose that to an african continent experience right where there's so much resource abundance that they need to import nothing yeah literally i mean so much abundance that there's stories of historical accounts of walking the streets and seeing diamonds and gold laying in the street because because it wasn't this notion of scarcity right so yeah so when we think about these these ethos clashing what we're finding today is that at base level human nature it always defaults to comfort yeah so how do i how do i achieve more without pushing myself past as comfort and if i've achieved the level of comfort how do i maintain that even at the sort of consequence of other people right and that's where i think when you get to a humanity centered approach it's really noting that your position of comfort comes at a cost to someone else and eventually will cost you because there's no group that's remained at the top forever yeah right i mean that's no more no more evident than looking at the african history yeah of tens of thousands of years of global dominance in the sense of trade in the sense of resource so forth whatever and now we're looking at a european dominant group for six hundred years yeah so it's in the in an arc of time it's a blink it's a blink of an eye yeah yeah right but it doesn't last so i say when we get back to this humanity practice it's it sounds very much like you know we are the world right but but it but it but it ultimately we are interdependent okay and and that that zero sum perspective of scarcity based approaches doesn't last long and we're seeing we're starting to see some of that that dismantling now what would be your advice to talent who's going into an organization about would you say to them that they they need to assimilate would you tell them would you recommend that they avoided it at all costs like what would be your advice for step someone who is entering into a it doesn't have to be corporate but just they're entering into a new company yeah well my message to black talent always is understand history mh number one someone and be very clear on what you're going in to do i i am not anti corporate right i think that it has its place and i think there's a lot of value to be derived from going in and understanding having an experience where you learn the different mechanisms of business right yeah go in and and i always say go into your first year as the extension of your college career right okay this this is your extended learning opportunity don't go in thinking that you've arrived and this was the end all be all because that's when people start to do whatever it takes to climb the ladder mh and they think this is it so i also say that we were trained and i use the word programmed to believe that corporate is the aspiration not the stepping stone towards the ultimate goal right yeah the beauty is when you get in there and you meet people right whether you join an employee resource group and you meet colleagues with brilliance and different backgrounds and things like that don't look at them as your competitors look at them as your c founders you should be thinking how do i build my own yeah not just rely on right but again i don't think that everybody i don't think that it's everybody should be an entrepreneur because i know that that's not everybody's ministry however i also don't suppose or accept that we were only meant to be employees of other companies that we don't know yeah right yeah it's just that's not what we were taught trained or program to think yeah but there are some people who who might have that that vision and that passion to go out and create something and how can you support that with your expertise skills and background yeah so it's really a mindset shift go in know what you're going for have a clear idea of what you want to learn and and build what you want to learn and what your skills you need to acquire what relationships you need to cultivate to then apply to something that you actually are passionate about that solves a problem that you care about yeah yeah it is an important shift it is an important agent if i had that mindset i think i would approach things differently am i you would be better corporate america okay so what was your advice be to leaders who are now having increasingly people with different identities on their team how do they support them and create a space that enables them to thrive yeah and their teams excellent question i'll say the leaders who i've seen be tremendous leaders of diverse teams specifically but teams in general are those who have willingly put themselves in the positions of discomfort for the purpose of cultural expansion right cultural intelligence expansion understanding who they are in a broad world where they aren't the dominant group right so this is the leader who goes into south side to an african restaurant or or a soul food restaurant because they enjoy the atmosphere or to learn who they are when they are not centered yeah right this is this is the the leader who spends time in a country where they don't speak the language yeah and they're not catering to your language and because now you know what it means not to be centered entered yeah and these are these are the folks who i've who who i've encountered throughout my career that have put themselves into uncomfortable positions yeah as a pathway to growth and expansion in which cases given them so much more empathy a broader aperture or wider aperture on what's possible beyond their own limited vision or experience yeah this is what i often tell people is part of my framework for building an inclusive brand is they're all about diversifying your circle of influence most people have very limited sources of information or things that influence them and so it's no wonder that their perceptions are super limited right and so once they go and like you said or much more intentional about entering spaces that where you aren't the dominant identity you feel a lot different and it it it contains your your way of thinking completely so totally totally on board with that okay let's switch gears a little bit sure and gonna change the word on the fly because we're thinking about we're rethinking this word belonging right like so tell about his time when a brand made you feel seen in like who they get me so that's a that's a great question and i can point to plenty of of times where a brand has made me feels phil and valued as a marketer as a social and digital brand developer i understand the power of perception and p r so so here here's here's what i'll say those experiences and i'll and i'll approach this broadly are the ones that speak visually rhythm production and commercially in the vernacular of the culture and community that they are trying to connect with and what i mean by that is it doesn't feel like you had a a focus group to understand whether or not this would land well with this this demographic right yeah it's you had somebody of the culture driving that that campaign or you know even down to the to the to the wardrobe the hair the makeup the lighting the the the environment like everything was designed by people who live it it wasn't a a guess and or assumption yeah but but what i've always appreciated is what is the subtlety what is that that that appreciated or that unexpected experience of delight you're like oh my god and that could just be where where i saw it and how i saw it right did it did it just come across the screen on an add at the subway or was it somebody you know doing something that made me stop moving an automatic behavior and look up and be like what did i just experienced but that's that was amazing and felt good i wanna know more so i'm saying all of these things without giving you a specific brand by saying that there are some companies who do that really well i tend to find that those are the organizations that are either growing right that that don't have this fear of getting it wrong but are hyper passionate and clear on who they are and who they wanna their consumer to be whereas the bigger brands tend to second guess and do the safe thing because yeah shareholder value legal legal departments you know not being comfortable with whatever the case may be and then that i think cheap or certainly alters the experience for the consumer yeah i did some research i was doing an audit for a brand and i was doing some user testing and one of the the people that i was talking to he's like i feel like i've been studied oh right and so like they i like they read a lot about his community and his identity and they were trying to apply it and he's like mh it was a difference between feeling like i've been studied and i'm trying to speak to you versus like i get you let's you know and so he didn't like that right so not at all yeah yeah nobody wants to feel like they're an experiment right no no i want an experience not an experiment yeah that's heavy where can you find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work yeah i'm not hard to find i'm all over linkedin for sure so a simple search on john graham creative or i'm sure you'll have a link there but but yeah there that's probably the best way to get get connected okay alright well jump links to that in the show notes of course to the one that posts in particular to your profile overall but to the post in particular that want the slides we gotta talk we gotta talk this has been fantastic any parting words wisdom for marketers and business leaders who want to infuse more humanity into the cultures that they are creating so that people don't feel like ass simulation is their motive survival yeah so and so that you know ultimately these these bring better business results but also it's better for people overall right so what advice would you give them how much time do we have for since i if i had to package this up neatly in a a a quota exit i i'd say focus more on the human experience than in the profitability potential mh and it's counterintuitive to your business school training yeah good right but but i don't think that there's been a unsuccessful business who put their customers needs their their experience and ultimately their their expectations secondary to profitability right i think that that's what drives that and that is the nature of the game that you're in your your obligation is to ensure the viability and sustainability of the business that you're at the helm of get it but you can't do that without people yeah and as much as you wanna try with ai you still need human touch always alright so remember the human in in humanity and think about how is this going to impact how is this gonna be beneficial for the human at the other end of what you're trying to sell or create even in your internal culture yeah very cool very cool i love it and i think that's very practical for people to to people apply it's it sounds very it's very simple you know i'm i'm yeah it sounds very like oh that that does that's not like follow this step but no but it's okay i mean i think it's just a we think about how would you want someone to treat you and just we stop thinking about like roi specifically all the time yeah yeah you'll get to roi but i mean yeah yeah for for the practical steps it's it it's sometimes the simplest thing is the is the right answer yeah and it doesn't have to be this complex do this first and then you're gonna do this for two years and yeah no no just remember that there's a human involved in in these things that you're building culture wise even for products and services so start there yeah it's an ethos that's what i think you it is yeah it is indeed thank you john for for stopping by i've i've thoroughly enjoyed this hey oh the pleasure is mine always sonia thank you so much for having me i really enjoyed my conversation with john and i personally have a lot of things to consider even from what we chatted about in some of the insights that he shared and i'm curious to hear from you what stood out for you the most what are the things that you are pondering the most in your mind as a result of sean's insights i wanna hear all about it let me know send me an email it's chat in the dms or even publicly on social happy to do so i wanna know what's turning around in your mind as result of this conversation alright quick question for you are you getting the inclusion in marketing newsletter i mean if not really what are you even been doing each week i send news resources insights and other important lessons for you to know all about how to attract and retain a bigger more diverse and fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i will drop the link to that and shown notes for you as well until next time remember everyone deserves to have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect a power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

brands wanna know that they are on the right track towards tell bring them achieve their goals and key performance indicators or kpis often help give brand leaders signals as to whether or not what they are doing is working or need some adjustments as an inclusive marketing strategist and consultant i found over and over again that the traditional types of kpis brands use don't often present the full picture that marketers and business leaders need to make decisions about the ideal path forward to attract and retain a bigger more diverse and fiercely loyal customer base so after this short break we're gonna get into why that is the case and how you can make your kpis work harder for you the two thousand twenty five inbound conference is coming up i'm gonna be there and i'm hoping that i will see you there as well it's september third through the fifth at the musk center in san francisco not boston it's gonna be in san francisco go this year come and get actionable insights you can implement immediately to grow your business also you can join a community of forward thinking professionals who are shaping the future of business i was at the inbound conference back in two thousand twenty three and i gotta say it was one of the most if not the most inclusive a conference i have ever been to this year you will be able to engage with a broad diversity of industry leaders like marquez brown lee dominique k amy polar and others who are breaking barriers and creating new path to success across technology culinary arts and entertainment you can engage with san francisco diverse tech community that working to ensure ai development reflects and serves all communities demonstrating how inclusive technology drives innovation and market growth visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today alright so here's a little bit about why most kpis don't tell you the full story that you need now the hit movie centers is the highest grossing original film this decade and as at the time of this recording it has earned two hundred sixty one million and domestic box office sales and three hundred fifty seven million worldwide now before i even saw the film i knew there was a pivotal dancing scene in the middle of it that me audiences and had them raving about it on social media ke sage is a popular comedian and when he was talking about that scene in particular he said he's never felt so seen in a scene comment mentors agreed with him on the impact one person wrote that scene was transformative another person wrote i went to go see that movie again just to witness that scene literally have never seen anything like it and another person added that one scene was an entire experience and that experience was all capitalized now given the context of the impact the scene had on a broad diversity of viewers i was shocked and i tell you i was shocked to learn that it had been cut from the film at one point during the editing process actor saw williams who was in sinner he played the preacher father at the beginning in the end of the film he told essence magazine that he saw a version of the movie that did not include that scene because it didn't test well with general market audiences here's what he said i saw a version of this film before the version that's out now ryan told me he's referring to ryan k the writer and director of the film that they had done a number of test marketing screenings all over the country and white audiences will look at that beautiful scene and would say i have no idea what that was for the people that ryan had defended the scene to at warner brothers were mostly white too he asked me what i thought and i said dude you're doing a film about the blues this scene is your guitar solo you can't take your solo out of the piece that's the part that you put in there for you but i know that you put it in there for us now there were lots of questions about whether or not that scene in particular would make it to the final cut thankfully it made it in the final cut now the performance indicators in testing showed that it was better for that scene to be left out however the feedback from audiences who saw the film reflected the fact that the scene was pivotal to both the impact and success of the film where did this disconnect come from the performance indicators were captured from the perspective of the quote unquote general market what would have been more helpful and this is true for most brands is to understand how different types of audiences responded to the stimuli this type of challenge exists with brands as well me and some colleagues recently gave feedback to a client on an ad they'd created as part of an inclusive marketing audit that we were doing they responded but we tested the ad and didn't get the indication that there were any issues so we probe a little bit deeper and asked them who they tested the ad with and there was a problem their kpis didn't give them the full story because the ad wasn't tested with a diverse audience the brand's general market testing failed to give them an accurate indication of how the ad would be received with a broader diversity of consumers so let's talk a little bit about how to ensure your kpis do give you a more complete story it really comes down to acknowledging that any metrics you track solely at an aggregate level are likely an incomplete story if you wanna uncover the root of what is happening and why it's happening you'll need to go deeper and adjust your performance metrics and look at them based upon subgroups as well so deborah pick is a mathematics instructional trainer and coach and she's been analyzing data with school systems for more than twenty years one of her roles is to focus on data at schools to better understand how they are performing she explained how she and school leadership use data to track performance where we dig into not just overall proficiency what some of our students are are learning what they're supposed to learn but then we also dig into subgroups in other words if we're looking at the subgroups of students by whether it's by grade level or by course or by subgroup like ethnic sub subgroup or students with disabilities are those students also performing at the same levels that the masses are and so it's it's really interesting but that's how we know if what we're doing is working for students she went on to add that you have to look at several data points to uncover a more complete story one of the things we talk about often is tri data because if you just look at for example if you just look at teacher data or you just look at student data or you just look at that big picture you miss all of the things that are happening when you look at it all together and see what story that data is telling you alright so i'm gonna let you listen in as deborah picket it explains further while looking at data by subgroups generates better markers for success along with an example of how this method generated positive results so in that perfect world we'd like to say that demographics don't determine a student's destiny but unfortunately we know that that's not the case and so because it's so important that we're meeting the needs of all students we have to actually look at the data for all students and not just as that one big group but in those smaller pockets when we think to one size fits all every you know this should work for everyone we miss out on all of those nuances to make an experience of better for everyone and that's what it's all about we want to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all of our students so on the business side you wanna make sure you're meeting the needs of all of your customers have you received any resistance from people whatever you suggest or whatever you're looking at data by subgroups to see how people are performing or evaluate how you all are doing i think that sometimes you know people may be initially uncomfortable and that's because we like to think of everybody is the same every everybody just fits in the same happy buck it together and you know so when you start talking about differences or okay this group of students it often may feel like finger pointing or oh i didn't do something or i didn't do it right or i didn't do it well get and it's really not about that at all it's about okay so we've identified this area what are we going to do next so it's not a oh i did a terrible job with that it's you know what i wasn't aware of that before now i'm aware i'm going to be more mindful and sometimes most of the time that being more mindful means that we're doing that preparation on the front end rather than oops i noticed this data point now let me try to kicks it on the back end here you have to be more proactive than reactive and so and when we put it in that perspective of just those real life scenarios that we've just talked about where you know everybody's not the same everybody's needs aren't the same and so we need to identify that sometimes students depending on their circumstance are going to need something slightly different but that doesn't mean that oh my gosh i stuck as a teacher or oh you know it's terrible business owner it just means okay now that i'm aware and sometimes you know things just aren't in our because of our lived experiences we don't know we're not aware but once we are aware once you know better you you do better totally great totally agree do you have any examples of when looking at subgroups identifying a problem and then making adjustment like has made a positive impact absolutely one example in particular a few years ago we were looking at data by course and so we have students that are in what we call accelerated math meaning they complete more than a year's worth of math when within a year's worth of time and so one of the things that as we started looking at subgroups more frequently we noticed the was disproportionate representation in those accelerated math classes compared to our overall school population and so you know again doing some digging try and figure out why is that the case we found out that some of it really just went back to systems because you know when you think about you know your initial response might be oh my gosh like why don't we have enough hispanic students or why don't we have enough black students or multi racial students in these courses but then when we looked at the process it was hey teachers make a list of the students you think would be great for acceleration and there may or may not have been some data that was involved in that process or the data that we used because that was the way it always been done oh we're gonna use these two data points ignoring seven other data points and so what we did was we change the the system of identifying students and went from hey make a list and submit it and we'll schedule the students to let's look at the long range data of every single student that enters our school then what we identified was not only were our students more representative of the school population in those accelerated math classes but also what we found is that we our students were outperforming not only students in schools like ours but also in schools that were not like ours and so it was just nice to see that given the opportunity to thrive our kids were thriving and so what we didn't do was say well this is the way we've always done it we've always had a list we've always just done it like instead of staying stuck in that we had to look at it and explore and then come up with a new solution and sometimes our solutions work we're like okay i've got a solution let's implement it and it works great but real life tells us that sometimes things don't always work out exactly as planned and you have to be willing to stop and reflect and gather more data or do more problem solving to figure out what the root causes and then move forward and still make sure you're monitoring that data to see that it's successful a common objection i hear when recommending this approach to clients is that people don't understand why it's necessary to track performance metrics by subgroup i always remind clients that it's important to do so because consumers are different even though the consumers you are serving are all coming to you to solve a specific problem the identities each of them have can influence a number of things that impact the journey they have with you including the ways in which they receive messages from you whether or not they convert to be your customer the degree of success they achieve and how long they stay with you as a customer so comparing your overall data with performance metrics by subgroup will help you evaluate how effective you are with different consumer groups having that insight will help you identify when you need to make adjustments to your approach now a client i worked with a while back wanted to ensure they were effectively engaging both the african american and hispanic communities as part of their growth strategy as a result they tracked many of their brand kpis by race and ethnicity doing so helped them identify that they weren't performing as well with african americans as they should have been my role was to help them figure out why and helped them with the plan to improve those kpis now here's just a quick snapshot of what the data was telling them african americans had this is a pharmaceutical brand and they were trying to reach african americans so african americans had the highest incidence of that particular disease state they had the highest incidence of that brand's targeted segments however african americans had the lowest levels of awareness and satisfaction with the brand the lowest levels of engagement and emotional connection with the brand and they spent the least amount of time spent using the brand this client had a lot of great data which was super helpful for me as i started to go and explore what was the root of the issue now i'm working with a client right now that has uncovered that their retention rates are hire with men specifically and as a result they are using that insights to turn things up a notch with campaigns targeted toward men who have the problem that that brand solves now if you wanna tune into my full conversation with deborah pick who you heard a little bit earlier which includes recommendations on what to do about the story your data tells you can listen to that episode number one hundred and forty six how to use data to increase customer success for all i'll drop a link to that in the show notes for you so you can access it easily alright so after the short break we're gonna get into what kpis apis your brand should be tracking especially as it relates to inclusive marketing okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's this old marketing hosted by joe po robert rose it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals joe po and robert rose are two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space and they talking about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain in customers one of the things i really enjoy about this show is how they do a commentary in a discussion on current events you know i love me some current events the episode that i'm listening to right now that they are doing that in all about thou shalt build on rented land anyway i think you're gonna enjoy this show listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts brands engaging in inclusive marketing to attract and retain a bigger more diverse fiercely loyal customer base arms as effective as they could be and it's a real shame because the potential is quite high and a recent hubspot study found that just thirty two percent of marketing professionals whose companies invested in inclusive marketing felt their marketing efforts were very successful that same study showed that sixty one percent of marketers that their inclusive marketing efforts were somewhat successful just a quick note that sixty one percent includes the previous thirty two percent that said that their efforts were very successful you know since we're talking about i wanna make sure the data that i'm giving you is accurate alright so there are a number of reasons more brands aren't seeing the growth from inclusive marketing that they desire one of those reasons is they aren't tracking the right metrics to understand how what they are doing is landing a number of marketers have said to me that their way of tracking inclusive marketing effectiveness is based upon specific actions taken by the brand that has often meant tracking metrics such as different types of representation included such as x x percentage of people represented in a campaign are from an underrepresented or underserved community however i always advise against those types of metrics because they don't tell the full story of how your brand is actually performing with consumers remember inclusive marketing drives business results and because of that the best way to track your effectiveness is by evaluating how well you are doing with the various communities you want to serve simply put track your existing kpis but do it by subgroup of the communities you want to grow with so if your brand has general kpis such as brand awareness brand satisfaction brand engagement brand retention market share or customer success my recommendation is to track that same data just at the subgroup level as well that means if you've chosen to serve spanish speakers gen z or the disability community then you should be tracking all those kpis for those specific communities gary obsession is the chief marketing officer at rec us hygiene which makes brands like l will light finish and more he told me that the marketing teams at record are tracking kpis by the subgroups they wanna serve including african americans and hispanics in some of the kpis they are using are just standard marketing kpis such as household penetration by rate frequency of purchase in response to messaging and communications bottom line when it comes to kpis don't reinvent the wheel make sure you are tracking enough data to tell you the truth about your performance and how you can do better the right kpis will support your growth go beyond general market metrics to evaluate how well your brand is performing instead go deeper to understand a full picture of the experience your brand is having with all the different types of consumers you want to serve when you do you'll have a true picture of what adjustments you need to make to achieve your goals alright so i'm super curious what types of metrics are you tracking to know how well you are doing with your inclusive marketing efforts let's talk about them i really wanna make sure that you are being as effective as you possibly can with your inclusive marketing efforts and there's no way to know that if you don't have the right data giving you indications about how well consumers are receiving what it is that you're trying to do so let's continue that conversation another quick question for you are you getting the inclusion in marketing newsletter each week i send news reese sources really good insights and commentary and lessen on what you need to do to attract and retain a bigger more diverse and a fiercely loyal customer base which of course touches every parts of your marketing mix sources as well as your organizational internal operations so you wanna make sure that you are on this list if you are not already go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i'll also jump a link to that in the show notes or below if you're enjoying the show please do leave a rating and review for it in your podcast player of choice it really does go a long way towards helping more people discover for the show which i like to believe helps more people feel like they belong until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collective power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

if you've hung out here for any period of time you've probably heard me say inclusive marketing is the future of marketing and i'm always the thrilled when i come across data points that further prove the statement to be true now i recently had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat with vale malaria pi head of inclusive growth at ka a global marketing analytics company one of the things we've chatted about were the latest findings from can tar global brands inclusion index research which not surprisingly showed that consumers all over the world want brands to be inclusive with their marketing we covered a lot including more about what this research revealed as well as findings from another study the team is publishing current events the state of inclusion gl today's current political and social environment based upon data as well we got into it so after this short break you're gonna hear my conversation with malaria the two thousand twenty five inbound conference is coming up i'm gonna be there and i'm hoping that i will see you there as well it's september third through the fifth at the mo center in san francisco not boston it's gonna be in san francisco this year come and get actual insights you can implement immediately to grow your business also you can join a community of forward thinking professionals who are shaping the future of business i was at the inbound conference back in two thousand twenty three and i gotta say it was one of the most if not the most inclusive a conference i have ever been to this year you will be able to engage with a broad diversity of industry leaders like marquez brown lee dominique cr amy poe in others who are breaking barriers and creating new path to success across technology culinary arts and entertainment you can engage with san francisco diverse tech community that's working to ensure ai development reflects and serves all communities demonstrating how inclusive technology drives innovation and market growth visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today hey vale malaria thanks so much for joining me today how are you i'm doing they're thank you for having me sonia totally my pleasure alright i'm really excited about this conversation so before we dive too far into it let the people know who are you and what do you do big question while i'm vale pi i lead inclusive growth at can and i've been in in the space for over twenty years traveling from us to global roles and focusing on better understanding people yeah helping brands grow and now navigating the challenges we have in the space of marketing yeah there there's a lot going on in this space right now i was struck by your title because it's inclusive growth rather than inclusive marketing or mostly cultural marketing and i love it right because i think it's important because inclusion is directly connected to growth is that the thinking behind your title that's exactly it okay from my perspective and from the perspective of gunther inclusive marketing is expensive marketing yeah it is via inclusions that brands can grow yeah and about ten years ago i started talking about the inclusive imperative and looking at high growth yet often misunderstood overlooked third populations that are growing they're growing in the population in buying power in cultural influence and yet brands often do not pay attention to them and are missing huge opportunities living money on the table so that's the thinking behind my title that if you want to drive growth especially if you are in a developed market in a mature category that you need to find new opportunities new pockets of growth and that is the inclusion yeah i love it i love and so i was super happy that you called it out i might need to start making some changes in the way i talk about it just because it was so spot on you've had a long career in in this space but one of the things that you and your team at can tires has recently done is the brand inclusion index where you got like a front and interview of what's happening can you and as i was going through it one of the things that suck out to me is that i think it's the headline inclusion is the future of brand growth again obviously something that i love to hear and see can you talk a little bit about why this statement rings true why you felt it was so important to incorporate in the report certainly and the brand inclusion index to give you some context started about three years ago we started in the us and the uk as our better market and we knew for a fact that because these markets are so diverse yeah this mentioned that inclusion for growth was needed but we didn't know if that was true globally yeah so last year actually six months ago we launched the first ever global brand inclusion index and we developed a study in eighteen markets we surveyed over twenty thousand people in eleven languages we put together the most inclusive research piece to date because we love at accessibility of different dimensions of people's identity etcetera with this notion that if you want to assess inclusion first you need to make sure that the voices of those who tend to be left behind or heard yeah and i give you all these pre to get to the point of why was it so critical to arrive to that inside of inclusion matters everywhere around the mh it was a resounding yes i not only care about diversity and inclusion in my life it's not only important to me yeah we also identified that it shapes people's decisions around brands so it shapes consumption and we thought well this might happen in developed markets where people's basic needs are met and therefore people can have more pursuits you know they can think about brands not just a necessity but addressing you know other social need and we found out that that's actually not the case that inclusion is such a vital and critical need for people especially in markets where this discrimination is rampant where people experience this discrimination even when they are ready to spend their money in commercial locations when they visit a hotel a restaurant when they go shopping and brands are involved in the process yeah so what we found was that if you want to grow in emerging market and if you want to grow among younger generations those two combinations which are the future which are you know what we are counting on for brand success you need to double down on inclusion yeah and that's why it's a future when we look at five ten years from now you have to grow with sears you have to grow with some of the fastest growing countries in the world and those are in africa and asia and latin america and in all those regions and in all those specific countries that we surveyed inclusion was the number one thing for many people yeah and again it has to do with how they feel if they don't see themselves accepted scene valued they are not going to choose your brand and it it's an essential need not so much something do you do when you have checked all the other boxes yeah i have been saying for a couple of years now that inclusive marketing is the future of marketing and for all the reasons that you just explained i am someone with a lot of differences so i see firsthand every day that how much inclusion and my identities that i hold and the identities of the people in my family that we have just because we we just a lot of adversity in my own immediate family and i know firsthand how those play a role in our decision making process right and i'm curious in that your data in the planet brand inclusion index globally around the world prove this out as well and i'm curious from your perspective working with brands over the years are marketers aware of the extent to which inclusion is in feeling like seen like you belong represented are they aware of the extent at which consumers particularly from underrepresented and underserved communities are making decisions with this in mind no they are not okay no yeah and that's why we need to have these conversations and that's why your podcast is so important and that's why you know people in english marketing space keep you know calling out on brands to pay attention to these issues yeah i don't think they understand how intersection people's identities are yeah one of the things we found in our study again we knew in the us diversity a given you know most you know younger generations today are diverse their identities are so complex in terms of not just you know the gender and race ethnicity but yeah looking at narrow diversity you know looking at different abilities sexual orientation it's soc background it's so so complex that when you think about it and i again it's been saying this for a long time there's no other consumer yeah brands usually try to engage an average consumer so people don't don't see themselves reflected don't engage yeah and you know they also don't address the issues that matter to them the most that are relevant in their everyday life in many cases this is because the marketing world is very different from you know the diverse communities you and i represent so a lot of marketers don't see and can't relate and can empathize with those differences and and that's why human insight is such so important to create that understanding yeah and generate that kind of storytelling that gets to people's hearts not just their minds not just their wallets but creates further engagement yeah have you seen a difference in the mindset or perhaps the teams or the leadership of brands who come to you and are ready to engage an inclusive marketing and embedded into the work that they are doing like have you seen a distinction between the way they think and operate versus brands who aren't there yet of course yes one is cultural intelligence yeah you know it's it's that understanding of the world in which they operate that marketplace understanding of what helps brands succeed and in some cases you know that stems from more diverse teams that understand that it's with diverse perspectives that you build stronger brands more innovative more creative with brands so it starts from within you know you can't really create wonderful marketing campaigns if you know the people from within it don't have that understanding themselves yeah yeah alright so let's move to a little bit of the elephant that's in the room with what's happening politically in society both in the us and in different places around the world where it seems to be having an impact on diversity equity inclusion for sure but it's even trickling into includes of marketing in some instances what's your pulse on brand attitudes and consumer attitudes based upon all that's going on that's an excellent question and i like the way you phrase that the understanding where consumers are today yeah because we think we need to distinguish between what's happening in politics and in government versus what's happening with people yeah consumer because there is a difference and in fact we spent the first few months of the year understanding just that what do people care about what matters to them especially now that there are so many economic pressures so do people care about anything other than prices you know the cost of leaving inflation tariffs of so forth so we did one very big global study a global parameter we did a very invest study in the us i'm giving you the the the scoop will the scoop the scoop the scoop is yes people care about the cost of living and prices and are very worried under their communities that are under a lot of strain but they also care about inclusion they also care about the environment mh and those things can't slip down otherwise brands will hurt more than they are already hurting yeah and it's about the trifecta of how can you they leave all of it yeah and therefore create value out of your brand proposition yeah so what we found was that there is a gap between it some of the current strategies we're seeing from brands especially in the us and in some other markets and where consumers are and that's why we're calling our new study mined the gap because yeah it is one gap that is getting larger as we and i don't think brands are realizing what it takes to close it the work that it will take to you know get closer again to especially high growth segments yeah and it's going to take a lot of additional investment and resources because the damage that is being done is quite great we talked before and i think you had some data on retail and what you were seeing on what some of the fallout is from this widening gap are you able to share any data that you've seen on the impact of this gap because as like a leading indicator of what france should be thinking about and moving forward yes in in retail use see some very very clear examples and this is public data by the way and some of the case studies are based on public data about you know traffic sales stock prices and in the retail space you have you know a clear winner costco in the us yeah and a clear loser and that's target both retailers took opposite strategies when it related to diversity equity and inclusion and i would say also inclusion marketing because in some cases we're talking about internal organizational practices and in other cases we're talking about deciding you know how they advertise when they advertise as well as what vendors they support so it has to do with a little bit of everything and i think that's what you you indicated this right at the beginning of our conversation it this started with a focus on d but it is very evident that it is also perm in some cases inclusive marketing and i think you know we're a couple of days away from pride twenty twenty five and i think we'll see brands through colors this try yeah you know in terms of who shows up who turns their logos you know to a rainbow who part of the parades who's part of the sponsorships and who is hiding and yeah in you know a very critical pride because these pride is yeah going to be about resistance not celebration for sure okay okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals joe po and robert rose are two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space and they're talking about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain and customers one of the things i really enjoy about this show is how they do a commentary in a discussion on current events you know i let me some current events the episode that i'm listening to right now that they are doing that in all about thou shalt build on rented land anyway i think you're gonna enjoy this show listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts so you whenever you're talking about mind the gap and they get the gap is widening you mentioned that you don't think that brand's realize what they need to do to close it and one of the things that i've been talking about for a number of years is that to do inclusive marketing well you have to build an inclusive brand and i'm curious if you have any data or any anecdotal feedback from what you've seen on the distinctions or if this is this this premise that i have is true or you know what have you been seeing playing out you're right we do have the data at can that proves that your ideas or thinking yes you need a strong brand and you need an inclusive brand in order to do inclusive marketing when we think about all the things that contribute to building a strong inclusive brand is not just about advertising it is about all the consumer touch points it is about who's behind the brand it is about what happens behind the camera when those commercials are rolling etcetera etcetera and that's where you know we think people don't pay attention and it turns out people do they are evaluating brands based on everything they know about them and in many cases you know it has to do with who they hire how they trade their own people who they promote and they have in senior leadership who's part of that board and we have seen many inclusive marketing campaigns fail because they are just performative when yeah people start scratching you know what they find beneath the surface is a brand that is not really inclusive you know sometimes they advocate for equal pay for women and it turns out they don't hire women for seeing a right you know or they again you know going back to the example of pride you know they they are they they were when it was very cool to to celebrate pride but here mh in reality they don't offer the same benefits to their lgbtq plus employees so all those things point to the fact that you need to be good inside and out if you want to be perceived as inclusive you need to be inclusive and the same thing that applied to climate and green washing applies to inclusive marketing as well and you know that authenticity that genuine approach needs to be there yeah yeah and i i think that slowly as people start to engage an inclusive marketing whenever they recognize that they might not be getting the results that they thought they were gonna get you know a lot of times i think sometimes they might have the realization that it's not just about showing up right like i show up i'm here i've arrived like everybody's gonna start like all of a sudden start like running to you it requires a whole lot more effort to take the time to get it right and you have to have that inclusive mindset from a brand level cultural level from your brand standpoint to be able to execute it well versus just like this you know this one campaign and that you know that's not getting the results that you want right so for the people who are want to get started with inclusive marketing they recognize that it's the future they see the changes in the population they're understanding that they need to connect with people on a more emotional level and be authentic what do you recommend for people as a way to get started i would start with reflection in intros reflection identifying you know what are the values you stand for how they relate to the populations you want to engage in in your inclusive marketing to again come confirm a position of authenticity and yeah yeah and and genuine engagement start there start talking about the things that you are already doing because i think in many cases we have seen like a issue with trust you know mh a a problem with brands not being transparent about who they are what they stand for and or making promises that are empty in many cases start with what you can commit to you can stand by and who also you want to engage with who you want to serve not just not you know have a a very short term commercial and transactional relationship with so thinking about those things as a starting point so you are set up for success know from a strong foundation i would say that it is critical to develop that cultural intelligence we were talking about learning about the communities you might not really understand well develop those insights that are needed or partner with experts and and some cases organizations that are dedicated to those communities so there is a stronger engagement a stronger relationship so i would say start there and as a way to it then think about okay these are you know the the products he offers the promotions etcetera might come later in terms of trying to to establish that relationship first very cool very cool vale larry this has been super fascinating i loved every minute of this before we wrap up i do have one quick question for you can you tell me about it time when a brand made you as a consumer feel like you belonged that's a very difficult question because you know as a consumer i'm i'm an argentinian american i'm latin nina i'm am an immigrant so the feeling of belonging doesn't become easy to me mh and sometimes i also think when brands engaged with my community the hispanic community sometimes they come at with a lot of stereotypes about who we are and i i think you can relate to the notion of diversity you know within a community and you know as south america and yeah it's hard to feel you know that i belong with many of the things that are out there so it's really hard and do do you have examples of something in argentina possibly yeah and i would say coca cola is brand that has a really good cultural understanding okay of some of the things that move different cultures and i think they have done an amazing job over the years of connecting through culture whether that is the passion for football and i say football not sober yes what happens you know some of the most interesting campaigns you know around the world cup and all that i think they have really captured some of the passion points that move people and they have found some really good pom on denominators very cool very cool you mentioned that you see a lot of stereotypes from brands when as it relates to the latino community in the us mh can we help some marketers out really quickly could you let us know about some stereotypes that you see that you're like please stop yes we don't not everyone eat spicy food not everyone is a you know goes for the the sexy latin kind of stereotype oh my god there's so many and the list could go on and my on the issue i see is that you know there's very little visibility hispanics in media and advertising and when we do show up usually it's in a secondary role in a service role and you don't see you know in some cases even you know successful you know let's until you know have have made their dreams come true so yeah yeah the thing about spice jonathan is argentine argentina and does not do spice at all right so even even the most basic level of spice and i'm like oh that's not not nothing not so right so i'd totally get that yes yes and you know yes no some burritos and no no vale this has been super cool where can people find you if people they wanna learn more about you and your work i would say linkedin is the best place to find me okay that constant over there and just find me on linkedin ping me there and we can we can talk alright oh i will drop a link to that and as show notes i will drop a link to the latest brand inclusion index and whenever you have available anything about the the mind the gap work we can make that available for folks as well any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders who want to do a better job tapping into inclusive growth in serving a much broader diversity of customers yes and hopefully we'll inspire people to be strong be resilient and be persistent because commitment does pay these are difficult times challenging times to navigate but it is also a huge opportunity there are may many brands that are hiding so this is an opportunity to be brave and to stand out as a brand that is committed to inclusion very cool thanks so much vale malaria this has been a joy thank you oh i so loved that chat with vale malaria i hope you got as much out of it as i did and i wanna make sure that you get access to the brand inclusion index as well as the other study that vale malaria mentioned that is hot hot hot off the presses i'm gonna drop links to them both in the show notes for you so you can access them easily quick question for you are you getting the inclusion in marketing newsletter if not i gotta tell you you are missing out if you are not on the list each week i send news resources current events consumer insights but deep dive on an inclusive marketing related topic you need to know about and so much more go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up if you aren't already i'm also gonna drop a link for that in the show notes for you until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collective power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

we live in a global world and it only makes sense that more brands embrace that there people in other countries and markets around the world who have the problem that they're brand solve engaging with your ideal consumers in other markets that speak other languages requires an effective multilingual ling marketing strategy now this is the topic we've covered before on the show because it's an important one and in today's episode we're gonna tackle it from a bit of a different perspective which gets into some of the operational details of building and executing your multilingual ling content strategy that helps you grow so after this short break you're gonna hear my chat with shah some odd ceo of vera content who works with brands like sony music spain and others to translate and localize localized their content to reach new consumers the two thousand twenty five inbound conference is coming up i'm gonna be there and i'm hoping that i will see you there as well it's september third through the fifth at the mo center and san francisco not boston it's gonna be in san francisco this year come and get actual insights so you can implement immediately to grow your business also you can join a community of forward thinking professional who are shaping the future of business i was at the inbound conference back in two thousand twenty three and i gotta say it was one of the most if not the most inclusive conference i have ever been to this year you will be able to engage with a broad diversity of industry leaders like marquez brown lee dominique k amy poe and others who are breaking barriers and creating new paths to success across technology culinary arts and entered attainment you can engage with san francisco diverse tech community that's working to ensure ai development reflects and serves all communities demonstrating how inclusive technology drives innovation and market growth visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today hey shah thank you so much for joining me today how are you very good thanks for having me totally my pleasure alright well i'm always interested in this topic so before we get too far into it let the people know who are you and what do you do yeah so my name shane sam and i'm a ceo and cofounder of a multilingual ling content agency called vera content based in madrid spain very cool very cool i've been some madrid once and i thought it was very cool it's definitely a place so i'd like to go back and visit again so we don't hear too many people and a lot of spaces say that they have a multilingual ling content agency can you talk a little bit more about what you all do what is content localization and why are brands coming to you and your team for support yeah so my personal background is in journalism and i started very content with my business partner nine years ago now and well how do you kind of mix background in journalism and and corporate communication and marketing and basically through my work experience i definitely well i worked with a lot of providers and i kind of saw there was room in the market for an agency that was really good at creating content in the different european languages so as i said we're based in madrid but we work with clients all europe and beyond a lot of companies in the us or or other parts of the world who want to reach european markets especially so basically what we help them do is really like adapt their messaging for those markets and we're specialized we kind of have like two main types of projects we do which are editorial projects so mainly like blog content creation web content newsletters and things like that and then we also do social media content and we do more multimedia stuff on that side very cool alright so the social media content how are brands approaching that are they creating different accounts for each language and then creating content specifically in that language is that how it's working yeah a million dollar question because every brand is like trying to figure this out yeah i i think there's like anyone right answer and it just depends on like your business strategy where you wanna focus and also like what you have the resources to do because obviously like in a perfect world you would create really tailored content for every market you're in and every community that you're trying to reach but sometimes if if you're a targeting a really broad global market that can be really difficult to do it really expensive yeah of course ai and all that is helping with that but yeah bit cheaper but at the same time there's still like a lot of moving pieces and a lot of logistics that's involved in like managing a lot of different local pages yeah and also like there's different i guess kind of nuances on each of the social media platform so it also depends like well the market you're targeting what platform makes sense to to focus on there i know even when you're targeting what one market it's it's a lot to like have a solid strategy for every channel yeah and let alone what when the complexity of it kinda multiplies when you're when you're entering more markets so i would like say just prioritize and go deep on on the markets that you wanna prioritize rather than try to do everything because yeah yeah it can spread yourself too thin and not get not kind of have the quality of the results that you want no okay no that totally makes sense alright i wanna make sure that we get people squared away on definitions what's the difference or is there a difference between content localization and translation yeah so they are related but localization goes beyond translation to basically adapt content to align with cultural social and legal no nuances any kind of nuances of a specific market yeah and it can involve more than just the translation of the words like modifying images the colors formats okay to really like keep in mind local preferences and really adapt the content totally for that market yeah okay so when people are using ai to translate they're getting a translation right it's like these were just changing this word for that word that localization aspect you really need human people to to do that is that correct well to some degree like machine translation is definitely just like and and machine translation has been around for like twenty years and it's basically word for word translation ai does add another level to that where it is able to adapt the content a little bit more than traditional machine translation because you can actually ask ai like write this in this local dialect of whatever and it'll do it it's a little questionable like how well it does it and so but i've tested it with like different dialects in spain for example and it's and it's not totally off it's like it's it it's it's interesting so i think yeah and of course it's only gonna get better so i think definitely think i can help with localization can you like rely on a a hundred percent not yet i okay okay alright sorry a little tangent but definitely such a really fascinating work in fascinating field alright so i'm curious at what points are brands coming to you put in your team to say alright we are ready to start with creating multilingual ling content and localization is it like based upon brand size is it based upon like their customer base what have you seen as you've been working with different brands yeah i mean the first definitely is like just depending on the audience you wanna target basically your localization strategy has to match your business strategy yeah and then so like whatever market you're targeting you'll definitely reach them more effectively if you do it in the mother tongue of that of that market that's it i guess brand size has it comes into play because like like i mentioned before like resources are like yeah our factor basically yeah like it basically cost money to do localization so it's something that you have to yeah think about the best use of the resources and i where you wanna prioritize okay alright so do you have any wins that you might be able to share don't have to tell us any company names or anything like that have you do you have any wins to share that you've seen from your clients who have committed to localization even if it's just for like one particular market yeah absolutely so but i mean i have an example of like a brand that we work with that was a real estate tech platform for example that that the project that we did for them was like it wouldn't be on translation because it was really creating content specifically for each market that was really had to be localized and had to be created separately because they involved like different regulations and things in the countries and yeah and basically i mean their goal for it was like think they wanted to speak more specifically to like landlords in those countries because those yeah who was yeah that was their target audience and yeah we did help them increase traffic thirty percent in those languages like thanks to those landing pages for example and then on social media projects a lot of the projects we've done on social media is like our brands like for example our present in the us have a really strong social media presence in the us like we work with a brand called overdrive which has an app called libby which is for like downloading books from libraries and they have a great social media strategy in the us and working on helping them adapt that for some european markets and of course it's like starting from zero so we've had like exponential growth on those accounts yeah but it's already like had good results for them in terms of like making brand partnerships in those markets and and influencer partnerships that is like help them really expand like their goal was basically to to raise awareness of the app among users in those countries and and it's been really effective for them so far yeah you mentioned before like this has to be connected to your business strategy do you find that you and your team are often helping the brands that you work with with their strategy to know even what types of content we need to be creating how to you know create what right funnel is i imagine to kinda connect the dots for consumers because it might be different right in germany versus spain versus france versus the us right mh yeah definitely like a lot of the clients we work with like count on us to like understand the local market and to make the recommendations on like what would work and what doesn't in those markets and a lot of times you might have a strategy yet that works in your home market that needs to be totally re thought or adapted for somewhere else yeah yeah one size fits all does not work right okay what would you say are the biggest miss and misconceptions about multilingual marketing content translation and localization that you would like to put to bed once and for all i mean like kind of i i alluded to this already but definitely like trying to do too much too fast i think like a lot of times people think they need to be everywhere and we've seen that especially with like sometimes we work with startup up companies you have like venture capital backing and they need to they're they need to like grow as fast as possible and they're like have this money we wanna go into thirty markets can you do it for us and we're like yeah sure but yeah are you're gonna be able to have the results you want in all thirty of those markets would it make sense to put more of that budget to a couple of them and use those as a test before you kind of expand ideally yes although sometimes you do have pressure that you need to respond to so yeah so that's one let's see i mean yeah i i guess the other one is like we're kinda just talking about now but like expecting that that content that works in one market would work in another like i yeah i do see that a lot like like we'll expert localize localized something and the client says oh i really like the you know this slogan that we had yeah unless can we just like translate that and it's like well that just the concept just doesn't land yeah like it doesn't work so and it's just i guess understanding that trusting the the people you work within the local markets to be the experts on that because it really is for sure different for sure are there specific support mechanisms or let's say back office things that brands need to have in place to be ready for an increase in traffic or leads or whatever it is that they're trying to capture whenever they're engaging in multilingual ling content like or is there like a chicken and egg type of thing that they need to be aware of yeah actually that's another one that i've seen mistakes that friends make is like expand their marketing into different languages before they have the operations to support it so it's super important that you have like a strong customer support and sales team who works in that language before you before you start selling there yeah so yeah okay no that makes perfect sense because it's kinda like if you if you convert people and they start calling but then you don't have the infrastructure like you said to support it it might be very hard to get them to come back whenever you do get things up and running because if you're creating the marketing materials in the language you're like creating the expectation that you're going to continue interacting with them in that language if you are yeah you you can like pretty easily localize utilize your website into another language but if yeah people start calling you in german and then you speak to them in english it's like yeah doesn't work yeah it doesn't work okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals joe po and robert rose are two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space and they're talking about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain and customers one of the things i really enjoy about this show is how they do a commentary in a discussion on current events you know i let me some current events the episode that i'm listening to right now that they are doing that in all about thou shalt build on rented land anyway i think you're gonna enjoy this show listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts alright so given that there are some there's infrastructure things that you need to have in place there's going into different markets maybe kinda slowing things down a little bit and not going to try and do five at one time is there do you have any recommendations on like is there like a phased approach that people should be thinking about like instead of maybe it sounds like people wanna go from point a to point z very quickly but like what does a to b b to c c to d like what does that look like as more of like a phased approach that you would recommend for people who were thinking about this just getting started in the world of multilingual ling content i was say i think just prioritizing and starting ideally with one or two markets as a test and really like okay having that process for localization really clear and like making sure that it's working like that you're have us in one market before you yeah we replicate it once you've done it in one market i'd say you could then go to tenant at once maybe yeah but but you need to like figure out what works and what doesn't yeah have the process in place and know how like how many people you need how how many what tools you're gonna use and all of that and have it really yet big feel for expanding okay this might seem like a super tactical question but it just popped in my head and i'm curious about it so let's say you're in spain right and you are local for spain spain spanish is what maybe i think the second most spoken mother tongue in the world right and do you then our our brands then like ready to make small tweaks tweaks to localize in latin america to other spanish speaking countries like is that a way to think about it in terms of alright where we're gonna start with spain's spanish and then we're gonna move on to argentina or colombia or us band like is it work that way or should we be thinking about it in a different manner yeah that's actually another common misconception i guess is that like that there is this global spanish shit because there isn't really like one standard spanish that works across all spanish markets right but it also depends on the context and what kind of content is like i do think for web content you can get away with it but when it comes to like i like actual like ad spots or outdoor ads and things like that it requires like another level of localization really specific for for that market okay but yeah for i do think like i mean we do very frequently get requests for like standard spanish that for latin america it could be tend to differentiate between spain and latin america yeah but think that latin america is like one big one big market and it is very diverse and i mean it's a huge area yeah with totally different vocabulary and things yeah but it's true like with the increase in communication of course in internet and right people are used to reading things from other markets that there has i mean it's kind it's actually kind of mexican spanish has become influenced a lot what we call the you know standard latin american spanish because it's so commonly used in the us and kind of become a bit the default yeah yeah i remember when i was learning spanish years ago and i bought rosetta stone to help me and it was good to give me a foundational i remember whenever i was buying spanish there were two options there was latin american spanish and spain spanish yeah i ended up with the latin american spanish but yeah it because i think that sometimes if you aren't if you don't speak the language you don't realize that there are those core differences would the infrastructure need to be set up for all the localization or would you find that there's a good enough understanding that you know one spanish or one type of french right or portuguese whatever people are can understand enough to make it work like if they're speaking with someone on the call center or looking yeah i think like definitely like across most spanish dialects you can understand perfectly i think it like i was saying it depends a little bit on the context because one thing is like when you wanna just communicate like yes you can communicate across spanish speakers across most markets but if you wanna connect on an emotional level that's different and that's what i think when it comes to kinda like emotional advertising like you really need like deep localization when it comes to practical information then sure you can write it in a more standard spanish and when it's like you know a transactional call like short they can understand each other if you wanna really build a relationship it of course helps if that person is from the same market so yeah then you might wanna have a local sales team you know it really knows that marketing it really gets to know people on the ground so it's it really depends on on the context no okay super helpful alright so let's say you got your infrastructure in place you now have a team that you're working with you're thinking about like the different channels that you want to make sure that you have in different languages how do you go about scaling what you're creating for different markets because i find that so often let's say if your your original market is english and you might have a hundred pieces you might have ten in spanish or five in french or whatever and so i think that there are and we understand why brands do that but if they wanna keep up with the con quantity of content you have to kinda have more of a scaled approach and how do you recommend brand sort of approach scaling their multilingual content strategy i mean basically to do quality content production in a particular market you need to have like a local team so and i mean that's kind of what we specialize in our agencies like we help mind we work with build those local teams in the different markets and we manage them for them of course okay you could do that yourself internally a lot of brands do but is oftentimes like outside the core competency of a of like they don't wanna do that and that's why did they decide to outsource it and is like like i saying a lot of moving pieces because there's a lot of people involved so yeah because i mean there's really at least as of today you you still need you still need the human expertise yeah look like as much as we use automation and ai tools like they still need direction from people and they still need revision from people so no till i get that till i get that alright so you mentioned ai at the beginning of the conversation and we touched on that briefly mh what would you say is the role of ai whenever people are thinking about reaching consumers in different markets or to speak different languages yeah well i was i was getting to that a bit now i think it can really help make localization more accessible for smaller brands or for those who are limited in budget like it's really made it less expensive because it allows for like localization or translation at least of large amounts of content very quickly more a creation of those of that content as well the thing is like you can get really crap results from it if you don't give it a good prompts yeah so prompt engineering is of course like something that in our agency we really put a lot of focus on and really like are building our our competency and that because i mean you need people or experts in the local markets and who know how to prompt ai so and yeah we've been working on on building most teams essentially to get better at that i think it's something that everyone is figuring out right now but yeah yeah yeah okay well before we wrap up and kinda switch gears a little bit i just have one other tactical question and it's more so about most of the time when people are local content they send it to their agency to translate to localize localized to trans right and then it comes back and then they're like okay i assume that it's right like assume that it's accurate maybe sometimes they might run it by someone on their team who speaks that local language but you know that's not necessarily of their core job how do you recommend or what assurances i guess do you provide that this is true and accurate this is relevant like what are the checks and balances that aren't common that people should be aware of as they're going through this process especially that they don't have people who are trained in doing this to be able to kinda spot check i guess you would say yeah absolutely well at vera i mean a lot of our processes are kind of inspired from my background and newspaper journalism okay and we really emphasize what we call our collaborative culture of feedback because i really believe that like i know know like working as a journalist do get a lot of feedback like when you're working there's like a really strict editorial process and and a couple of layers of of editing where you and a lot of things get changed in your article so you know that like people are really paying attention to what you're doing and i find that i found as i started working in marketing and communications that that was like less the case like a lot of times in a corporate situation yeah was the writer or just putting content out there and it's being like okay looks fine publishing yeah yeah it's true yeah which is good people trust their in place but at the same time if you don't if you don't get that feedback then you don't feel like anyone really cares about what you're producing and then you might your quality might slip so that's something we put a lot of emphasis on at barr is like having those rounds of feedback internally and then also being really committed with the client about like this is why we made these decisions this is why we recommend this i think having that extra layer of communication like does goes a long way in in the quality in like creating quality yeah yeah and gives them a little bit of a sense of we can trust this and whatever review process that they're going through and probably even more important like you said you all are perfect affecting your your ai prompting whenever ai use is incorporated but if if if brand is kinda working on this on their own if they don't have those additional touch points and human reviews all the more reason why you need to figure out a way to incorporate that if you're using ai to verify check make adjustments tweak etcetera mh yeah absolutely okay alright well let's switch gears a little bit i'm curious if you can think about a time when a brand made you feel like you belonged and share with this yeah well i guess an example that comes to mind is a a client that we work with actually a called remit lane i mean i think i mean they i think they do a really good job of of localization essentially but i know like in in my city mara like they do really localized ads and so i've i recently we just saw an ad like at the bus stop that was like i don't remember exactly what the word was but it was some word in argentine spanish u so clearly was like targeting argentine immigrants in spain and my husband oh wow very specific yeah and my husband are argentina i am get in my too i really yeah so i i'm from at the us but i'm iranian in american but i am from my okay so i haven't seen any person ads yet in monica but yeah actually that's the whole the whole thing about local free iran is special because there's so many peculiar i about that market but yeah no i just thought a may it could really relate to it because it was like focusing on this word that's like only used in argentina i made me think about husband and everything so that's that's cool that's cool but it shows that the brand understands very much their market that yeah we're in spain but we have a good number of pockets of immigrants from the specific place in this market and they will really appreciate seeing these things that are specific to them i think that's beautiful where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you and your work so definitely on our website vera content dot com and also you can find me on linkedin sri sam okay i will link all of that up in the show notes for everyone so they can find it easily any parting words of wisdom for marketers and business leaders who wanna do a better job of engaging their ideal customers in their local language no i just i think it's an exciting time for localization and i think i just encourage people to take advantage of all the tools that are out there right now that like i was saying even if maybe hiring my agency isn't in an option although do i totally recommend that but yeah there's like a lot of a lot of things you can do on your own until like to take advantage of like being able to localize your website or localize your your blog copy and things like that very cool shah thank you so much for stopping by this has really been in enlighten i learned a ton personally so i really appreciate you coming by great thanks so much shah had some really super cool things to share and i'm curious to know from you how what she shared might impact the way you approach and think about engaging consumers who speak other languages let's discuss shoot me an email sign my dms let's have a combo on social i wanna hear how you are thinking about it and i'll even share the way i'm thinking about it as well for my business another quick question for you are you getting the inclusion and marketing newsletter if not really what are you even doing we have a lot of fun in the newsletter each week i send news resources commentary a deep dive on inclusive marketing related topic and all sorts of other goodies to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse and fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter to get signed up i'll also drop a link to that in the show notes for you so you can access it easily until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collect the power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

there are eight lots of moving parts when it comes to engaging and inclusive marketing in a manner that makes more people feel like they belong with you so as you work on ensuring the way your brand does marketing is inclusive it's helpful to have a framework to follow and incorporate into your practices and policies to ensure that you're not leaving out any important elements that will have an impact on the success of your efforts thankfully increasingly there are more marketing leaders who've been working on giving brands the framework they need to execute inclusive marketing on a consistent basis one of those leaders is jerry dea head of global media at beam sun an author of the book inclusive marketing why representation matters to your customers and your brand we've got so much to learn from jerry in his experiences and i was delighted to sit and chat with him for a bit and i'm excited for you to hear this discussion so without further ado here's jerry okay i've got another podcast recommendation for you it's truth lies and work and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join my peeps husband and wife team a and lia elliott as they dispel myths and part wisdom and answer all of your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people i have to say i really enjoy this show leanne has actually been on the inclusion of marketing podcast twice now and one of the things that you will appreciate just like i do whenever you're listening they have a really good point of view on all things related to work but also leanne backs up her thoughts and points of view with a loss of data no matter what kind of work you do you can relate to the things that they talk about on the truth lies and work podcasts tune in to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcasts hello jerry thanks so much for joining me today how are you i'm good thanks sonia thank you so much for having me on oh it's totally my pleasure i'm really excited to dig into all this discussion today but first can you tell me who are you and what do you do yes my name is jerry dea and my day is under the vp they a global head of media at beam sun which is a alcohol company jim bean sun whiskey maker's mark and that kind of things like lead our paid media and advertising but i also spend quite a lot of my time in the industry as a whole when i'm a w diversity ambassador so a lot of my time thinking about in marketing the adverts we produced the media we make has a big impact on society around it so i'm quite passionate about how we change that and make sure it's a bit more inclusive for sure so what would you say is the definition of inclusive marketing so i mean sometimes i think it's just doing good marketing because honestly it's it's our job as marketers to like market to everyone and people who are different to us so that's kind of it but i to talk about spectrum which i think is like historically advertising has been the opposite inclusive it's kind of had a very limited view of who it talks to who it shows tends to be quite stereotypical people about how it's even how it's portrayed women has been quite like back over the years we sort of get to like an awkward middle ground where people like start to try and show people look a bit different or act bit different but often it's slightly negative stereotypes for those people for me inclusive marketing is when you like just truly represent and talk to and just speak to the true breadth of consumer that you have a big part of that is kind of the adverts you make and how they look and how you communicate but it can also mean your product the thinking that goes into your service whatever you're doing and there is a sort of like gold style level that some brands go even further to it and it's not necessarily what every brand which is really like campaigning for inclusion you really wanna like stand behind his certain cause whether it's black month or pride and things like that and and done well that stuff is is the pinnacle of that and done badly that stuff is messy and chaotic for sure we'd seen enough on both ends of those spectrum and some in between as well what would you say is the state of how inclusive marketing is right now yeah i think it's a couple of different that so the marketing industry as a whole like the people who work in it like the w mfa did it has done a survey and ultimately the simple answer it's not fully sensitive of the people we serve almost every minority you can name is under sensitive in the industry and also likely to have a worse experience of working industry and that's you could argue the problem at the heart of the matter like if the industry itself was properly inclusive and representative everyone we probably make better work i think from advertising itself i mean we're light year the headed of where we were ten years ago in the sense of brands to make efforts to kind of talk to different consumers sometimes in a slightly siloed like multicultural marketing way but people are still making efforts in the u s and the u uk you definitely see if you just watch a tv ad outbreak for instance you will see a greater number of adverts that kind of represent different people people have a sense that actually only almost gone too far but it's far from the truth certainly in the u uk channel forwarded like an actual research they watched like every advert for an entire month and again every single minority ability sexuality race that you could mention was like massively under underrepresented versus the actual slice of the population but i think certainly big global advertisers are taking it seriously and trying to work out to understand it's important because you want to reach as many and talk to as many consumers as possible you want to support and serve those consumers so i think we've got a good energy behind it but we're still a long way off it being you know business as usual for sure for sure well one of the things that i think helps to make it business as usual whenever people have like guides and manuals and you've written a book inclusive marketing which kinda serves as a a great guide to help people along with that why did you feel the need to write this book so it it comes from that point i just made which is i'm on the w mfa i sit alongside a lot of other global leader of the businesses i'm all there saying we agree this is important it's really important like our business signs up to this but like when we look at our own work we're still not there yet yes so as companies have kind of gone beyond the like you can have our a bit of is it important why should you do it it's a chapter in the book that has all the business case like why it works better and why it's important why you're reaching different consumers and it came more like well how do we actually do it and one of the things that we came across and the book is very much not just my thoughts i interviewed like over twenty different intersection markets who had different personal backgrounds also expertise in different parts of the marketing process and it's not the only answer our sense was like that's be truly inclusive in marketing you have to think about it every stage of the marketing process like you have to think about it in your insights in your brief in the partners you work with in your production process in your media in your measurement as so we created this framework which is kind of like twelve phases maybe that's too many but twelve stages and each one of them we were like here's some of the questions you need to ask yourself like about have my own like buyers have my own assumptions made me miss out on different perspectives ruled people out meant that i'm marketing just to people who look and sound and live like me having the book was kind of like well it's great we've got all these questions but will be handed to have some answers to help people on the way and because i realized pretty early on i didn't have the answers that's why i ended up speaking to lots of other people to try and find out from them like experts in like production and media and different parts of the process to try and tell its story so it's bits to the book certainly the first few chapters are kind of like why it matters why it makes a business impact personal stories which i think is quite readable and in the second half is like more like a practical manual hopefully you can come back do time and time again and be like i'm actually doing this what are some of the questions i need to ask myself what are some of those check maybe even like check missed the things to ask yourself for sure so i wanna dive into a few more of like your framework in the various components of it but i did notice one thing as i was kinda going through it you talked a lot about how a lot of times whenever people are trying to engage in inclusive marketing one of their on ramps is diversifying the visual imagery that they're using whether that be in their photos and videos etcetera and while that is a good starting point that's not necessarily like you're done right and one of the things that you wrote is that visual imagery isn't true inclusive marketing thinking and it's under underlined by real insight strategy and authenticity can you talk a little bit more about like what that would look like in process or in practice beyond just okay we've changed up some imagery yeah i mean to some extent it can lead to a similar output but i think there's definitely a caution with with brands we're just like oh you know i i'm i'm just gonna slightly cast my advert differently and like there's obviously an next like more to black culture than the color of your skin so it's like know have telling a story that's clearly like a middle class white family and just like catch changing one people to be that's not fully tapping into that community into the insights into the moment so it's much more important to like actually start by understanding i think on various the brands i've worked we've done specific insight work to understand like the different consumers and it's often focus groups to those consumers or even talking to the media that like the publication that represent that community how do they use that product how do they relate product where the culture members that matter and of course there's often like huge amounts of commonality like people there lots you know i've worked for pain killers and alcohol brands and chocolate bars like a lot of us have fairly similar relationships with those products but also there'll will be from a from an alcohol perspective there are certain like celebrations there are certain moments certain things that are culturally nuanced that are like different that communities have even bit a simple like different religious calendars or different celebrations and things you get the much more nuance about what are some of the moments that people choose to celebrate and it starts right by start insights and thinking about as a result of this like is having a couple of different tv ads the right thing to do are there different forums i should be talking to these people are there different ways i can communicate like in particular we've done a lot of work in my previous role at gs with with ability and disability and saying like maybe best way of solving disabled people's need it's not an advert in which they appear on tv that can be positive it they need a slightly different packaging because they can't open the product we make so it's taking a step back and then if it's purely advertising you're thinking about it's like why are we trying to show these people's stories what is unique and different about these people's stories and i'm pulling that right through so like it's costume and casting and staging and makeup and everything like you really want to have people from different cultures in different background in adverts bring some of that with them they just kind of like make the advert you were going to make but like with a slightly different looking person just to wipe it out yeah yeah it's still a positive it's a positive step that the advertisers are considering but i think you just got to do it in an inclusive and as i said earlier that comes very naturally if you have like an inclusive team if you work with people from different backgrounds and mindset and it is usually a bit forced if it's a bunch of old white men like myself in a room being like oh i wonder what the kids are doing these have you all i know you mentioned some research that talked about the marketing and advertising industry on a whole not being representative in terms of the talent that exists in comparisons to the population have you all identified like what are the drivers of that why there are such disparities between like who's working on you know behind the scenes and like you know the actual people who are buying yes it's the short of the long months we need a whole another on it but and in the in the uk in particular advertising associations on a really deep dive into this they did a survey over over thirty thousand people big slice in the industry in the u s the ana and a and some other companies have done it it's a whole budget of some of which is like systematic of processes itself it's like oh historically it's been driven by these people big to get like a placement or a mentorship or something you need to know some of in industry you need to come from a rich enough family to be able to like live at home with your parents for the first few years you have to go to a good university which is kind of self selective in other ways and it's true to other stuff like it's an organization called the bricks and finishing school there's the lot to break those barriers down get people from different backgrounds trained up into the industry and then they arrive they're like what is no one that looks like me at the top of this organization yeah do i really stand a chance of succeeding here so we've got through better job of advertising industry to people from different backgrounds about making it easier people to get through to get in and i think one of the most worrying things about a lot of those surveys is they show that people from minority backgrounds are also more likely to be thinking about leaving the industry so isn't just that we can't get people in but it's like they come here and they find it tough and they find that they're overlooked in the service and quite a i mean a lot of which is true of any industry that you look at but we're not necessarily worth number industries it's just a reckoning that we have to face and it's is even more important in our industry because as advertisers market we're supposed to be representing real people yeah and so we we need we need to be real ourselves yeah yeah and i say that as i'm at posh white man myself still you know i'm part the problem but also trying to be part of the solution no as as more people we have who are working to be part of the solution the better right right yeah there's definitely a lot to unpack there it could be a whole different conversation but i wanna dive a little bit deeper into your framework or methodology that you in your colleagues laid out in the book so you mentioned there's like a twelve step but framework but you break it out into four stages what are those stages yeah i think like the twelve steps come because kind of a committee and if you have a committee you're gonna go into let load and know the detail but i i think it sometimes helpful to think about it in big chunks and so those the chunks i came up with like briefing planning production and go live so like the briefing is like everything at the start of the process it's kind of when you set your like business objective your brand challenge when you're getting insights and data in do you have like a narrower assumption of what the opportunity have you bothered the size up like are there different audiences we haven't spoken to you before that we could play into i think marketing by default has to try and look at the average person because we have to try and appeal as many people as possible shouldn't i think it's always worth saying yes this is our average customer but are there other interesting spikes interesting nuances nuances of consumers that we could tap into and even if when you're writing your brief bringing that in making it clear and your even like literally writing like it's really important to us that we consider like the breadth and diversity of our consumers we want to talk to tell your agency that matters tell your partners that matters the planning stage in like the thinking i guess so it's partly who you choose to work like who do you choose to brief and work with are they inclusive do they have different perspectives on the team as they develop the idea are they really thinking holistically about kind of like what the solution is and more often than not know we work in a well where it's advertising we're making but if you're thinking about making advertising are they really developing like rounded ideas rounded scripts rounded portrayal and as you move into like maybe pre testing or like approving that work who's doing that and are you making sure you're getting like perspective from different communities to understand like whether it resonates whether it portrays them well or not when it's actually like production making it i mean that's that's a phase obviously think things can go well in many ways you don't leave enough time for it if there's not enough time to cast things well all types conversely that's where you just like force in some fake casting so yes if you're going to be making advert which has people from and communities different backgrounds you need to allow time to find those people you need to make sure some people have different needs for production whether that's kind of like different spaces different heads makeup you've got to think about some of that stuff i mean even like some of the more technical stuff of an advertising on the post production like how you're editing how you're cutting stuff down there's been a lot of adverts kind of like well meaning like they tell this really let inclusive story and then they've got to make a ten second version it's like well let's just show the most average people in that version and cut everyone else out and the last one is like to go live how do you actually push it out there i work in media my day job kind of what media partners are you using are you making sure that you're partnering with inclusive partners that you've got in the technology using to advertising you're making sure you're not appearing in hateful negative spaces how do you evaluate and measure where all that has worked for you like has worked harder and do you bother to look at how like different audiences different people think about you so it's quite a lot to think i guess in big marketing companies people's jobs tends to be like some slice of that process so i think you can become like really focusing on that if you're kind of like a one person marketing machine and it all sounds a bit like overwhelming it's definitely a case of like take a few places to start and and move slowly in the right direction i think for sure there's a lot like i i love how it's it's so comprehensive and it covers every part of it because i think sometimes people focus on the end yeah they've gone through all the steps of how they would normally go through getting to a campaign a promotion and advertisement but then they get to it i'm like oh wait like we need to make this inclusive right and then they're trying to work to retrofitted or it makes some adjustments but what you're saying and what i love about it is it needs to be from start to finish like it's it's a full on this is how we think about marketing this is how we approach marketing not just this is something that we do to the end of something that we've already created yeah and like part of it is because of diversity inclusion i'm part of just like better marketing and like i think if you if you actually really dig into some of the new terms of your consumers you find more interesting stories were interesting reasons yeah you make better more emotional advertising that appeals to yeah everyone not not just like that small group could of consumers that you've been inspired by but actually like everyone really appreciates that humanity for sure hubspot helped tumblr solve a really big problem they needed to move fast to produce trending content which i know was a little something about but their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds the impact three times more engagements and double the content creation wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com where have you seen brands struggle with these four areas are there some that you find that people are struggling more so than others i i mean to an next extent i think the tell of the two biggest things that i seem to go a bit wrong which i crossed the board is like time or i'm too i'm too busy i'm two i've got too much going on i'm kind of related to that a slight like sense of like all increase in marketing is something else i have to do it's like another pillar it's another silo i think in the u s in particular i it's quite common to have multi multicultural marketing teams like specifically about talking to latin black community etcetera i think they're also very very good things about this team but there's a bit of a caution with that it kind of makes everyone think like hey that's those people over there job or like it's an extra thing i have to do and our i messaged is like we don't need extra time necessarily you don't need another thing it's just like do your main job in a like a more inclusive more open minded way a lot of it is like just sort of the natural bias that creeps in when like you know you're doing things with the way when we've done or you know what you know or you're surrounded by people with similar life most people work of marketing are reasonably well off by the time they've got a good job and they all live in these comfortable lives and things it's like it's hard to get outside that bubble so i think trying not to think of if you think about it like i've got to do my main job and when i've got to do is extra campaign to talk to different people yeah then that's extra work but if you just think i'm gonna do my main job better and more inclusive and more like it's your job as your marketer to make adverts that appeal to broad your consumers not to yourself yeah totally great so in keeping with that what are your thoughts on how marketing leaders in particular can work to embed inclusive marketing thinking because like you said inclusive marketing is just better marketing right yeah how can they incorporate this into the skill set and the competencies of the marketers that are on their teams and this extends even to the agencies as well yeah i got like really practical pragmatic things that you can do like if you have a certain like marketing process or marketing template i've seen a few companies like literally put on that paper that centers like either like a field or a question or a call out being like what is the role of different audiences or have you considered different cultures and things in it that's it's a little bit for us i think as a marketing leader you ultimately need to build this into your culture why about my just finished being cmo being being a jessica spence what she talked about was empathy i think that is kind of at the heart of what we're talking about here which is that what you're really trying to do inclusive marketing is like slightly get outside of your own bubble and think about other people's perspectives other people's world other people's journeys and so having from the top down like a clear message around like your job is to think outside what you're doing think other perspectives i think is important be ultimately you have to look at your processes at like some of the like templates and the the briefing forms and the things that people are made to follow ideally you wouldn't have to have a separate form that kind of said have you considered yeah insights in that because that that's like so total etcetera but let's be honest people aren't doing it yet to begin with i think to begin with having some of those nudge and i didn't with a caution that i know some big companies that are like it's part of our dna so we're not calling out separately everyone's just doing it and it's like are they are they really doing it do you still need a bit more like training and pushing and prompting until we get i mean hopefully get to the point where we don't need books like this and we don't need committees like this and then we just move past right totally agree totally agree okay how should brands be thinking about measurements when it comes to inclusive marketing because i kinda feel like this can be a little bit of a tricky thing where you know what are your thoughts at it can it can be tricky it's measuring anything and marketing is it's always a little bit difficult depending on your industry and things it's not always like super easy to be like oh my gosh i did this and it turned it to this i think generally speaking is a little bit of pop up you should measure your inclusive marketing and your increasing increase marketing the same way you're measuring all your other marketing and i think so if that's using surveys or sales or metrics or whatever kind of metrics you use i think for the most part with every company who's gone in this journey has seen it drives improvements not because of some magic because it's kind of better more human more emotional more real advertising i think it's companies that are nervous about this and i like you know taking early steps and things i think it's worth doing like more dedicated research etcetera around it like at gs we did a partnership with like a multi year partnership with ga times so obviously lgbt focus of the content and we made sure that like in the first six months and after twelve months of that partnership we were doing a survey of like their leadership to understand like how was our messaging landing did they think positively about our brands etcetera so like just trying to tread carefully and even like with some measurement of like pre testing and stuff like if i've had i've worked in companies where like they've been an advert let's say it's a little bit more inclusive than i've adverts in certain markets won't take it they're like oh no we're very conservative we can't show yeah a mixed race family adopting a child or something that's that's not gonna work here okay and you know there are times when there is cultural nuance and you know certain countries parts of asia expect certain looking people but a lot of that is in our heads so do pre testing getting in front of a small number of people see it works and ninety nine percent of the time it's like actually consumers like that and it resonates and it works so yeah measure as you with your other marketing but if if your company is nervous about this and taking the first step then by all means like do some specific research around it for sure oh jerry this is has been great like i i feel like there so many different other areas that we can continue to dive into any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who wanna be more inclusive with their marketing i'm definitely gonna put make sure that include a link to your in the show notes so people can access it well that's the know that's the answer no i i think i did a couple of things one thing would be don't be afraid to start i think some businesses are very nervous about like moving more in this direction and i think what if i get it wrong where i get called out i guess to that spectrum i meant i mentioned at a start perhaps if your business hasn't done a lot of this then the first thing you do isn't necessarily like oh my gosh we're all in on black history months well you know it maybe be it's like make some small steps work with some black owned and media owners work with an lgbt title start sharing and make some small steps and then when if one day you decide to do that bigger stuff then you've got more of a basis that people will be less like where did that come from i mean other people is it's kind of the point but like open yourself to hear different perspectives and if your team is diverse a different perspectives listen to them odds czar most of our teams aren't truly so looks for other opportunities like in companies that mine we have people come different things but like employee research groups so like groups that represent latinos and lgbt and black and women and like there opportunities to bounce ideas of those kind of communities listen to those kind of communities or surround yourself with partners and agencies who like thrive in this space who know how to do this stuff well so they'll be scared of starting and there are lots of other people who have great perspectives who've done this before and can help you on the journey but it is your job but it's not an option not today because your job to talk to people and there a lot of different people out there definitely there are there are thank you so much jerry this has been super cool love jay thank you jerry had so many great things to share and i'm super curious to know your most important takeaway from the discussion that you'll start applying within your brand one of the parts of the conversation that i cannot get out of my head was a part about the need to ensure that we do a better job of diversifying this talent within the marketing industry of course that will equip us to better serve our customers but that means ensuring that we create inclusive cultures that makes talent from under underrepresented groups feel like they belong there's much work to be done but we continue to make progress that's it for today's episode if you like this show i would so appreciate it if you would share it with a friend the colleague or your network and if you do share it on one of your social channels definitely be sure to tag me i'd love to engage with you there and shout you out until next time remember everyone deserves to have a place where they belong let's use our individual and collective power to ensure more people feel like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon

it feels like growth is a mandate for brands each and every year and it's you've been around here for any period of time you will know that i champion inclusive marketing as a smart way for brands to grow not only is it the right thing to do but it also helps you create products services and experiences that appeal to a broader group of people and not just a quick refresher to ground us inclusive marketing is all about acknowledging the many ways in which people are different the brands that do inclusive marketing well authentically infuse the identities they've chosen to serve through all parts of their marketing mix to ensure those consumers feel like they belong and that their brand is for people like them now with my more than eight years of experience as an inclusive marketing strategist and consult and i can tell you that each brand's approach to inclusive marketing looks quite different because it's tailored to its audiences and its products now of course there are some similar threads along the way but i wanted to share with you today how some really stand up companies have created specific strategies for inclusive marketing that are causing them to stand out and to win a bigger more diverse fiercely loyal customer base so after this short break we're gonna walk through five different examples of how brands are engaging in inclusive marketing and you're gonna hear a direct from leaders from these brands on the way in which they think about it alright so the first example of way in which brands are engaging with inclusive marketing comes from z and how z is focusing on building a diverse team so when brands struggle with inclusive marketing i often recommend that they take a look at the demographics of their team if everyone comes from the same background you may be missing valuable insights a diverse team will be more representative of the consumers you want to serve and they will help you better understand those consumer needs one of my favorite examples is from z now z is the popular dance fitness program that trains instructors in more than a hundred and sixty countries around the world and they have more than fifteen million people who take their classes worldwide with a global audience z buttons needs instructors who can teach in different languages and understand different lifestyles so carolina mori is the chief marketing officer at z here she is talking about the diversity of the instructors that they have the z corporate and the z company the way you know we make money is through the training of our instructors the training and the licensing instructors around the world now what's important to know is that those instructors they come from all walks of life so you have people you know with taking their certification for a variety of reasons we have people that do this as a full time job because they need the income you have people who do this to stay in shape you have people who is a side gig so as you can imagine that brings in a blend of a very diverse community of of instructors where you have lawyers teachers firefighters you know hairdresser chefs all kinds of of of primarily women we are obviously a a heavy female program taking these trainings together and they bring in their students who very often are from the same universe right so when you start teaching their class very often looks like them okay but as time goes by that class starts to blend in with other classes other instructors other only events other and and you end up with this you know melting pot of right of people coming together in that class and and i think that what we did or we were good at z is instead a few years in into the program going into those classes and being like but we don't look like that our videos don't look like that our tone of voice doesn't sound like that and and we adjust okay cool but it was a reflection of what was happened naturally with the product that led us to say hey we have to be more intentional here or showing the world how how awesome this actually is right okay so while having a diverse team can help you expand your perspectives your hiring practices alone don't guarantee success you can only benefit from your employee's unique insights if they feel safe enough to share their experiences that's why brands need to build an inclusive culture and focus on psychological safety when employees feel like they belong they can bring their lived experiences in what makes them unique to the work they do z builds this environment with education specialists who train new z instructors and get them steep into the brands inclusive culture here's carolina c again about those education specialists so we have in the one hundred and sixty countries that we are allowed to train we have what we call our z education specialists so these are the people that you know will out into those markets to hold the trainings okay now they themselves are the most diverse group you will probably see they again they are a direct reflection of the brand and when they hold those sessions not only is this diversity spoken about in in the actual training but it's also brought in to the product and how the product is deliver alright so my pro tip for you is all about building and empowering a diverse team with an inclusive culture which will help you interact and retain that bigger more diverse fiercely loyal customer base alright so let's get to the second example which comes from wi and how it features diverse talents in its communications okay so like z wi which is a video marketing platform focuses on amplifying diverse voices the company features diverse talent in its promotional videos both in the form of internal team members and external influencer partners taylor gerard is the senior director of brand marketing at bust she explained the benefit of showcasing a of experts in the brand's content and then like who we're using in our content so videos and photo shoes are really an important piece of how we include different people of different groups and i'm really proud that we use a lot of our own employees in our content in our visuals and that just reflects our hiring process which is kinda like where everything starts yeah if you're building the team that's inclusive and diverse you're gonna be able to infuse it more into your marketing which is like you don't always make the connection yeah but when you realize how much you can use your team to be in content and to be the voice of the brand but also like visually represent different groups it's really impactful and i'm always like so proud every time we do one of those video or photo shoots that we use our employees we don't we don't cast them now the data backs this up i ran a survey of a thousand customers about inclusive marketing specifically about representation in marketing i'm gonna link to that latest edition of the representation of marketing study for you in the show notes so you can check it out if you haven't already done so of the respondents it's forty six percent of them said they wanted brands that they engage with and bought from to have internal staff in leadership that is a representative of their customer base in that same study i also found that forty one percent of consumers wanna of brands work with representative influencers in spokes people and taylor also said that that's something that they have prioritized as well at wi so my pro tip for you is to put your team front and center without using token as a reflection of your brand's commitment to inclusion consumers want to see that you walk the talk they see the team you hire in feature as a reflection of your values alright so the third example comes from michael graves design and how it builds accessibility into its product now i like to think a lot of brands that are most successful with inclusive marketing are the ones that are baking inclusion directly into their products and that's one of the reasons why i love michael graves design and what they're doing so much brand wen is the ceo of michael graves design and he told me that the brands eat ethos around accessible homes centers on this yeah so i mean accessible fundamentally means that you're capable of something's cable being reached or used understood or appreciate it so when we think about accessible home design it's the decisions you make within a home that are gonna allow the widest group possible to live the way they wanna live you know and most importantly with independence and dignity to achieve this mission the brand works to build products for the people who have the most specific needs including those who are disabled witness says the brand builds products with novel functional enhancements and the design teams are equally focused on blending safety style and accessibility most companies i've seen design products for the masses then they later go back and figure out how to adapt offerings for underrepresented and underserved communities michael graves design breaks that mold by focusing on building a product that works for consumers with the most specialized needs while considering the wider needs of its larger customer base the brand delivers a product that actually works for the widest group of people possible here's been w again explaining a little bit about how they go about building products that work for the widest group of people possible research is the foundation of everything we do and we're always looking for product opportunity gaps or unmet consumer needs that we can fill with new product designs mh so we have for literally now twenty years we've done eth demographic research with older adults and people with every type of disability you could imagine as well as with and this is in their homes for so this is a lot of observation people are so willing to talk about their most personal and private experiences it's tumbling and so we've had those experiences we also talk with family caregivers professional clinicians and caregivers occupational therapist physical therapists social workers all trying to understand what do people go through and i would say our maybe biggest takeaway is that people want us to design with not designed for and because the everyone's preferences and situations are unique there's never gonna be a single solution that's gonna work for everyone and no one wants to be told this is what's right for you so what we do is we listen we try to meet with and understand as many people's perspectives as possible and then what we do and what we did with pottery barn is we build prototypes so if we are trying to solve a certain problem than we heard a lot of people having we'll have a lot of ideas like maybe you could solve it like this maybe like that so we build rough prototypes quickly afford we talk to them as works like not looks like you know they're are two by fours in plywood but we will then have people use them so it's different from a focus group it's more one on one we call it consumer preference testing and we'll do some ab b testing which solution you like better and we'll just observe people where do they touch it how do they use it and get their feedback and we do it early enough in the design process so we can then integrate their feedback into our designs and we feel like that's the best way to ensure the products are gonna be commercially successful because they're less hypothetical they've been proven out i've seen this work outside of the design space now take a restaurant that i regularly visited while i was living in buenos aires and i also go to this restaurant every time i go back to buenos aires for a visit the menu was designed for people who follow a gluten free and paleo diet however the food was delicious and focus on popular dishes that people buenos aires love to eat now i say delicious because a lot of times food that is gluten free tastes like gluten free and we don't have that thing going on at this particular restaurant and the result is that the majority of people who ate at the restaurant are not gluten free or paleo they just come for a delicious meal and the restaurant which is comp bravo is also frequent by people who have those restricted diets like me because there aren't a lot of restaurants available for them and the restaurant because of the design of the menu and how good it is it serves a wide range of clients it's a win win win win win so here's my post tip for you design for the consumers with the most specialized needs so you have a product that works for the widest group of people possible alright so after this short break we're gonna get to the last two examples that i have for you are brands and their specific approach to how they're embracing inclusive marketing alright so the fourth example i have for you comes from l and how it prioritizes identity based research to improve effectiveness so customer intimacy is at the heart of any effective inclusive marketing strategy the team at l prioritizes engaging in research to ensure they understand their consumers at a deep level all while crafting communication that strikes the right tone gary os chen is the chief marketing officer and general manager at record us hygiene which are the makers of l and he's told me that the brand had effectively engaged african american and hispanic consumers by authentically representing them in the brand's marketing the key here according to gary jin is basing all promotional campaigns on consumer insight and here's gary sharing how they are able to obtain those customer insights and how they're able to know that the communications that they're delivering are gonna work and resonate with the people that they wanna serve i very much instituted next that case as a leader of my marketing team first and foremost to know who their consumers are from a diverse audience standpoint and understand you know how they're doing in terms of housing penetration by rates frequency of purchase what needs to be solved to better address the needs of consumers is it you know that i i mentioned scent is it is it product changes is how are they looking at graph you know what in our communications in terms of insight whether it's a hispanic insight or it's representation of black families using our l all products first and foremost what do we know what's the baseline in terms of how we resonate or don't and then what do we need to do to better resonate and and that's a lot of rich sq a lot of in home a lot of ups skill and ensuring that we actually are speaking to diverse consumers to gain insight and that insight then drives your communications and your product development and then you have to have quantitative testing as we do in all of our comm in our product development ensure that against the audience segments that you wanted to do something better with and resonate more with are we actually doing that are we actually delivering a better fragrance experience with our l all brand new day products amongst the target consumers of african american has hispanic the answer is yes we are because we developed it based on insight and then we tested it to ensure that we're delivering against and then we communicate you know big grand l on in a way that is truly you know grounded in consumer truths that resonates and that we represent he's asian african american hispanics in our in our advertising so here is my pro tip for you move beyond superficial content that doesn't resonate with consumers from under underrepresented in underserved communities instead invest in getting the insights you need and testing them to ensure that what you create will resonate and the last example we're gonna walk to which is another great one of how brands are engaging in inclusive marketing and achieving success comes from hubspot and how they are acquiring more customers through multilingual ling content marketing so people in more than hundred and thirty five countries around the world use hubspot not all those consumers speak english and even if they do they may prefer to engage with educational content in a different language so as a means to reach more of its ideal consumers hubspot leans into multilingual ling marketing and the brand creates localized original content and funnels in different languages such as spanish and french sal is part of the french growth marketing team at hub spot now he told me that the brand takes a very strategic approach to getting consumers in different markets that strategy goes far beyond just translating existing content here's celine we have drugs accept that the original market or the us market is different from international markets but they're are also all different and unique and we cannot have just like the one strategy we roll out for every other country if if we're not going native enough we're are already giving arguments to the potential customers to say no to our sales team okay if it looks like this is not for me you know if you come as an american company in france trying to sell something and you you don't advertise it in a way that the french audience can say okay that's gonna work for me the assumption is that it's not if all the examples that i'm shown are about you know an american delivery company the american fast foods american trade systems yeah booking systems that don't exist i'm like okay it works great won't work for me yeah and we're we're we have to break these arguments one by one showing that i'm speaking to you and that your markets yourself are not an afterthought of my strategy but that you are the center of the regional strategy alright so here's my pro tip for you your inclusive marketing efforts will be much more effective if you don't try to force a one size fits all strategy to work one size fits all is at complete and total eye so please don't try to embrace that or apply that into your marketing know the different identities that the consumers you have and the consumers you want to serve hold and find ideal ways to serve them and their identities alright so we went through a lot today and it's time for you to get ready to grow with inclusive marketing each company that we walked through in these examples took a different approach to inclusive marketing however each brand reap the same award they could generally serve a wider range of customers by meeting their unique needs and they are growing more brands are realizing that inclusive marketing is both the right thing to do in an incredibly effective and so whenever you understand the diverse perspectives in your audience and the identities in the ways in which they make decisions and the different things that cause them to choose different products or keep their credit cards in their wallets once you understand all of that you can create inclusive marketing campaigns products services and experiences that make them feel like they belong with you and will enable you to expand your reach that's it for today's app episode if you like to show i would so appreciate it if you would share it with your friends colleagues and your network let's continue the conversation about the different ways in which brands are finding success with inclusive marketing also are you getting the inclusion in marketing newsletter we've got a lot of great stuff going over there each week i send news resources commentary pop quizzes i wanna get your insights in your feedback on whether or not certain things that i'm showing are inclusive or not and we talk about why i also go through a deep dive on a topic related specifically to inclusive marketing and all of this is to help you attract and retain a bigger more diverse fiercely loyal customer base go to inclusion and marketing dot com slash newsletter and get signed up if you haven't already done so i'm also gonna drop a link for that and this show notes for you as well until next time remember everyone deserves have a place where they belong let's use our individual collective power to ensure more people who like they do thanks so much for listening talk to you soon