Avoid Tokenizing: Get Over Your Marketing Tactics & Build a Better Culture
Maybe it’s because clients and consumers are demanding it. Maybe it’s because there are more and more examples of how it is good for business. Perhaps it’s because CEOs of some of the largest corporations are joining the conversation. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: brands are increasingly talking about and portraying diversity in their marketing and communications.
To be clear: this is welcome progress that is sorely needed and long overdue. At the same time, given the promotional nature of most brand assets and communication platforms, it’s important to handle such initiatives with care to ensure the impacts are as positive as initially intended. Representing diversity externally in the absence of real commitment or gains rings hollow.
While many organizations have worked diligently to create diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) strategies that permeate their organizations, others have a long (long) way to go. For those brands sorely lacking demonstrable gains - or even those with well-intentioned plans that have yet to make progress - talking a big game on diversity in your marketing can be more of a liability than an asset, let alone a sign of any real improvement.
What Tokenizing Can Look Like
Tokenizing happens in the workplace when efforts to show diversity through employee examples are merely symbolic, rather than a true representation of the organization. Or, in many instances, they result from the desire of marketers to portray diversity without thought to the impact those requests have on employees asked to participate.
Some examples might include:
Inviting your five BIPOC employees to be included in every marketing photoshoot in a company with hundreds of racially homogeneous employees.
Only asking female employees about the importance of work-life balance when creating content to promote your employer brand.
Asking an Asian-American employee to speak to the experience of all Asian Americans in a video for Asian American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month.
To some, these examples may seem innocent on the surface, but tokenizing diminishes an employee’s value and undermines their inherent talents.
Negative Consequences for Employees
Tokenizing does not lead to lasting change or contribute meaningfully to a cultural shift in your company. Instead of empowering individuals, it categorizes them and makes them feel singled-out rather than included. It can take away from a person’s sense of individuality, uniqueness, and feeling seen and valued for who they are.
According to research conducted by Marla Baskerville Watkins of Northeastern University, tokenized employees have increased fear of portraying stereotypes, feel added performance pressure, and can often feel lonely or alone at work. These types of results are bad for both the organization’s culture and its bottom line.
Negative Consequences for Your Audiences
Tokenizing certain employees or certain classes of employees can have negative external implications as well. Why? Because it risks telling your audiences a story that doesn’t accurately represent your organization.
For example, a private school might include diverse students on its admissions materials when, in fact, their campus is predominantly white. Or a hospitality company could utilize paid talent in commercials to showcase the diversity they aim to host at their lodging accommodations but have not recognized in their guests. In both cases, customers looking for a diverse experience may be quite surprised when they arrive and discover that they’ve been lured in by tokenism.
That initial reaction is a lasting one, and it leaves external audiences with the impression that a brand is more interested in using a perception of diversity to its advantage than investing in true diversity and inclusion. The result? A presumably well-intentioned marketing decision ends up alienating audiences and eroding some of your brand’s reputation.
Try This Instead
Regardless of how skilled your marketing and communication team may be, efforts that tokenize employees will do more harm than good. If it feels like you’re at risk of going this route, try these things instead:
Ask Tough Questions: Marketers and communicators must be strategic partners within their organization. When formulating campaigns with a diversity component, they need to make sure to ask the tough questions. What are our actual commitments to diversity and inclusion and what have we accomplished? Does our outward messaging reflect who we really are? Are we leaning too much on individuals to tell this message? Do employees want to help us tell this message?
Asking questions like these might initially seem jarring or prickly, but these answers will likely be surprising and valuable. Bottom line: authenticity is key to growing equity for your brand. Faking it won’t make it on topics that matter. Any effort to grow your brand reputation - or that could harm it - needs to be carefully examined.
Listen: It shouldn’t be assumed that employees will welcome participation in marketing efforts around topics that are thought to fit personal attributes. Instead, share your planned campaign or marketing strategy and put out an open ask for feedback and volunteers. Also important to DEIB efforts, ensure you have a strong sense of the real experiences of employees within your organization. If groups of employees feel marginalized, unrepresented, or unheard, trying to tout their presence in marketing tactics will only compound the problem.
Elevate Real Voices: Your employees and customers have stories to tell. Instead of hand-feeding them assignments, empower them to share their stories in ways that feel most natural to them. Granted, this makes content planning more challenging, but the results will be more authentic to your brand. Ask about employees’ real experiences, learnings, connections, and dreams, and the results may provide some wonderful surprises.
Tell The Truth: This is the first rule for all brand, PR, and marketing efforts. But if your results don’t yet match your commitments on the DEIB front (and you’re working in earnest to address this), this isn’t a cause for despair. Use phrases like “Our hope is,” “We aim to,” “We’re working toward”, or “We’re committed to.” And don’t hesitate to add an acknowledgment by following up to indicate that it is an ongoing process, like “We know we have a long way to go.”
Let’s be clear: No real change ever sprang from a few social media posts filled with platitudes or a mailer with images that don’t reflect an organization’s true composition. A commitment to diversity is something core to your organization and culture. No amount of marketing or communications can make up for a deficit in this area.
Should marketing be more inclusive? Absolutely. But it also needs to be truthful. Companies and organizations that try to represent themselves as something they are not, risk alienating both employees and supporters. Instead of tokenizing the few, invest in real DEIB efforts that will empower your organization to perform the way it should, and the results will speak for themselves.