Healing the Divide
Finding the win-win in your marketing
By Samira Brophy • 15 mins read
Division – specifically, the weaponisation of it – is a major issue for us all as we approach the close of 2024. It is also presenting profound challenges for marketers, notably the way division impacts efforts to execute responsible marketing. But in these challenges lie opportunities, too.
Key takeaways:
1
The weaponisation of division in society is harmful to us all. There is both an urgent need as well as a business imperative for more nuance, trust and responsibility in the actions of our industry.
2
In the Ipsos Creative|Spark ad testing database, advertising scoring high vs. low on inclusive & non-traditional portrayals of women, men or people of colour, have a significant advantage on measures of attention, sales lift and brand equity.
3
An analysis of Effie UK Award winners 2021-2023 inc. showed that an Effie Gold award winning agency is 7.2% more diverse than the industry with an apparent positive correlation between agency diversity and award level achieved.
Let’s take a look at some case studies which highlight important lessons for any brand wanting to help heal the divide.
Boots recognised that the menopause isn’t the same for all women and has a large range of products and services to support them, however unique their experience is. The Boots No7 brand needed to reverse a decline in penetration and reconnect with their heartland audience of 45+ women.
Ikea celebrated 10 years of their ‘the wonderful everyday’ by showing us how we can elevate our daily lives, encouraging us to inject creativity and wonder into our homes. They leaned into the growing appeal of dupe culture and financial pragmatism stemming from a cost-of-living crisis with the ‘Show Off Your Savvy’ campaign.
Vanish gave center stage to a young girl with autism to dramatize the role of their product in a beautifully natural way. The once the go-to stain-remover, had fallen into long-term decline after being undermined by improved mainstream detergents and throwaway fast-fashion.
In 2019, HSBC made a choice to build fame and have unique point of view on Modern Britain as a UK bank with a truly international perspective. This point of view has been a red thread for the brand the last 6 years.
Representation in advertising drives social inclusion and creates a sense of cohesion (who is seen and how they are depicted). Doubling down on portraying intersectional communities in our work is urgent and vital.
Ali Hanan
CEO, Creative Equals
Instability, inflation and covid recovery – the convergence of multiple interconnected crises around the world that coincide with and amplify each other, causing hard to resolve systemic challenges, have become the norm over the past few years.
As a result, the use of division as a weapon is now a major theme in today’s culture and politics as people scramble for a sense of control. This is having a powerful and significant knock-on impact when it comes to people’s attitude and outlook.
Ipsos Global Trends 20241 data shows that 47% of people in Great Britain and 49% of people in the US agree with the statement that “within my lifetime society in my country will break down”. Given effective marketing reflects and shapes society, what does increasing division mean for marketers?
Perhaps it is time for us to take more responsibility for healing divisions.
In recent years, marketeers seem to have made efforts to do things more responsibly – ensuring their marketing is more representative and more sustainable. But with division now a weapon, achieving this has never been more challenging.
The World Federation of Advertisers’ decision to discontinue the activities of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media2 – the not-for-profit working to reduce availability and monetisation of harmful content online – following an anti-trust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X is a significant setback to responsible marketing.
Combined with DEI rollbacks3, this is especially worrying at a time when the world needs less division and more collaboration and empathy to solve collective problems such as harmful online content, climate change and food security.
But this also underlines the importance of the role marketing can play. It points to a pressing need for marketers to take more interest in and more responsibility for healing divisions.
Brands have a remit for positive change. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of people who agreed with the statement “Politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars”1 rose by 39%4. Further, 57% agreed that it is appropriate for brands to communicate their stance on inclusion and diversity issues.
Meanwhile, despite advertising executives sitting towards the bottom of the Ipsos Veracity index5 of trusted professionals for several years, a positive change in this ranking for ad execs since the last study suggests it is possible to build back trust – trust in marketing and trust in what marketers say and sell.
Marketers are ideally placed to build and re-build the core components of the antidote to division: trust, empathy, a sense of control, connection and collaboration. With 23%6 of Brits saying they are expecting to live to a 100, there is much to play for.
Finding the win-win in your marketing
It’s time to re-think marketing and start to challenge the status quo in a way that heals fractures and bridges divides. Doing this well will be a win-win – for businesses and for society.
Re-thinking representation in marketing means getting off the ground floor and elevating our approach to unlocking inclusion – an important key to healing division.
The Ground Floor: Normalising a more inclusive / less divided society
On the ground floor, when it comes to representation in advertising, the advertising world are not doing too badly.
There has been positive progress when it comes to showing women and people of colour in a primary role, for example. But when it comes to reflecting disability and over 65s in the ad and media landscape there is still a way to go.
Addressing this better will help people from different backgrounds, abilities and perspectives feel they are seen and part of the mainstream fabric of society.
To create an outsized advantage for their brand, however, marketers need to advance beyond representation and think about genuine active inclusion.
To create an outsized advantage for their brand, however, marketers need to advance beyond representation and think about genuine active inclusion.
Riding the Elevator: Active inclusion
Active inclusion means not just showing diverse characters but treating them with more respect and nuance than ‘normal’.
Non-traditional representation of women as business owners, STEM professionals or athletes, is one example of this. Non-traditional representation of men as empathetic and highly expressive or taking the time to show the nuance in diversity is another (for more on this, read A Woman’s Worth and Making Belonging Joyful).
Meta-analysis of thousands of ads in the Ipsos Creative|Spark7 ad testing database shows positive sales lift and equity share gain business effects when we go above and beyond representation into active inclusion. The difference in effectiveness measures between high vs. low scoring ads on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Indices range are +10% for Attention, +55% for sales lift measures and +43% for potential equity share gain.
Non-traditional male and female portrayals achieve the same sort of positive shifts using Ipsos’ Gender Equality MeasureTM (GEM).
This pattern of results may be broadly generalisable across different subgroups because ultimately, it comes down to treating your characters and audience with empathy and respect.
Analysis of thousands of ads shows positive sales lift when we go above and beyond representation into active inclusion.
An Effie Gold award-winning agency is 7.2% more diverse than the industry average when gender and B.A.M.E. representation are factored in, according to analysis of Effie UK Award winners (2021-2023 inc.).
There also appears to be a positive correlation between agency diversity and award level achieved. Although this analysis is still in its early stages, it suggests a link between inclusive teams and effective marketing.
In a country that is ‘sick, sad and confused’ there is desperate need for cohesion. So, for those brands that chose to help us see we have more in common than divides us there is a powerful dividend - to be part of the renewal of pride in who we are and what we can be together.
Richard Huntington
Chief Strategy Officer, Saatchi & Saatchi
Case studies
How to elevate our thinking about inclusion – and the potential of doing so – is powerfully demonstrated by the award-winning work of this year’s Effie UK finalists. Let’s look at some case studies to see how inclusive advertising can drive effectiveness.
In summary
As marketers we make intentional choices daily to reflect or shape society and its aspirations. Countering division with responsible marketing is a good commercial decision in the short term while safeguarding business for the long term. Responsible marketing is not just a socially motivated aim, it is a position of long-term safeguarding of the business context as well as highly capable of brand building in the short to midterm.
Intentional choices to heal division and normalise differences can be applied to marketing in many ways from how you price products, deliver your service/offer and shape expectations of your brand. While anger might drive short term engagement in a social, algorithm driven world (see our piece on Evolving Aspirations for more on this), empathy can create long lasting business effects as evidenced by some of our featured case studies.
Our top tips for getting it right are:
1
Be true to the facts: Consumer insight and its role in making your marketing more effective is more critical than ever. Listening to and staying focused on consumer needs, balanced against your organisations’ capability to deliver against them is key. Consumer insight to illuminate and guide decision-making is a superpower. Boots truly heard their audience and were able to deliver a highly effective programme through an empathetic, audience-first approach vs. sensational or brand-first one.
2
Be true to the people: We are less progressive or nuanced in our showcasing of people than we might think and this makes richer story telling one of the many gifts of moving beyond representation into genuine inclusion. In our piece on female portrayal, we saw from the Ipsos Spark Ad testing database that women shown as athletes, STEM professionals, Business owners or artists are all in the low single figures. There is plenty of headroom to up our game and be rewarded with people’s attention for the way we show different groups of people in less conventional ways or settings. Vanish did a beautiful job of this in “Me, My Autism & I” which shone a light on the gender diagnosis gap in autism and normalised the disorder through the story of Ash and her family’s real life.
3
Be true to the brand: This final piece is fundamental. It is important to find the connection between your brand/service and the specific area of division you want to address. Coming at it without a credible or ownable position runs the risk of tokenism, inauthenticity as well as not being effective. An analysis of Sustainability ads in the Ipsos Creative Spark Database8 shows that ads with strong brand integration are significantly more effective than ads where the brand has a weaker link or is seen as a ‘sponsor’. Ikea and HSBC in the case studies are two great examples of how the brand values are central to the idea and is the red thread whether you execute it with seriousness or joy.
Sources
1. Ipsos Global Trends Data 2024.
2. WFA Makes Difficult Decision To Discontinue GARM Following X Lawsuit. Marketing Week Aug 9 2024.
3. Does DEI Still Matter? Bloomberg. Feb 15 2024.
4. UKs culture wars divisions exaggerated but real, say Public. Ipsos X Kings Policy Institute. 2023, Base: 3,716 UK adults aged 16+, 17-23 Aug 2023. 2020, Base: 2,834 UK adults aged 16+, 25 Nov – 2 Dec 2020.
Get in touch
Samira Brophy
Senior Director, Ipsos samira.brophy@ipsos.com
Samira is an Ipsos expert on brand and communication work, with 20 years of experience spanning creative and research roles. She leads Ipsos’ earlystage campaign development offer, is a thought leader on ad effectiveness, and works with clients to adopt a misfit mindset and make bolder, highly creative campaigns that audiences value.
