Cultural Marketing: How Inclusivity Drives Commercial Growth

Cultural marketing done well is not about representation for its own sake. It is about reaching people your brand has systematically ignored, earning their trust, and building the kind of commercial relationships that compound over time. Done poorly, it is a campaign that alienates the audience it claims to serve while embarrassing the brand in front of everyone else.

The difference between those two outcomes is not intention. Most brands that get it wrong had good intentions. The difference is strategy: how deeply you understand the cultures you are trying to connect with, how honestly your organisation reflects those communities, and whether your marketing is the start of something real or a thin veneer over business as usual.

Why Cultural Marketing Is a Growth Lever, Not a Values Exercise

Early in my career I spent a lot of time focused on the bottom of the funnel. Conversion rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. The logic felt airtight: find people who are close to buying and push them over the line. It took me longer than I would like to admit to fully internalise that a large proportion of what we were crediting to performance marketing was going to happen anyway. We were capturing intent that already existed, not creating it.

Cultural marketing, when it works, does the opposite. It reaches people who were not already considering your brand. It builds familiarity, trust, and relevance in communities that your competitors have not bothered to understand. That is a genuine growth opportunity, not a PR exercise.

The commercial logic is straightforward. If your brand has historically skewed toward one demographic, the audiences you have underserved represent real, addressable market expansion. Reaching them requires cultural fluency, not just media budget. And that fluency takes time to build, which means the brands that invest now create a durable advantage over those that wait until the category forces their hand.

If you are thinking about how inclusive marketing fits within a broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks that connect audience development to revenue outcomes.

What Authentic Cultural Marketing Actually Requires

The word “authentic” gets used so often in this context that it has almost stopped meaning anything. So let me be specific about what it actually requires in practice.

When I was running an agency and we were pitching inclusive campaign work, clients would sometimes show us their diversity and inclusion policy as evidence that they were ready. A policy is not a culture. What matters is who is in the room when the brief is written, who has sign-off on the creative, and whether anyone from the communities being targeted has a meaningful voice in the work before it goes to production.

Authenticity is structural. A campaign written by a team with no lived connection to the culture it is representing, approved by a leadership team with no meaningful diversity, and then handed to an external creative agency to execute is not authentic marketing. It is a simulation of authentic marketing, and audiences, particularly those who have been misrepresented before, can feel the difference.

This does not mean brands cannot do cultural marketing unless they have perfect internal representation. It means the process matters as much as the output. Genuine community consultation, cultural advisors with real influence rather than token involvement, and willingness to hear uncomfortable feedback before launch are all part of what separates credible cultural marketing from performative gesture.

The Difference Between Cultural Fluency and Cultural Appropriation

This is where a lot of brands stumble, and where the commercial risk of getting it wrong is highest. The line between cultural fluency and cultural appropriation is not always obvious, but there are some reliable indicators.

Cultural fluency means understanding a community deeply enough to communicate with them in ways that feel natural rather than forced. It means knowing the references, the history, the tensions within the culture, and the things that would land as tone-deaf. It requires sustained engagement with that community, not a pre-campaign briefing session.

Cultural appropriation, in a marketing context, tends to happen when a brand takes the aesthetics or symbols of a culture to make itself look interesting or relevant, without any genuine relationship to that culture, and without the community benefiting from the association. The simplest test: is the community you are drawing from represented in the business, and do they benefit commercially from the work? If the answer to both is no, the risk is high.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the things that became clear when evaluating culturally-led campaigns is that the work that wins, and that drives genuine business results, tends to come from brands with a long-standing relationship to the communities they are speaking to. The campaigns that feel opportunistic rarely perform as well commercially, even when they avoid outright backlash.

How to Build a Cultural Marketing Strategy That Holds Up

There is no single template for this, but there are principles that apply consistently across categories and markets.

Start with audience research that goes beyond demographics. Demographic data tells you who someone is on paper. Cultural insight tells you what they value, what frustrates them, what they aspire to, and how they relate to brands in your category. These are different things. A 35-year-old South Asian woman in London and a 35-year-old South Asian woman in Birmingham may share demographic characteristics but have meaningfully different cultural reference points. Generic multicultural marketing that treats communities as monoliths tends to miss both.

Map your brand’s earned cultural credibility honestly. Where does your brand already have a genuine relationship with diverse communities? Where are you starting from scratch? The strategy for deepening an existing relationship is different from the strategy for building a new one. Trying to appear credible in a cultural space you have no history in requires a longer runway and more humility than most campaign timelines allow for.

Invest in media channels that reach the communities you want to connect with. This sounds obvious, but many brands claim to be pursuing inclusive marketing while their media plans are almost entirely skewed toward mainstream channels. Working with creators who have genuine cultural authority within specific communities is one of the most effective ways to build relevance quickly. Creator-led go-to-market strategies have evolved significantly, and the best practitioners understand how to match creator credibility to brand objectives without compromising either.

Do not treat cultural moments as campaign hooks without earned context. Pride Month, Black History Month, Diwali, Eid: these are moments when brands with genuine community relationships can deepen them. They are also moments when brands without those relationships expose themselves to criticism that can follow them for years. If your brand has done nothing to support a community throughout the year, a campaign in their cultural moment reads as opportunism. The audience you are trying to reach will notice, and they will say so.

Make sure the product and service experience reflects the marketing. This is the test I come back to more than any other. I have seen brands run beautifully executed inclusive campaigns and then deliver a product experience that completely undermines the message. A beauty brand that celebrates diversity in its advertising but only stocks a narrow shade range. A financial services brand that talks about serving underrepresented communities but whose product terms make those communities less likely to qualify. The marketing creates an expectation that the business then has to meet. If it cannot, the campaign does more damage than silence would have.

Measuring Cultural Marketing Without Fooling Yourself

Measurement is where cultural marketing strategies often fall apart, not because the results are not there, but because the measurement frameworks are not designed to capture them.

If you measure an inclusive marketing campaign using the same metrics you use for a performance campaign, you will almost certainly undervalue it. Cultural marketing tends to operate across a longer time horizon. It builds brand perception, shifts associations, and creates the kind of familiarity that makes future performance activity more effective. None of that shows up cleanly in a 30-day attribution window.

The metrics worth tracking include new audience acquisition rates within target communities, brand perception shifts among those communities measured through tracking studies, share of voice in cultural conversations, and longer-term revenue contribution from demographic segments you were previously underperforming in. That last one requires patience and a business intelligence function willing to slice data by customer segment rather than just by channel.

The broader challenge of making marketing measurement honest rather than just flattering is something I have written about in more depth in the growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice. The same principles apply here: you need measurement that approximates reality, not measurement that confirms what you wanted to believe before the campaign launched.

There is also a useful parallel in how organisations approach agile working and measurement maturity. Forrester’s work on agile scaling highlights how measurement frameworks need to evolve as organisations take on more complex, longer-cycle initiatives. Cultural marketing is exactly that kind of initiative.

The Organisational Conditions That Make This Work

I have seen cultural marketing strategies fail not because the marketing was bad, but because the organisation was not ready to support them. A campaign that promises something the business cannot deliver is worse than no campaign at all. It raises expectations and then disappoints them in a context where the audience already had reasons to be sceptical.

The organisations that do this well tend to have a few things in common. Leadership that treats inclusive marketing as a business priority rather than a compliance exercise. Internal diversity that gives them access to genuine cultural insight rather than approximations of it. A willingness to move slowly enough to get it right, rather than rushing to market with something that has not been properly tested with the communities it is meant to serve.

There is also a commercial patience required that not every business can sustain. Building cultural credibility in a community your brand has not historically served takes time. The first campaign will not pay back on a short-cycle ROI model. The brands that make it work are the ones that treat it as infrastructure investment, not a campaign budget line.

BCG’s research on understanding the evolving needs of diverse populations in financial services makes this point well in a sector context: the commercial opportunity in underserved communities is significant, but capturing it requires a fundamentally different go-to-market approach, not just a different creative execution.

What Growth-Stage Brands Get Wrong That Established Brands Get Right

Growth-stage brands often approach cultural marketing with more urgency than patience. They want the audience, they want it now, and they want the campaign to prove ROI within the quarter. That pressure produces exactly the kind of shallow, opportunistic cultural marketing that generates backlash.

The irony is that growth-stage brands are often better positioned to build genuine cultural credibility than established ones, precisely because they have less history to overcome. They can make structural decisions about who they hire, whose voices they centre in product development, and which communities they build relationships with from the beginning. That is a genuine competitive advantage if they use it deliberately.

Established brands face a different challenge. They have existing brand associations that may actively work against them in certain communities. Overcoming that requires more than a campaign. It requires a sustained programme of action, visible enough to shift perceptions, consistent enough to be credible, and commercially real enough to survive leadership changes and budget cycles. That is a much harder problem to solve, and the brands that solve it tend to be the ones where the commitment comes from the top of the organisation rather than from the marketing team alone.

Understanding how go-to-market execution differs by company stage is something the Vidyard team has written about in the context of why GTM feels harder than it used to. The underlying dynamics they describe, fragmented audiences, harder-to-reach buyers, more competition for attention, apply directly to the challenge of reaching culturally distinct communities.

The Commercial Case, Made Plainly

I want to end on the commercial argument, because I think it gets obscured by the values conversation that tends to surround inclusive marketing.

If your brand is underperforming with significant demographic segments, you have a growth problem. Cultural marketing is one of the tools available to address it. Like any marketing tool, it works when it is applied with strategic discipline and fails when it is applied carelessly. The fact that it also happens to be the right thing to do does not make it less commercial. It makes it more so, because the brands that get this right will have durable relationships with growing audiences, while the brands that get it wrong will be repairing reputational damage for years.

The growth opportunity is real. The risk of execution failure is real. The answer to both is the same: do the work properly, invest in understanding before you invest in production, and make sure your business can deliver on what your marketing promises.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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