Design a marketing strategy

  • 10 minutes

Design an inclusive marketing strategy

Employing the following five principles can help ignite your inclusive marketing design. This approach provides an easy way to understand, explore, and synthesize the elements that speak to your customers. Helping guide you through discovering the concepts that resonate and bind everyone through shared human values.

Natural synergy

A natural synergy can be described as something that speaks to a brand’s mission, is authentic, and there's an obvious alignment that becomes a natural extension of the brand. When the Surface team looked at a wide range of stories to show a diverse representation for their campaign, they were seeking synergy between the stories and the Surface attributes. For example, Maurice Harris’s work aligned perfectly to attributes like precision, beauty and high performance. This alignment needed to make sense and Maurice’s work needed to be a natural extension of the brand attributes.

Deep customer knowledge

It's vital to understand all audiences. There are many ways to access deep and detailed customer information. You can gather it through formal research that your company funds, through employee sourced experiences, or employee research groups. When these groups review creative content or provide insights into how they use a product, it can bring unique and valuable input. The goal is to be diligent about who your customers are to gain critical information to inform your approach and design.

Lead by example

What we market outside of a company, needs to be a 100% authentic reflection of what is on the inside. Understanding that we aren’t perfect, that we're on a journey, and we're always trying to learn and do better. For example, if we're planning to market to an indigenous business association. We also need to look at what we are doing within the business to support indigenous employees. Our story on the inside is owning up to what we are doing on the outside. Coming to a place of authenticity within your organization supports an alignment in your outward facing campaign.

Design for the edges

This concept isn't limited to product design, it extends to marketing and can be brought to life through storytelling. The Surface example with Maurice Harris’s work also depicts an individual who rose to success despite the adversity he faced being a floral sculpture artist and a Black, gay man. He's representative of intersectionality and success. He exemplifies someone who is doing the extraordinary things that align to finding your authentic voice and being an underdog who rose up. When you seek and understand the edges, design for one becomes a design for all. Binding people together through common human values.

Benevolent brand attribute

Asking the question, what part of your brand can serve a higher purpose? This becomes the guiding WHAT for how you design your experiences, brand, and marketing. It empowers every marketer on the planet to reach more, designing with everyone in mind. Ensuring that you aren't making an average solution. This also connects back to the idea of seeking the edge of ability or society, understanding the common solution that everyone really loves and can get behind, this is where resonance happens.