Recently, rankings for the Most Culturally Inclusive Brands were announced. The rankings come from the Association for National Advertisers’ Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, in partnership with the Cultural Inclusion Accelerator. For the second year in a row, the Lysol brand has been awarded Best in Ad Effectiveness by more than 80,000 consumers with a broad diversity of identities.
Brands that ranked the highest with consumers for their 15- and 30-second advertising creatives saw increases in key performance indicators, including 69 percent in purchase intent, 67 percent in brand trust, 49 percent in brand affinity, and 43 percent more brand recommendations.
While more brands are slowly delving into the world of inclusive marketing, Lysol and other brands such as the Home Depot and Tide, which ranked second and third in Best in Ad Effectiveness, are seeing direct positive business impact from going all in.
Gary Osifkin is the chief marketing officer and general manager at Reckitt U.S. Hygiene, the makers of Lysol. Gary told me that inclusive marketing is embedded into the brand’s operating model and thinking because it is core to the brand reaching its goals. He explained, “We are consumer marketers marketing consumer products. If we’re not understanding our consumers, which include multicultural, then we’re not going to achieve it.”
The Lysol team performs so well with a broad diversity of consumers because the brand intends to do so.
Osifkin shared how marketing teams go through an in-depth process to ensure they are developing both products and messaging that will resonate with the underrepresented and underserved communities they want to reach.
The process the brand follows is rooted in customer intimacy. The Lysol team invests in qualitative research and other forms of talking to diverse consumers to gain insights on how to better serve and resonate with them. Osifkin went on to explain that the brand relies on those insights to drive both its communications and product development.
As I talk to marketers across industries who want to engage in inclusive marketing, many are nervous about getting started, because they are fearful of making mistakes. They’ve sat on the sidelines and have watched with horror as brands have received strong backlash from culturally insensitive ads.
But most of the brands that are the subject of this kind of backlash find themselves in hot water because they haven’t done the work of developing a sufficient degree of customer intimacy that would have ensured they delivered communications and campaigns that resonate, rather than ones that offend.
The Lysol team’s approach to inclusive marketing as an operating model ensures they hit the mark with the products and communications they deliver over and over again. Osifkin explained that his team knows they are delivering a better fragrance experience with their products and communications that target consumers from specific underrepresented and underserved communities because “we developed it based on insight, and then we tested it to ensure that we’re delivering against it.”
There’s no guessing or hesitation involved, because marketers at Reckitt know their consumers, which of course includes consumers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
How to Build a Culturally Inclusive Brand That Drives Business Results
You can develop culturally relevant ads that draw a broader diversity of consumers closer to you while driving business results. Adopt the proven approach Reckitt has taken to grow with underrepresented and underserved consumers.
Start by identifying which identities of consumers you want to reach. The goal of inclusive marketing isn’t to serve everyone, as most brands don’t have the resources to do that effectively. Besides, it is important to have a degree of specificity to help focus your efforts.
Once you’ve determined which consumers you want to reach, turn your attention to developing a deeper degree of intimacy with them. Spend time with them, talk to them, listen to them, build relationships with them and organizations that serve them, and conduct market research with them to uncover how their needs, experiences, and decision-making processes differ from those of other communities.
Then develop products, experiences, and communications for the identities you’ve chosen to serve that are rooted in the insights you picked up from engaging with them. Bonus points for doing another round of testing to verify that what you’ve created resonates before putting it into the market. Even better would be to co-create products, experiences, and communications with them, to ensure that people with lived experiences are informing what you produce.
Inclusive marketing is a smart and effective way to drive business results while making an impact on more consumers. Following a proven system will ensure you get it right, without having to guess and fumble your way through it.
