For Meaningful Inclusion, Ad Leaders Must Address Power Disparities

According to a November 2021 report, marketing is more ethnically diverse than ever at 30.8% in the United States. It would seem, then, that voices from historically underrepresented groups would be heard more clearly. But in many cases, it appears these voices remain muted, as seemingly every week we see companies creating ads relying on painful tropes or exclusionary of myriad people.

As such, we must address diversity in the context of power-sharing. Too often, diversity gets positioned solely as a number. While numbers provide good reference points for goal setting and goal measurement, they are not the whole story in and of themselves. Numbers do not always equate to power.

Therefore, it’s important to understand tokenism and culture, and how both inform work norms and outcomes.

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What the scholars say

Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote a seminal book in 1977 called Men and Women of the Corporation, which extensively informs much tokenism research today. Kanter explored how women comprised too few positions in many corporate settings, contributing to why their voices were ignored or silenced. Women didn’t feel empowered to express their opinions.

Quite simply, it’s easy to have the appearance of diversity while shutting out myriad perspectives. Sprinkling in some people who “look” different than the status quo doesn’t make an organization or campaign inclusive or diverse, especially if an outcome was predetermined.

While teams with diverse skill sets and experiences can potentially produce more perspectives, it takes far more than diversity to ensure that the final product reflects the contributions of the entire team. A more recent study of advertising leaders found: “Team diversity helps to address knowledge gaps but does not necessarily guarantee improved performance.” In fact, Jacqueline Lynch, author of the study, further recommended that “strong leadership” is required to fully realize the gains from a diverse team.

This corresponds to research from Charlotte Holgersson and Laurence Romani that found “organizational culture,” not solely numerical representation, also influences how businesses behave in terms of action. The scholars explored the power of norms in industries and how these norms, when left unchecked, can often marginalize underrepresented groups of people. They say a dominant norm “can be reproduced because it is kept implicit and, consequently, protected from being openly challenged.”

Industry norms can be likened to what’s considered “communities of practice.” Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet describe how groups create their own norms and preferred behaviors, but these communities of practice can serve to exclude, rather than include, large swaths of people. In common parlance, you’re not a real member of this field until you adopt these precepts and refrain from asking why these rules exist.

The need for new norms

So what does this have to do with tokenism, strong leadership and organizational culture? Well, it’s easier to do what’s always been done than to do something differently.

If a company increases the number of underrepresented people in its ranks but refuses to change practices or mentalities, then it won’t matter how “diverse” your organization appears because it’s not diverse where it really counts. And the “diverse” people will not stay very long where they feel unappreciated, either.

This is where power imbalances come into play. For much of the history of Western mass communication, the industry standards or so-called commonsense norms came solely from executives who were overwhelmingly white and male. That doesn’t mean these norms are inherently bad or even unsuccessful, but they lacked input from many societal stakeholders.

Thus, asking people previously excluded from creating the industry norms to uncritically adopt all of these norms likely won’t achieve meaningful inclusion and will likely replicate the tokenism effect instead. It is incumbent upon industry executives to challenge themselves on what is considered orthodoxy in their fields.

Moving beyond tokenism requires those with power to surrender authority in order to establish new communities of practice and perhaps more inclusive communities of practice. For advertising and public relations, we need to do more than reexamine our practices. We must provide a wider array of folks access to changing how we do business in order to create the diversity the industry says it covets.

This means everything must be on the table in terms of transformation. We must explore “how” we decide, “who” our customers are, “what” resonates with them, “how” we engage with them, “where” they are located and “why” we think the way we do. Essentially, we must engage with the five Ws of journalism to determine the story we’re telling as marketers and PR experts, and who decides each facet of that story, from the imagery to the product to the verbiage.

A new study offers strong recommendations to ensure that marketing companies are valuing diversity. Among their ideas, Eva Kipnis and her co-authors suggest business leaders “determine systems for evaluating conduct in campaigns.” Thus, we need to come up with evaluative tools for marketing to determine our inclusivity goals and see whether we reached them.

It will not matter how many people from marginalized backgrounds are hired if these companies strive to conduct business as usual. Businesses need to see what worked and what needs revisions in order to improve or continue to be successful. Efforts in inclusivity require the same dedication. If not, we’ll be stuck in various stages of tokenism.

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