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Trump wasted no time: on Day 2, years of progress in the field of Diversity (DE&I) were largely erased. This trend was already visible in marketing: From drag queens to anti-woke: brands are reversing diversity. This article of mine was the most read on Dutch blogsite Frankwatching last year: over 15,000 marketers wanted to know more about this.

Diverse or woke?

Diversity has now become almost mandatory in your marketing plan or media mix – it’s contemporary, socially responsible, and also good for your corporate culture and your bottom line. Millennials and GenZ almost demand this. Brands and organizations have no less than 4 reasons to put diversity into practice, plus two bonus reasons. So, a win-win?

But how do you, as a marketer or advertiser, deal with cultural sensitivities? How do you prevent “get woke, go broke” from becoming a reality? To start with the latter: don’t worry, that’s not going to happen; that contemptuous attitude about “woke” comes from the last remnants of ignoramuses who still think that marketing should only be about the product and that companies should refrain from social involvement. That might have been the case in 1974, but not anymore. Go ahead and get woke, but do it right. Even though that’s no longer the trend in the US.

An example of a clip that went viral some time ago, but had a cultural impact and provoked (religious) outrage.

Mexico

It came from Mexico from Doritos: “It’s never too late to be who you are.”

Doritos had long had a somewhat dubious reputation in the field of Marketing the Rainbow (lots of gay vague and gay tease over the years, see separate case study). But in 2020, they had promised not to engage in pinkwashing by only latching onto a Pride Parade or LGBT day, but to continuously pay attention to rainbow diversity with #PrideAllYear. Pure brand loading, where the product is sometimes only shown briefly for a few seconds. For All Souls’ Day (November 2nd), we saw a Pixar-like short film about a family in the cemetery, where Uncle Albert has his post-mortem coming out. The mater familias receives this with joy, after which the whole family is happy.

The video was viewed even more times on their own channel than “The best gift” from the year before (18 million times in 2 weeks, compared to 14 million in 2020). But the reception was more negative. People blamed Pepsico for appropriating an important Mexican religious holiday with an LGBT theme. It was even argued that this day originated from the time of the Aztecs, so ‘deeply rooted in Mexican culture and history’… but that was a month-long festival that took place in August. If you’re going to criticize, at least make sure your facts are correct.

On the Doritos channel, the like:dislike ratio was still positive 45K:17K, but on my channel, there were 4x as many dislikes as likes. This is mainly because I added English subtitles, which mainly attracted American trolls who – with 50K views and over 800 comments – wanted to interfere with what was happening south of the border.

My question to you: are you allowed to use or even ‘bend’ cultural values for your advertising expressions? And was this done deliberately here to go viral? Because of course, that (expensive!) clip was first run through all kinds of focus groups.

Conclusion

Sensitivities in advertising, whether it concerns overweight people, people with a different skin color, or LGBT people, will often evoke negative reactions – even more so when it comes to cultural aspects or things that (seem to) touch religion. Some companies aspire to that, others want to prevent it. I think you don’t have to look for the lowest common denominator to achieve an effect that contributes positively to your image. As Oscar Wilde already said:

Alfred Verhoeven is a marketer and is in the final phase of his PhD research Marketing the Rainbow.
He previously wrote for ILOVEGAY about From Representation To Respect, The Musk Effect, Pride Month, The Oldest Rainbows, The Dutch Rainbows, The Belgian Rainbows, The Chinese Rainbows, Super Bowl Ads: What Would Jesus Do?, Get woke, go broke, Spain has 6.8 billion reasons to love rainbow tourists, Everyone’s gay in Amsterdam, Gay Capital, The Ideal Traveler, Abercrombie & Fitch : The Rise & The Fall, Barbiemania, Bud Light and the 4 bln dollar woman, Pronouns, About those rainbows, Alphabet soup, M&M’s and the lesbian invasion, The Men from Atlantis, 5 Bizarre LGBT Videos, TRANSparency, Transgender persons as a target group, 5 videos that went viral, Cultural sensitivities and social involvement in marketing, and 4 reasons to practice diversity.