From Exclusion to Inclusion

While at the surface inclusive marketing may seem like the most recent industry buzzword or simply a politically correct list of criteria to check off when running a creative marketing campaign, it’s far deeper than that. For brands, inclusive marketing offers a new foundation on which to build trust with consumers, affording an opportunity to build credibility, reliability and relevance in an era when skepticism surrounds both advertising and technology.

With the continual growth of the digital economy, it’s critical that we question our protocols in product development, ad creation, and the technology used around both. For consumers, inclusive marketing has the potential to affect our lives on a profoundly intimate level – from whether the products we’re offered take into consideration such dimensions of our identity as our ability, skin tone, gender, size, age, culture or height, or whether we’re served a brand’s ads via paid social media and display advertising based on the superficial target categories assigned to our pixels. Marketers must ensure that neither the creative side of advertising, nor the technology powering our modern marketing landscape reinforces our unconscious bias.