Before you even get into creative, the most important place to infuse DE&I thinking is in your research. “Inclusive marketing research is about being truly human-centered in your approach,” says Media.Monks Strategy Director, Naomi Heckroth. “The key is in designing research to address real challenges so that brands can connect with their customers on a more meaningful level.” More inclusive and equitable research approaches and techniques will help you show up with eyes wide open for a more accurate and diverse view of who to reach and how to better connect. The result will be better strategies, better campaign performance and deeper, more empathetic connections with your target audiences.

Cultivating a DE&I mindset for marketing research, whether managed by internal teams or external partners, can be the difference between creating meaningful and sticky messaging or completely missing the mark. That’s why we put together an Inclusive Marketing Research Tipsheet chock full of tips for conducting radically inclusive marketing research. Here’s a quick rundown of just some of them from our resident experts.

Start at the Beginning

In creative work, your job is to reach and attract people to your brand, product, or experience.  Ideally, they represent various groups who respond to messaging based on their diverse backgrounds, upbringings, and world views. And marketing research is the starting point for better understanding and engaging with those ideal audiences. But if that research is flawed—let’s say you’ve inadvertently missed an entirely underrepresented group, or asked questions that have an unintended cultural tilt—the results will color everything you do. “Flawed research leads to flawed insights which, in turn, means missing the mark when you’re trying to connect with audiences,” says Sam Haskin, Media.Monks Inclusive Marketing Lead. “So starting with an awareness of DE&I in your research—who you’re asking, what you're asking them, and how you’re asking—is a very important step in creating authentic messaging.”

Marketing research that’s designed for diversity brings the right perspectives into the room and ensures that all voices are heard. And effective research teams challenge every assumption to get to a better outcome. Here are a few tips for starting your research off on the right foot:

• Know your team’s biases. Even the best-intentioned individuals and teams cannot completely know and understand all audiences. And, as humans, most of us have unconscious biases. Assembling a diverse team can help but will not completely counter bias—the key is to be aware and honest about gaps in understanding to try and sidestep inadvertent exclusions.
• Build a representative sample. This includes counteracting weaknesses in general population statistics by oversampling commonly undercounted groups that are relevant, and paying attention to how weighting may provide more inclusive insights.
• Examine secondary research resources closely. The more diverse your secondary sources are (who funded the research or who authored a report can provide hints) the more inclusive and complete your insights will be.

Choose Inclusive Partners

Conducting marketing research can be a lengthy and time consuming undertaking. If you’re considering collaborating with an external partner, evaluating a potential partner’s commitment to DE&I from the outset will help set you up for success. “Neutral” does not equal diversity.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Include diverse vendors in your RFP process.
• Look for partners who are committed to DE&I in their own organizations.
• Select the partner with an intentional approach to representing all consumer voices.

Hold Yourself Accountable

You don’t have to wait for a new research project to start integrating more inclusive and equitable approaches. To help set a baseline for measuring your progress and hold yourself accountable to real change so you can continue to build your practices with inclusivity at the forefront, conduct audits of existing research methods such as customer segmentations and personas, customer needs studies, brand positioning research and campaign effectiveness tracking. 

“Although the primary goal of an audit is to discover where you currently stand, keep in mind the longer-term goals that you plan to accomplish once you have implemented your DE&I marketing efforts,” says Executive Creative Director Susan Parker. “Goals will help you keep your eye on the ball as you evaluate and formulate recommendations.” Here are a few questions to help guide audits and ensure your marketing research efforts are focused on inclusivity:

• Participant demographics. For target audience studies, what was the rationale for screening only that set population? What relevant perspectives may have been missed as a result?
• Primary research. Are surveys provided in multiple languages? How are quantitative studies weighted?
• Secondary research. What are the biases, perspectives and lived experiences of the authors or financial backers of these sources?
• Question framing. Does the way you ask questions reinforce stereotypes or cultural biases?

Including diverse perspectives and voices in your marketing research increases your potential to produce work that better represents—and resonates with—the world around you. It balances listening, empathy, and data. The effort you put in at the beginning, and throughout the journey, will pay dividends for your business and society in the long run.

Want to dig deeper? For more detailed information on conducting radically inclusive marketing research as well as a wealth of pro tips, insights and helpful resources check out our tipsheet.

As marketers, our job is to build the bridge between brands and their customers in creative and engaging ways. To do this effectively, we often tap into what we see as common cultural understandings and use them as vehicles for our messages, then project those messages at scale to the public. But it’s critical we understand that we have the power to “normalize” culture. Our work can foster either belonging or exclusion, and we haven’t always gotten it right.  

It’s our responsibility to use our tools to celebrate people as they are and respect the depth and nuance of the audiences we speak to on our clients’ behalf, fostering belonging through accurate and respectful representation. This requires a shift in the creative culture of our industry toward more inclusive marketing. And that shift starts with each one of us.

We Have a Lot of Work to Do, and It Can’t Wait

The work we do focuses first and foremost on our clients’ goals—often with very little thought put towards the secondary impact it may have. One of the tools we use to further our clients’ goals, for better or for worse, is aspirations. We often try to present a case where our products or services will help people achieve some aspirational state—frequently one that we’ve conveniently painted for them.

While this may feel a bit disingenuous at best, it can be downright dangerous when applied to cultural norms or stereotypes that don’t offer a healthy reflection of the people in our culture—and it’s critical that we understand the role we play in defining so-called ideals. For example, aspirational marketing around certain “ideal” body types has contributed to a host of unhealthy side effects, including an epidemic of eating disorders. Aspirations-oriented marketing has also played a role in perpetuating an idealization of lighter skin tones, which can have an awful impact on how people view themselves and each other relative to perceived “norms” around attractiveness.

The challenge is that any decisions we make that aren’t directly informed by the brief come from our own perspective and experience, which leaves a lot of opportunity to project our own biases and incomplete understanding out to the world. Ideally, all of our creative, strategy and account teams would be full of diverse and intersectional viewpoints that round out each other’s perspectives and offer opportunities for us all to learn. However our industry has a big problem with representation overall and, even if some agencies are doing a good job at pulling together people from different lived experiences, the training, recruiting, and shifting leadership profiles that are really needed to make a difference at any scale will be a long-term effort. 

But we can’t wait. And the plan should not be to make it other people’s responsibility to fill gaps in our understanding. The responsibility is on us to better understand the people and communities we communicate with to ensure that what we project into the environment represents them in positive and inclusive ways. 

How We Addressed this Challenge

At Media.Monks we started to explore what this responsibility meant in earnest a few years ago. Our first step was to create an internal working group so we could share experiences and learnings and develop our point of view as a marketing organization. 

As we began this work, we found there were very few resources available that discussed inclusion and representation in the context of marketing creative. We found lots of great examples of things that worked, a lot of wonderful discussions that focused around individual communities, and a ton of data, but nothing that pulled it all together into one place that we could share with our broader teams. So we set out to do it for ourselves.

What began as a group of volunteers with a common interest in furthering our inclusive marketing efforts and approach, developed into a full blown, year-long (plus) labor of love, listening to the voices around us and developing guidelines for creating diverse and inclusive marketing practices and content. 

We use this work to help train ourselves in the development, curation and delivery of content and uplevel the baseline cultural awareness of our creative, strategy and account teams. And we’re sharing our work with the creative industry at large.

Let’s Use Our Power for Good 

Many in our industry have already taken important steps toward more inclusive content and campaigns. We admire brands like LinkedIn for highlighting the positive impact of a diverse workforce, Nike for celebrating all kinds of athletes and Oreo for showing us what it means to be an LGBTQ+ ally all year long. We admire these brands even more for going beyond a single campaign and striving to make inclusivity and representation values that live as an integral part of their marketing efforts, every day. 

This is no easy task. It means continually seeking out ways to demonstrate that we see, hear and value all of our customers. It means showing up to every strategy session, brief, photoshoot and creative review with an inclusive mindset. It means doing our best to do what’s right, always. That’s why it's important to create guidelines and materials easy for teams to digest, use and refer to as they produce work.

As marketers, we have the power to create real change when it comes to inclusive marketing. Let’s continue to learn from each other and be open to support so that we can further the industry together and use our power for good.