Webinar:
The Importance of Authentic and Inclusive Marketing Communication

Welcome and introductions

Rik from Ambassify opens the session and hands over to Johan van Mol, founder of No-Kno, a diversity and inclusion analytics platform that helps brands measure who actually appears in their marketing assets. The session is structured in two parts: Johan on inclusive marketing, then Rik on how employee advocacy amplifies authentic messaging.

Representation in marketing isn't new, but the audience has changed

Johan opens with a simple point: representing your target audience has been done forever in marketing. If you sold a family car, you showed a family. If you sold cruises, you showed an older well-off couple. What's changed is the audience itself.

The traditional marketing key demographic, the white nuclear family aimed at by classic ads, is now about 20% of the Belgian population (and roughly similar across Western Europe). The other 80% includes ethnic diversity, age diversity, and very different family compositions. The cliché "mum, dad, son, daughter" household is less than 10% of Belgian households today.

Attitudes have also shifted, especially after COVID. People started showing themselves in full "goblin mode". Authenticity, relatability, and vulnerability have replaced the unattainable beauty standards of the Mad Men era.

A vivid example: in 2001, a Duval Guillaume award-winning campaign used a "big, hairy, balding guy" as the laughing stock. Twenty-three years later, an equally award-winning campaign for a German beer used the same kind of man as a sex symbol. Pamela Anderson plays the same role from the opposite direction. In the nineties she was the sex symbol for looking unnaturally polished. Today she's a role model for showing up at events with no makeup. The zeitgeist moved, not Anderson.

Why "shoehorning" diversity backfires

Advertisers are adapting, but often clumsily. A UK study found that brands trying too hard to demonstrate diversity, by shoehorning minorities into ads where they don't fit the context, get a negative response. Audiences sense the inauthenticity.

Campaigns that highlight a specific underrepresented group (LGBT campaigns from postal services, Toyota using Paralympic athletes, Nike using different body types) have their place. But they can also provoke mixed reactions, including from the communities being represented. Inside any community, there's diversity. Not everyone is waiting to be the subject of a "special campaign".

Normalisation, the approach most underrepresented groups actually want

No-Kno's qualitative research found a clear pattern. Most underrepresented and underserved groups want normalisation: being represented in normal situations, not just in identity-themed campaigns.

"People want to be seen in ads where the ad isn't about their identity."

Johan praises a Colruyt campaign for handling this well. Instead of mixing a Belgian family and a Moroccan-Belgian family into a single forced setup, Colruyt showed each family separately, in authentic everyday situations. Belgian Muslims weren't represented only during Ramadan campaigns. They were just there, doing normal things.

A Nike ad showing forty to sixty women of different body types, sizes, and skin colours hit a similar note. Respondents in No-Kno's research saw it as a cross-section of society. There's also a "yellow car effect": if you own a yellow car, you suddenly notice them everywhere. People zoom in on the figures who look like them and feel represented.

Not every brand can afford forty models per ad. With limited resources, the best move is to show an atypical cast. The Belgian postal service (bpost) recruited truck drivers using two people who don't look like the cliché trucker. Audiences not only believed the ad, they believed the people in it actually worked at bpost. An Amazon recruitment campaign Johan worked on used a similar approach. Focus group members spontaneously said "everybody is welcome at Amazon" without being prompted. When asked how they knew, they pointed to specific people in the video, including a man with a neck tattoo who many viewers remembered.

The business case for inclusive marketing

A growing body of research shows inclusive marketing pays off:

• Wunderman Thompson: 63% of consumers from underrepresented groups say they would buy from brands that make an effort to represent them.
• Google: 64% of consumers who saw ads they considered diverse and inclusive acted on them.
• Unstereotype Alliance (UN Women): a recent landmark study of 392 brands across 58 countries over four years found a 3.5% short-term sales uplift and over 16% long-term sales performance change from inclusive advertising. Johan calls this "the seminal study" and recommends downloading it.
• Ulster University: in a performance-marketing experiment with four versions of an ad (younger man, older man, younger woman, older woman), age-gender congruence predicted click behaviour. Older men click on older men. Older women click on older women. Younger men on younger men. Younger women on younger women. People click on people who look like them.

The gaps the No-Kno platform keeps surfacing

No-Kno ingests brand assets (social posts, videos, website images) and uses AI to measure who actually appears, by age, gender, ethnicity, disability, and certain stereotypes. The team also runs a pro-bono monthly scan of the top 1,000 Belgian ads by media spend, called the Ad Diversity Barometer. A few patterns appear consistently:

• Age underrepresentation. People over 45 are systematically underused in advertising, even though they hold more than 50% of buying power.
• Gender skew within age. Women in advertising are roughly ten years younger than men on average. Women over 55 are virtually invisible. In the 18-24 age bracket, 40% more women than men appear. In 55-64, 40% fewer women than men.
• One-dimensional "diversity". A beauty sector example: brands celebrate body positivity and ethnic diversity, but 77% of the talent used is under 35. The women over 35 (the ones with more money to spend on creams) barely appear.
• Big campaigns vs. organic social. One car brand showed 100% women in its above-the-line advertising, but its organic social media was 80% men. When the gap between brand campaigns and what employees actually post becomes too wide, the campaigns start to smell like tokenism.
• Context-driven stereotypes. A brand that sponsors both sport and culture showed 35% Black representation in its sports content but almost 100% white in its culture content. The fix isn't different pictures, it's a different sponsoring strategy. Cultural sponsorship that targets only highbrow events naturally produces less ethnic diversity than sport.

"If you don't measure it, you don't know what you're doing."

The Bud Light case, and what to actually learn from it

A predictable question Johan gets: what about Bud Light? Bud Light's collaboration with a trans influencer sparked controversy in the US, the brand dragged its feet in responding, fired the marketing manager, then got backlash from the LGBT community in turn. Sales dropped 30% for three months.

Johan's view: Bud Light created the perfect storm themselves. For decades, their marketing was pickup trucks, American football, barbecues, and country music. Then suddenly a single highly polarising campaign in a topic that's contested in the US. That isn't inclusive marketing. That's switching brand voice overnight.

"If Nike had done that campaign, nobody would have said anything. You need a history of inclusive marketing. You can't just jump on the bandwagon."

The second mistake was dragging their feet. Brands that stand firm in the face of criticism suffer much less damage. Outrage usually passes quickly when the response is steady.

Guidelines that fall out of this:

• Don't look for controversy unless that's actually your brand.
• Check outside your bubble. In Johan's bubble, certain topics aren't controversial. In other bubbles they very much are. Marketers need to know which.
• Use non-aggressive framing. "We fight for climate justice" reads as confrontational in some audiences. "We want to secure a healthy environment for our children" lands across all of them. The substance is the same, the framing isn't.
• Have a code of conduct and a plan for when things go wrong. Especially when employees appear in your campaigns, everyone needs to know what happens if criticism arrives. Standing by your employees matters for both their safety and your reputation as an employer.

A useful Belgian resource: respectfulranting.org, a site with tools and tips for social media managers handling difficult situations.

Inclusivity has to be more than ads

Final point from Johan: action speaks louder than words. Nike is known for inclusive advertising, but inclusive marketing only works if it sits alongside inclusive products, an inclusive retail experience, and inclusive employer practice. The marketing director of Albert Heijn told Johan their inclusive marketing isn't the result of a niche-market study. It's downstream of wanting to reflect society. An inclusive workflow automatically leads to inclusive campaigns.

"Being an inclusive brand isn't just a brand thing. It's your product offering, your customer experience, and your employee experience."

Related Pages & Posts

• Employee Advocacy Platform
• Securex Use Case
• Infrabel