Brand Growth in the New Era: How to Evolve Inclusive Marketing and Futureproof your Brand
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Researchers were able to hear insights from Collage Group from a study on what consumers in the U.S. expect from brands during the Quirk’s Virtual Sessions – Consumer Reset series that took place on March 12, 2025.
Jack Mackinnon, senior director of cultural insights, presented the findings and then explained how they lead to the idea of inclusive marketing 3.0. The new inclusive marketing includes three components, real-life resonance, struggle solidarity and cultural co-creation.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody and welcome to our session, ‘Brand Growth in the New Era: How to Evolve Inclusive Marketing and Future Proof Your Brand.’ I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm.
Before we get started, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenter during the session. And we'll answer as many as we have time for at the end during the Q&A portion.
Our session today is presented by Collage Group. Jack, take it away.
Jack Mackinnon
Yeah, thanks Joe. Great to be here. Good to digitally be with all of you.
Today I'm here to talk about some of the work that we've been doing on our research teams over the past couple months, which is our research juggernaut that we call America Now.
This year it's America now in this report and America then our insights library of reports because we are I think leaving the old era and entering ideally the new era. So, that's what I'm here to talk about and to show us what are the distinctions, how do we do this, how do we navigate it?
I'm sure if you are paying attention or not, but it's creeping in that this is a chaotic moment, especially for inclusive marketing. So, I want to talk about how to navigate that and not just position ourselves from a defensive standpoint but actually grow in 2025.
To do that we're going to reveal three key teaching points from this research.
First, we have found that America essentially is stuck, consumers are stuck, brands are stuck, and so is inclusive marketing.
When I say inclusive marketing, by the way, I mean campaigns that are focused on diverse representation and engagement. The name of the game for marketing is finding more customers. At the heart, I think, all marketing is inclusive marketing. But despite that stuckness, American consumers do not want brands to turn away from cultural storytelling and cultural outreach. That's very clear.
The combination of those two things means that to grow in 2025, brands have to adopt the next evolution of inclusive marketing. This is what I'm calling inclusive marketing 3.0.
To understand where we are now, we need to consider the context of the current era. I've found that the best way to talk about this is not a timeline, it's really a cycle. A cycle of big promises made and then met with backlash and burnout and disappointment and repeat.
This works across the era of the last five years from 2020 Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in my hometown of Minneapolis and calls for change, and consumers researching the internal diversity, the messaging, the values of brands. All the way to the backlash that we've seen over the last 18 months or more. Bud Light being just one example of that pushback to inclusive marketing. Some of it from bad actors, some of it real backlash, but it is a very real contention
It kind of works like this. The beginning of the era, the beginning of this cycle is about a promise of a fresh start. We know things now we didn't use to know and we are going to do better. Inevitably there's missing of the mark that happens and disappointment among consumers from that. Then a revised promise and then backlash of it missing again and again.
Now we've seen that the backlash itself creates a lot of concern and worry. Logical worry I think from brands that this backlash is going to eat into the bottom line and into the business. But that overly cautious reaction that comes out of backlash often then leads to burnout on consumer's point of view and also what we call double backlash.
Brands that are getting backlash from those who think they've gone too, far too woke, whatever the terms are used to describe that, as well as consumers who are disappointed and feel betrayed from brands that maybe are walking back promises that they made previously.
I think the result regardless is that a brand feels like they don't know which direction to go and they're caught in between all of this backlash.
The problem is if you didn't think that was the problem, is that cycles are not static. Usually, they spiral down. So, the longer that you're stuck, the worse it gets. Lower energy, less enthusiasm, bigger disappointment and frustration and it's also harder and harder to pull out of it.
The urgency is incredibly high to figure out the solution to the problem of the moment that we're in that inclusive marketing is stuck, consumers are frustrated.
We're here today to talk about that, how brands get unstuck and grow into a new era of inclusive marketing in 2025 but also beyond this.
We have a very simple roadmap I think today. One is to talk about what it looks like to be caught. Then two, where we'll spend most of our time, what it looks like to evolve into a new and more hopeful place for inclusive marketing.
Let's talk about getting unstuck. First, I want to talk about the consumer facing side of things and where we are seeing this taking place.
We've been asking consumers about satisfaction with representation and advertising for four years across race, sexual orientation, age and gender. Essentially what we're asking is, ‘Are you satisfied with how your gender is being portrayed in ads?’ How your age, how your race, how your ethnicity.
We saw a clear trend over 2020 to 2023 and really all the way through early 2024 was progress. More consumers saying they were satisfied with representation. The reason why that's a really big deal, beyond just the moral victory, is it means more consumers were giving brands the benefit of the doubt and their attention and their loyalty and their purchasing decisions. That was the trend until late last year where you can see on the chart, we hit a plateau and even a dip in satisfaction for the first time.
The main thing to note here I think is that 40% of Americans are not satisfied with representation and ads of themselves. That means that ceiling of consumers are less likely to consider your brand when they hear the messages and are likely to tune out or even worse have that backlash come into play. This is the consumer side of things.
I think we can see that traction has slowed down on the brand side. The past couple of years has really presented some real business consequences. We have seen that with backlash.
We are now seeing that with the contention around DEI practices and how to navigate that. Some brands saying that they're going to backtrack, some brands doubling down, but I want to talk about the opportunity costs that are at play when that conversation taking place.
Here on the left or kind of in the middle, you see multicultural purchasing power over the past 20 years and projected into the future. Just look at the growth of purchasing power among Hispanic, Black and Asian American consumers.
These are the growth segments in this country. Especially as we head towards being a majority multicultural country by about 2050, where the white population will dip below 50%. That 2050 number is obviously a projection, but it has gotten closer and closer to us as we get more and more census data and other things that the diversification of the country is actually moving at a faster clip than we previously knew.
The white segment still has the largest share of purchasing power, but their growth in purchasing power is happening at a far slower rate than each of these segments. And when you consider the other growth segments of young consumers like Gen Z consumers, LGBTQ+ consumers, it's really clear where growth is coming from.
Let's connect this data then with headlines that we saw throughout the last year. And Shaun Harper here on the right, the founder of the USC Race and Equity Center makes the very important point that focusing too much on the threat of backlash internally and externally is a tradeoff. That means brands will be missing out on growing in the direction that the country is growing in.
Also, the vast majority of consumers flat out say that inclusive marketing is equal or more important to them now than it was in 2020. I think that is a remarkable data point because in 2020, as we know this was on the front of everybody's minds, there were protests in the streets, consumers were researching brands, their board makeup, their CEOs, their diversity and equity and inclusion practices and they're saying now that inclusive marketing is even more important than it was then.
When you look at the growth segments of Gen Z, Millennials, Hispanic, Black and LGBTQ+ consumers, that number is even higher. Pushing 90% who say that this is a priority for consumers when they're making decisions about what brands to engage with and buy from.
It's super clear it is time for inclusive marketing to evolve. It can't stay in the same exact practices as it is right now because we're losing traction. But it also is not a moment to say that it needs to go away. It's time to build on the evolutions that we've seen previously, and inclusive marketing has evolved before we have kind of been in moments similar, it's time for it to evolve again.
Let's talk about how and what that looks like for the remainder of our time together. I mentioned earlier inclusive marketing 3.0 is where I think we need to collectively head, but the 3.0 obviously insinuates a 1.0 and a 2.0. So, let's look at the evolution over the years.
We could go back in time as far as we wanted to talk about the shifts in inclusive marketing, but for the sake of clarity and time, let's use the window of the digital era.
Over the past 25 years or so, there's been really a period of pretty big change, the rise of social media, the growth of digital marketing. This I think gives us a lot to think about, a lot to discuss and some lessons and case studies here.
On the left side you have version 1.0. You could timestamp this from about 2000 to about 2015. For a lot of brands, the focus of this time was to reflect the changing demographics of the country through wider representation.
You may remember the image of the young girl here in this Honey Nut Cheerios commercial. This was an ad from 2013, so actually kind of from later in that era. The ad featured a young biracial family who were eating Cheerios and having of normal breakfast conversations. But it caused a widespread conversation at the time around the representation of that family, which is almost quaint by today's standards.
The intentions of the brand here and elsewhere in this era was really to increase diversity in marketing and reflect those changing demographics. But we can also look back now with hindsight and see that there were limitations to this.
We reached the proverbial ceiling on 1.0 because it really could only get past surface level representation. Something I would call the “Captain Planet” version of diverse representation. If you grew up with that cartoon, that team had someone from every continent represented. It was a diverse team and that, I think, is the epitome of the push to have representation. But there were no conversations beyond Cheerios in that ad and there was more to say, there was more cultural nuance to display, and it was time to evolve into version 2.0, which is really personified with cultural specificity.
The nation was evolving. Black Lives Matter protests were really active at this point of time. Same sex marriage was legalized and the conversation around racial inequity was getting more and more complex.
So, this is an image from Nike's campaign of course with Colin Kaepernick after he kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police violence. The goal of brands here was to move from only representation to representation and engagement. But I think the limitations, which are the limitations that we are talking about in this stuckness in the cycle right now, are this kind of engagement without being evolved into something new can really leave us feeling like it's performative and requires us to redevelop what we mean, why and the purpose of inclusive marketing at all.
We learn very clearly that greater cultural specificity was engaging, was meaningful to consumers. Everybody has a second screen in their hands, so you don't have to worry about leaving people behind.
The halo effects of telling meaningful and interesting stories with specificity were true then and are true still now. But this leads us to the next phase of inclusive marketing. We are beyond the precipice of this. It is essential that brands evolve into 3.0 in order to navigate exactly what's going on right now. Some brands have leaned into this, some have not yet.
Version 3.0 of inclusive marketing can be defined as individual depth. This is where we are today. As we head further into 2025, it's time to address Americans’ desire for a more multidimensional representation and reflect who they are at a deeper level, an individual level.
Individual depth has three specific components that we've identified in our research. This is where we're going to spend the rest of the time today.
Real-life resonance. This is capturing the little everyday experiences to build relevance. This is a brand who understands me.
It also is a way to create great unity. When you're able to identify something that we all experience and have it feel very real, that's powerful.
Second is struggle solidarity. Recognizing the shared challenges that people have, the hard stuff that's out there. Focusing on that but in a lens of hope to build trust with brands.
Then finally, cultural co-creation. Partnering with diverse consumers to boost values and advocacy and get to the heart of what's real, what's true, what the problems are, what the solutions are. These can all be used individually as separate levers in marketing or combined for maximum impact.
We have an example here from Uber. This is an Uber ad that ran last summer, it's not just a random picture of people hugging. I think it really encapsulates these three components really well. This is kind of a smoking gun.
I'm going to show it to you now but not play it. We will play it at the end once we've talked about all of these components so that you can get a sense of what it might look like and hopefully instigate a lot of ideas and new ground in storytelling for you.
Let's move through the components and start with real-life resonance.
At its core real-life resonance is about reflecting American's everyday experiences, which I know sounds super simple, super basic. But what I think is important to emphasize is that real-life resonance is rooted in identity. And identity is changing and shifting in this country, now in 2025, in ways that it did not in years previous. The backdrop of this component is the United States in 2025, which I think is a pretty unique period of time.
Let's talk about how we got this component and why we decided to make it one of the key components of inclusive marketing 3.0. And that of course comes back to the research.
We asked American consumers what successful inclusive marketing means to them. What does it look like? How do you know that it's good, that it's working? The data was actually very clear.
The number one way nearly half of American consumers think about inclusive marketing is that it shows real-life experiences of people. It reveals, highlights and reflects what's actually going on. You can see that it's the winner by a pretty huge percentage point difference from number two on this list.
It really speaks to what Americans want and need at this point in time from brands because our research points to the fact that most Americans want to see their daily interests reflected back to them.
One way we see that is with this question around what will make you watch media; shows, listen to podcasts, whatever? What intrigues you and brings you in, in the sense of representation?
We found, especially with Hispanic, Asian American and young consumers, are more likely to say the type of representation they want to see in their media content includes people who share the same hobbies and the same interests as them. Representation in demographic features, like age and race are definitely important but shared hobbies and interests is the top reason.
That's an indicator of how important it is to reflect what people are doing because a lot of the time how we spend our time is where our enthusiasm and our priorities are and to some degree where our personalities lie. The data point tells us that reflecting on real-life experiences is about connecting on the details like the stuff you do, the hobbies you have, etc.
One more note though, when reflecting on real-life, there must also be recognition that a diversifying America is changing. So, 2025 looks different than 2024, definitely looks different than 2015. Those daily priorities are changing and it's very important, through some of the other components, to tap into what those are.
But the next component, and honestly maybe my favorite component is, struggle solidarity. It is about aligning with Americans based on the hard stuff that we face.
These struggles can be small things, or they can be really big and really traumatic things that people are going through. But both are important and both are an opportunity to connect with people where they are because Americans are telling us that this is how they relate to others through struggle.
One of the most compelling findings from our study was when we asked consumers about the different groups that they feel most culturally similar to; Who are your people? Who do you feel like you have a lot in common with? At the top of the list are people who have gone through the same struggles as me.
When you look down the list you see that feeling culturally similar to those who have gone through the same struggles is higher than things like being a parent, having the same racial ethnic background, people I grew up with and have shared childhood with. So, shared struggle is clearly an important cultural connector among Americans.
If anyone here has experienced any significant struggle in your life, you get it. That someone else who has gone through a very similar thing, had the uncertainty of it, the worry and the concern around it, you feel unified with them, and you feel like you have something in common with them. But even though identity traits here are lower on this list, it's really important to address the fact that shared struggle is often based in identity.
We asked another question here about how do you define culture? The number one answer was two things tied up. They were that culture means both shared experiences based on racial identity and the customs and norms of living in this country together.
So, when we think about the term shared struggle, you have to place it in the context of experience. It's important to recognize that there are systemic issues that make it so that Americans with shared racial and ethnic backgrounds or sexual orientation are experiencing shared struggles in a way that is rooted in who they are. The shared struggle is unifying, but identifying the sharedness oftentimes is connected to identity. Brands that connect on culture have to do that by recognizing shared struggle.
So, there is a really cool example from this last summer that stood out to me while I was watching the Olympics with my family.
There was a bunch of us, we were watching the Olympics, we're talking constantly, kids are running around, but when this ad came on, the room kind of stopped. It's because this Hyundai ad addressed something in a different tone that was surprising, and I think it really rang true.
Keep in mind the context that the Olympics are going on. The Olympics are a time when we celebrate pushing through and fighting to train even though it's hard and getting up early all for the purpose of achieving that gold medal. Then this ad came on.
Let's watch it together and think about as we're watching it, the shared struggle that it addresses.
[Hyundai’s “It’s OK” ad plays at 24:53.]
This ad is rooted in hope, I think, of pushing to find where your fit is. But it just swims against the current of that mentality that many of us are fighting internally that you have to just push through no matter what. That shared struggle was a really powerful message to hear at that time, but I think anytime as well.
Let's take that and let's continue the conversation to talk about cultural co-creation and what that means for the other two components.
Cultural co-creation is the collaborative process where brands and consumers work together to identify real needs and then shape real solutions together. The three ingredients and components of inclusive marketing 3.0 are not mutually exclusive. Cultural co-creation boosts the other two because it's how brands can genuinely reflect real-life and find real struggles. Because if you want to know, you got to ask people and that's what this component is about.
An example of this that comes to mind before I show you some other examples here is in the financial services industry with credit cards.
You may have noticed or remember from a couple of years ago when we, suddenly on some cards, got the ability to put any name we wanted on the front of our cards. If you were like me, you didn't think much of it and you kept your name on the card. But this came out of a process that some of the credit card companies had with transgender consumers. They realized through listening that every time this subsegment was using that card they had to be referred to and see a name that they no longer identified with.
So, just by the simple solution of allowing everybody to add whatever name they wanted on the front, they solved this really powerful challenge for that subsegment and demonstrated the power of just listening and solving problems for consumers.
Let's talk about some other examples here but first just to reiterate, this should be taking place, just like the credit cards, within product development.
So, when we ask Americans the best way for brands to demonstrate that they're inclusive, it was in the specific products and services that they offer. Now notably it is pretty close, but that is the top response. The avenue to develop inclusive products is by working with consumers to share their problems, like I was saying, and then co-create solutions to move forward.
A lot of examples here, let's start from maybe the most obvious to the least obvious.
YouTube is a platform we talk a lot about at Collage. It is a great success story among young and multicultural Americans. It is also a platform that quite honestly, I can't believe we're still talking about.
I would've thought in 2008, it was going to kind of fade out for whatever is new, then 2015, then 2021, and yet it's still here. It's still powerful, it's still the main place user generated content is viewed, but it's not just about the fact that you can become a creator that is giving voice to people.
It's also encapsulated in this quote from Carsten Andreasen Fangel who's a research and insights manager at YouTube. He says, “Audiences now use their agency not just to choose, but to influence the content, becoming a critical decision maker alongside the media owners and content producers.”
So, there's a lesson there to learn with comments and interactions that viewers and consumers want to be able to influence the things that are being made. I think that this is true for YouTube, but not every brand, almost no brands own and are built around a platform with user generated content. I realized that.
So, there are other ways here and other lessons to learn.
One of the key tools is internal diversity, you can't get around talking about that. That means hiring. Brands are more legitimately positioned to understand and then reflect back to the segments that they're trying to connect with when that happens.
In fact, just about half of all Americans don't trust brands without internal diversity. And that number goes up when you look at LGBTQ+, Black and Millennial segments, which is a lot of the country.
One cool example here in the media category is with Cartoon Network.
On the right is Rebecca Sugar who created the show, Steven Universe. Rebecca is the first non-binary person to own and create their own show. The show prioritizes LGBTQ+ representation, themes, nuances and specifics of real-life resonance within the storylines, highlighting how this diversity comes to life when communities are empowered. They couldn't do that the same way without Rebecca's vision, perspective and experience.
But internal diversity, I think, isn't relegated to creative choices. It can get super practical like in this case with Hershey's.
Hershey's found that they were having challenges in their production facilities with efficiency and working up to the quality that they wanted. So, they partnered with their Latino Business Resource Group to develop its first bilingual facility. They realized the problem here is language. So, they built a bilingual facility from the inside out and saw those problems were solved with that need.
If you think that a factory has very little to do with and is a far cry from marketing, you'd be missing out on the immense and genuine opportunity because this facility speaks to Hershey's ability to listen to people whether it's internal in the workforce or external with consumers and find the most impactful solutions.
When internal values line up with externally communicated values through people, whether customers or employees, the cultural co-creation really sings.
The bottom line is that cultural co-creation is the ingredient that lets you execute on the best stories, the truest values, the best ideas that are out there. It's also one of the best ways to bring inclusive marketing 3.0 together.
I think that is what this ad for Uber did. It's called “On Our Way,” and it really brings together the small true moments of real-life resonance, the hard stuff and struggle solidarity.
These vignettes that you're about to see were actually pulled together from Uber riders. So, asking people what they're really experiencing to find those moments that are powerful.
Let's watch this. Let's talk about the components and then let's have some discussion.
[Uber’s “On our way” ad plays at 33:50.]
I think the ad really demonstrates the power of real-life resonance in those little moments. Like the little girl who sees, I assume her family at the spring concerts. The most powerful parts of that ad are the ones that are real, the ones that are lower definition and quality because they're real clips. And I think it's that small stuff that makes the big impact in storytelling. The hard things like we're moving to a new city, trying to meet people, putting yourself out there, getting stood up for a date. And the power that the connection of what Uber does bring people together through rides obviously in transportation, I think we can all relate to that feeling, that emotional resonance that's there.
Like I said, these moments are real because they're real, because they connected with real people to identify those little moments that they might otherwise miss throughout the creation of this ad.
It is time for inclusive marketing to evolve. I think it is hard to argue that it's not. I would argue that these three components at least give us three steps to hold onto, to organize around as we move into this very complicated, very chaotic year and help our brands grow.
So, thank you. I'm going to kick it back over to Joe because I know we might have some questions. I'm going to stop sharing my screen as well and we can get to it and have a little discussion.