Inclusive marketing is one way to live out your company values in the public eye. It’s also a way to broaden your appeal and foster a positive relationship with your customers by letting them know that they belong.
Here’s a breakdown of how inclusive marketing strategies work, key principles to follow, and practical tips to help you create inclusive campaigns and build an inclusive company culture.
What is inclusive marketing?
Inclusive marketing describes a marketing strategy that amplifies a business’s commitment to inclusivity through campaigns that engage a diverse audience base. It involves creating marketing materials that celebrate different kinds of people, from ethnicity to age to gender, and more.
Inclusive marketing can help businesses reach a wider target audience, build relationships with current and prospective customers, and increase brand awareness. A company that sells school supplies, for example, might run a back-to-school special for busy parents, rather than cater only to moms. It might also use imagery that represents families with diverse parental gender identities and family structures to include as many target consumers as possible.
An inclusive marketing strategy can also improve brand perception. Consider a running clothes company that designs an advertising campaign celebrating Paralympic athletes. The campaign might resonate with an audience of runners with disabilities and the wider group of consumers who value inclusion.
Real-world example of inclusive marketing strategy
The ecommerce company Knix was one of the first brands to introduce period underwear to the market, and it’s also a pioneer of size-inclusive marketing. The company is committed to inclusion and on a mission to transform the intimates industry, break taboos, and “celebrate the freedom to live unapologetically.” For example, the brand’s celebrated “Age Doesn’t Matter” campaign features women over 50 who are “as sexy, confident, and badass as ever.”
Their campaigns also featured racially diverse models with a range of body shapes and recognizable human quirks, like stretch marks and freckles. “From 2013, we were the first brand to showcase our products in every size that we make,” founder Joanna Griffiths says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
This approach helps customers identify the right product and size for them, while the company supports its goal to help customers feel comfortable and confident so they can live with joy. “That was the start of using real people in our campaigns, using our customers in our campaigns, showcasing different bodies, celebrating different bodies,” says Joanna. “It’s honestly one of the things I’m the most proud of.”
Principles of inclusive marketing
The foundation of inclusive marketing is simple: Tell stories that make people feel seen and invited to your brand community through representation. What that looks like in practice will vary by company, but these foundational principles can help you plan inclusive marketing campaigns:
Authenticity
Effective marketing reflects a company’s brand values. This statement is true of all marketing campaigns, but it’s particularly true of inclusive marketing efforts.
Imagine learning that a brand known for celebrating women in STEM has a company culture hostile to female-identified employees, for example. The campaign will ring hollow and could even suggest to consumers that the company views some consumer groups as props. Authentic messaging will correspond with your other business activities instead of contradicting them.
Consistency
Brand consistency is one mark of authenticity. A company that’s truly committed to racial justice won’t discuss race only during Black History Month, for example. Its values will show up in brand and marketing materials consistently because it approaches all decisions with an understanding of how ideas about race shape society.
As Knix has grown, it’s stayed true to its original core values centered on body positivity. “I think it’s incredibly important to bring others along with you,” Joanna says. “To lend your voice and platform to not just elevate your own brand, but also lift others up.” The company only employs “real brand ambassadors who love the mission and love the brand and want to help people,” Joanna says. This creates a consistent brand experience in stores and online.
Accessibility
Inclusive marketing campaigns are also accessible to the broadest popular user base. Businesses use website accessibility to minimize barriers related to vision, hearing, motor skills, speech, and cognitive differences. Ecommerce companies, like direct-to-consumer (DTC) clothing retailer Everlane, post accessibility pages that outline their accessibility efforts and invite customers to share feedback from.
Diverse representation
Inclusive marketing representation refers to the presence of diverse voices, bodies, and perspectives in marketing materials. Undergarment retailer ThirdLove showcases its products on models with a variety of skin tones and body types, for example. Again, you need to approach this with authenticity rather than assembling picture-perfect diversity. Represent your actual and target customers, speaking to their unique pain points and desires.
Cultural competence
Understanding your audience’s cultures helps you create campaigns that resonate deeply rather than feeling generic or tone-deaf. Cultural competence refers to your business’s understanding of the cultural groups that make up its target audience, and it prevents costly missteps—like beauty brands launching foundation lines that ignore deeper skin tones—while helping you create campaigns that feel personally relevant rather than generically diverse.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality ensures your inclusive marketing doesn’t ring hollow by recognizing that people hold multiple identities simultaneously—and face discrimination on multiple fronts. A business committed to equality for women that values intersectionality, for example, will also oppose discrimination for any group and advocate for systems that protect the rights of all individuals.
Many businesses focus their inclusive marketing efforts on a particular issue or group while expressing solidarity with others and recognizing the shared goal of combating systemic discrimination.
Tips for authentic inclusive marketing
- Draft a diversity statement
- Learn from your customers
- Segment your customers
- Conduct accessibility testing
- Stay curious
- Live your values
Building an inclusive company culture is part of doing inclusive marketing authentically. These tips can help you get started:
Draft a diversity statement
Writing a diversity and inclusion statement can help you clarify your values and keep your marketing messages aligned. To create one, ask yourself what inclusion means to your business, why it matters, and how it corresponds with your mission, vision, and brand values. Your goal isn’t to capture every thought you’ll ever have about diversity and inclusion; it’s to find an angle that aligns with what your brand offers to the world.
A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that values creativity and risk-taking might write that diversity and inclusion are critical to innovation, and a consumer packaged goods company with a warm, nurturing brand personality might frame inclusion as a path to human connection. A strong diversity and inclusion statement creates consistent, authentic marketing messages that won’t feel hollow once they’re out in the world.
Learn from your customers
Soliciting customer feedback and using it to improve your customer journey is critical for any marketing effort, but it’s particularly important for inclusive campaigns. There’s a risk that if you create content for a target audience not represented in your company, you might misunderstand the group’s needs and cause campaigns to backfire. Gathering information beforehand can help you avoid sounding tone deaf—and it surfaces fresh ideas.
“One of my favorite things to say is that the answers are in the comments,” Knix founder Joanna Griffiths says on Shopify Masters. “I really want to stay close to the customer and what it is that they’re saying to us. So most of our great product ideas come from comments and suggestions that come from our customers.”
Customer feedback can help you learn from diverse voices, but remember that diversity exists within groups, too. Your LGBTQ customers can provide a critical perspective for your Pride campaigns, but no single person can speak for an entire community—so rely on focus groups or surveys instead of single interviews when you’re launching a campaign. The more consensus you can reach, the better.
Segment your customers
Use customer demographic data to create customer groups and look for trends within specific identity categories. Customer segmentation can surface valuable information that’s obscured in the larger data set.
Consider a business that sells power tools and has a respectable average customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 75. When it analyzes data by gender, however, it discovers that its average CSAT is 90 among male customers and 39 among female customers. The business can review its marketing campaigns, customer service processes, and retention efforts to look for problems and develop a more inclusive marketing strategy.
Conduct accessibility testing
Accessibility testing your ecommerce store can help you identify and remedy barriers for people with differences in eyesight, hearing, or motor function that affect how they access information on the internet. Digital accessibility testing tools assess your site and show you which areas to address.
Stay curious
Building an inclusive company culture requires ongoing discovery, so commit to learning more about the people who make up your target market and how best to serve them. When you build cultural competence as a technical skill set, you’ll spot opportunities competitors miss and avoid tone-deaf campaigns that can tank brand perception overnight.
Attend marketing industry conferences focused on diversity, seeking out panels and workshops that address inclusion in your field and following thought leaders from diverse backgrounds in the inclusive marketing, media, and social equity spaces.
Live your values
When your values inform your business decisions, everything falls into place. You’ll build a diverse community of people around your business, connect with peers and partners who share your commitment to inclusion, seek growth opportunities, and use your platform to celebrate the variety of identities and experiences in your customer base
It all circles back to authenticity—so define what really matters to you and hold every decision accountable to those core values.
Inclusive marketing FAQ
Why is inclusive marketing so important?
Inclusive marketing connects businesses with a wider audience. It can build relationships with different people across a diverse consumer base. Without it, a brand may become too niche or inaccessible, limiting its growth potential.
Who benefits from inclusive design?
Inclusive design refers to a design process focused on creating products, services, practices, and marketing materials that provide value to as many people as possible. It benefits consumers and businesses, helping businesses serve a greater number of customers and allowing more consumers to access the products or services they need.
How can a brand be more inclusive?
Here are five ways to build a more inclusive brand:
1. Promote diverse voices.
2. Solicit customer feedback.
3. Design inclusive marketing campaigns.
4. Make your website more accessible.
5. Pursue partnerships with brands and organizations that attract diverse audiences.
