Frictionless Growth Marketing

The Home Depot was recently named "The Most Culturally Inclusive Brand" by the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing (AIMM).

I thought it would be great for you to learn about their approach to inclusive marketing, so I sat down with Chante LaGon, Sr. Manager of Multi-Cultural Marketing at The Home Depot to get insight into how they think about and execute inclusive marketing.

There's lots to learn from this chat. Pull out your pen and dig in.

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The Home Depot

Inclusive marketing is a fairly new discipline. As a result, inclusive marketing consultants and strategists are newer areas of expertise for talent.

Whenever I introduce myself and explain that I'm an inclusive marketing consultant, coach, and strategist, I always find that I need to explain what that means. That includes sharing the ways I support clients for people to get it.

An inclusive marketing consultant isn't like a copywriter, sales person, or even market researcher where people tend to understand right away more or less what you do.

Thankfully, more brands are focusing on building inclusive brands that attract and retain a bigger and more diverse customer base. As such, I thought it would be helpful to understand how an inclusive marketing consultant can support you in your efforts. This is especially relevant if inclusive marketing isn't firmly rooted into the DNA of the way your brand operates.

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Have you ever encountered someone different from you, and then fumbled your way through interacting with them?

I know I have, and I included a few of those stories in this episode. From my observations -- it seems like too often, we struggle to build authentic connections with people who are different from us, and I wanted to explore why that was.

So I sat down with Topsie VandeBosch, a mindset and emotional intelligence consultant for business leaders, and a licensed psychotherapist.

Topsie helped me understand why we behave in this way and gave some super practical tools for how to do better so we can authentically build relationships with people who are different from us -- which is becoming critically important as demographics change in our society.

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Topsie VandenBosch website

Topsie VandenBosch LinkedIn

Customer intimacy is one of my five pillars of building an inclusive brand. The most effective way to build customer intimacy is through actually talking to your customers. But a lot of brands don't do this -- and get nervous of even the thought of doing so, especially when it comes to people from underrepresented and underserved communities.

So in today's episode we're going to fix that. I sat down with the brilliant Andi Jarvis, the founder and Strategy Director of Eximo Marketing, a marketing strategy consultancy based in the UK and Ireland. Andi also hosts the Strategy Sessions podcast.

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Strategy Sessions podcast

Andi Jarvis on LinkedIn

Andi Jarvis on Instagram

Search engines connect interested consumers with willing brands. That's why smart brands optimize focus on SEO to make it easy for these curious customers to find them.

But too often, brands forget about customers who have the problem their brand solves when it comes to consumers who speak other languages -- even when they are equipped to serve customers who speak other languages.

In this episode I sat down with Sarah Moon, an SEO marketing and business strategy consultant, to cover practical ways you can do multilingual SEO to so you can attract and convert consumers who are looking for what your brand offers.

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Sarah Moon

More brands are acknowledging the many ways consumers are different, and adjusting their marketing approach accordingly to ensure they make all the people they serve feel like they belong with them.

In this episode, I sat down with Santronya Smith, Director of Enterprise Sales at Suzy, a market research company, where we chatted about strategies some of the brands she's worked with have used to do a better job of connecting with and serving consumers from underrepresented and underserved communities.

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Santronya Smith on LinkedIn

Suzy

One of my goals this year is to bring you more stories of marketers who've been out in the trenches using inclusive marketing to grow their brands. For this episode, I sat down with Bryan Alston, former CMO of Greater Than, who's also worked on brands such as Magic Spoon and GoClove.com. We chatted a lot about inclusive marketing strategies he's used with these eCommerce companies that helped them achieve a greater degree of growth.

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Brand Castle Growth Partners - Bryan's new company

People want authenticity in their food. 

We need authenticity in our relationships. And we definitely crave authenticity in marketing.

Today, we’re going to talk about authenticity in marketing.

These days especially, more and more consumers want brands to be authentic. That is one of the things that makes inclusive marketing – and really, most marketing effective. Authenticity.

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Episode 97 - Inclusive marketing ethics

Shaq Buick commercial

Jimmy Kimmel - Basketball mean Tweets

Fresh Prince of Bel Air cheesesteak episode

Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad

Ben & Jerry's bans 2 scoops of same flavor

Marketing ethics, or more specifically, the ethics associated with inclusive marketing doesn’t get talked about nearly enough as it should.

Of course, I’m a big proponent of brands engaging and serving people from underrepresented and underserved communities. But there are times when I wish brands wouldn’t focus on specific communities, and would just leave them alone.

Why? Because in certain instances, brands do more harm than good when engaging with certain underrepresented and underserved communities.

In this episode I walk you through 5 inclusive marketing ethical considerations, and the mindset you need to have to ensure you're not causing harm to the communities you want to serve.

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Find links to everything covered in this episode here

Representation matters. We know this. But all representation isn't created equal. In this episode, I walk you through how to do representation in marketing the right way, infused with insights from consumers.

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2021 State of Representation in Marketing Study

Orange FIFA Women's World Cup ad

Episode 51: How To Create Inclusive Content That Makes More People Feel Seen with Natasha Pierre

Episode 53: The Inclusive Marketing Framework The Big Brands Use with Jerry Daykin

Episode 45: Factors That Influence Your Customers' Success That You Should Be Aware Of

Meryl Evans post on LinkedIn about accurate portrayal of people with disabilities