Inclusive Brands: What Genuine Representation Costs and Returns

Inclusive brands are businesses that build representation, accessibility, and belonging into their core positioning, not as a campaign layer but as a structural part of how they operate and communicate. The commercial case is straightforward: when more people see themselves in a brand, more people buy it, stay loyal to it, and recommend it to others.

The harder question is not whether inclusion matters commercially. It does. The harder question is what it actually takes to do it without it becoming another form of marketing theatre, and whether most brands are willing to pay that cost.

Why Most Inclusion Efforts Stay at the Surface

When I was running the agency, we had a client in financial services who wanted to reach younger, more diverse audiences. The brief came in asking for “more inclusive creative.” What arrived from their internal team was a set of stock image guidelines and a note about casting diversity in the next TV spot. That was the entire strategy.

The product itself had a minimum deposit requirement that excluded the majority of the audience they claimed to want to reach. The customer service model assumed a level of financial literacy that most first-generation investors did not have. The terms and conditions were written in language that a lawyer would struggle with. None of that was in the brief.

This is the pattern. Inclusion gets assigned to the creative team because it is visible and relatively low-cost to execute at that level. The harder work, aligning product, pricing, service design, and internal culture with the audience you say you want to serve, rarely makes it into the brief. So you get diverse faces in the advertising and an unchanged experience underneath. Audiences notice. Particularly the ones you are claiming to include.

Brand strategy built around positioning signals that the business cannot actually support is a liability, not an asset. The full picture of what brand strategy involves, from positioning and archetypes to the signals that build or erode trust over time, is worth understanding before committing to an inclusion narrative. The brand positioning and archetypes hub covers that territory in more depth.

What Representation in Advertising Actually Does

There is a legitimate and well-documented effect from seeing yourself reflected in a brand’s communication. It signals that the brand considers you a relevant audience, which lowers the psychological distance between you and the product. For categories where trust is a barrier, that signal matters more than in categories where the purchase is low-involvement and habitual.

But representation in advertising is a claim. It says: we see you, you belong here. The experience that follows either validates that claim or exposes it. A brand that shows diverse families in its advertising but has a customer service model built entirely around one cultural norm, or a website that has not been tested for accessibility, or a product range that does not extend to the needs of the audience it is advertising to, has made a claim it cannot support. That gap is where trust breaks down.

I have judged the Effie Awards, and one of the things that separates work that actually moves commercial metrics from work that wins on aesthetics alone is whether the brand has done anything structurally different to earn the position it is claiming. The campaigns that demonstrate genuine effectiveness tend to show a chain of evidence: this is who we wanted to reach, this is what we changed to be credible to them, this is the communication we built on top of that foundation, and this is what moved as a result. The ones that do not tend to show a beautiful execution with no structural change underneath.

The Segments That Inclusive Brands Are Actually Competing For

Part of the reason inclusion gets treated as a values exercise rather than a commercial one is that the segments in question are often underserved, which means they are also underestimated. Categories built around a dominant customer archetype tend to assume that archetype represents the ceiling of the market. It rarely does.

When I was growing the agency from around 20 people to close to 100, one of the things that gave us a genuine competitive edge was that we had built a team of about 20 nationalities. That was not a diversity initiative. It was a commercial decision. We were pitching for clients across Europe and the Middle East, and having people in the room who understood those markets from the inside, who spoke the languages, who had lived the cultural context, was a material advantage. We won work because of it. The positioning as a European hub was credible because the team reflected it.

The same logic applies to consumer brands. If you want to be credible to an audience, you need to understand them from the inside, not approximate them from the outside. That understanding has to start internally before it can be communicated externally.

The commercial opportunity in underserved segments is real and documented. BCG’s work on brand advocacy has consistently shown that word-of-mouth and recommendation behaviour drives outsized returns in segments where trust has historically been low. When a brand earns genuine credibility with an underserved audience, the advocacy effect tends to be stronger than in saturated segments, because the bar was lower to begin with and the supply of credible alternatives is smaller.

Where the Credibility Gap Opens Up

There are three places where inclusive positioning tends to collapse under scrutiny, and they are worth naming directly.

The first is internal representation. A brand that communicates inclusion externally but has a leadership team and workforce that does not reflect that commitment creates a contradiction that is increasingly visible. Employees talk. Glassdoor exists. Journalists and activists look at the gap between external messaging and internal reality. The credibility of an inclusion position is partly a function of whether the organisation behind it has done the internal work.

The second is product and service design. Accessibility is a useful test case here. A brand that runs inclusive advertising but has a website that fails basic accessibility standards, or a physical environment that is not genuinely accessible, is communicating one thing and delivering another. The same applies to product ranges that claim to serve a broad audience but were designed around a narrow one. Cosmetics brands that extended their shade ranges did not do so purely for ethical reasons. They did it because the commercial case was clear, and the brands that did it earliest captured significant loyalty in segments that had been systematically ignored.

The third is consistency over time. Inclusion that appears in June and disappears in July is not a positioning. It is a campaign. Audiences in marginalised segments have become particularly attuned to this pattern, and the backlash when it is perceived as cynical tends to be louder than the goodwill generated by the original campaign. Existing brand-building strategies are under pressure precisely because audiences have become more sophisticated about the gap between what brands say and what they do.

How Inclusive Positioning Affects Brand Equity Over Time

How Inclusive Positioning Affects Brand Equity Over Time

Brand equity is built through consistent, credible signals over time. Inclusion, when it is genuine, adds to brand equity in specific ways that are worth understanding as a strategist rather than as a values advocate.

The first is distinctiveness. In categories where most brands have converged on the same dominant archetype, a brand that credibly serves a broader audience stands out. Distinctiveness is one of the more reliable drivers of brand salience, and salience drives consideration. If you are the brand that a specific segment trusts when no one else has earned that trust, your competitive position in that segment is structurally stronger than any advertising budget can replicate.

The second is loyalty depth. Customers who feel genuinely seen by a brand tend to have higher retention rates and stronger advocacy behaviour. Research on brand loyalty consistently points to emotional resonance as a driver of retention that outperforms rational factors like price and convenience in the long run. Inclusion, when it is credible, generates emotional resonance in segments that have historically been underserved by the category.

The third is insulation from competitive pressure. A brand that owns a genuine position with a specific audience is harder to dislodge than a brand that is competing purely on product features or price. When a competitor enters the market with a better product or a lower price, the brand that has built genuine trust with an audience retains more of that audience than one that has not. The switching cost is not financial. It is relational.

Measuring brand equity, including the components that inclusive positioning contributes to, requires looking beyond last-click attribution and short-term conversion metrics. Brand awareness measurement is one starting point, but the more interesting metrics for inclusive brands tend to be segment-level retention, net promoter scores broken down by demographic, and share of voice within the specific communities you are trying to reach.

The Organisational Conditions That Make It Work

Brands that have made inclusion a durable part of their positioning tend to share a few organisational characteristics that are worth noting.

Ownership sits at the executive level. When inclusion is owned by a diversity and inclusion function that sits outside the commercial and brand leadership, it tends to stay in the values column rather than the strategy column. The brands that have done this well have made it a commercial priority, with a seat at the table in brand strategy conversations, not a separate track that runs in parallel.

There is internal representation to draw on. The insight that makes inclusive communication credible tends to come from people who have lived the experience you are trying to reflect. Brands that hire for this, and then actually listen to those people in the creative and strategy process, produce work that reads as genuine. Brands that hire for it and then override it in the approval process produce work that reads as approximate.

The commitment is reflected in the business model, not just the marketing budget. BCG’s work on the intersection of brand strategy and HR makes a point that is easy to overlook: the alignment between what a brand communicates externally and how it operates internally is not just an ethical consideration. It is a commercial one. Brands that have that alignment retain employees better, attract better talent, and produce more consistent customer experiences. All of those factors compound into brand equity over time.

One of the harder lessons from running agencies is that the work that looks effortless externally is almost always the product of significant internal alignment. The campaigns that feel genuinely inclusive tend to come from organisations where that alignment exists, where the brief reflects a real commercial commitment rather than a communications brief dressed up as strategy.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A few markers distinguish brands that are building inclusion into their positioning from those that are performing it.

They have defined which audiences they are committing to and why. Not a vague commitment to diversity, but a specific commercial decision about which underserved segments represent a genuine opportunity, and what it would take to earn credibility with those segments. That specificity is what separates a positioning from a sentiment.

They have audited the gap between their current experience and the experience they are claiming to offer. Product accessibility, pricing structure, service model, content accessibility, language and tone in communications, and the cultural assumptions built into the customer experience. That audit tends to be uncomfortable. It should be.

They measure the right things. Reach and impressions tell you how many people saw the communication. Segment-level retention, advocacy rates within target communities, and share of voice in the spaces where those communities gather tell you whether the positioning is working. Brand advocacy measurement has become more sophisticated, and the brands that take it seriously tend to have a clearer picture of whether their inclusion investment is generating commercial returns.

They do not stop when the campaign ends. The brands that have built durable inclusive positions treat it as a permanent feature of how they operate, not a seasonal activation. That consistency is what turns a campaign into a position.

If you are working through how inclusion fits into a broader brand positioning framework, the thinking on archetypes, positioning signals, and what makes a brand position durable over time is covered across the articles in the brand strategy section.

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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