Building For Everyone

CHAPTER 10Making Your Marketing More Inclusive

Our definition of product inclusion covers everything from ideation through marketing. After all, the success of a product or service hinges on the organization's ability to get that product into the hands of as many consumers as possible, regardless of their differences and you do that through authentic connection and value.

Marketing plays an important role in the success of a product or service. If your marketing efforts fail to resonate with historically underrepresented consumers, your products will pay the price in terms of negative word‐of‐mouth, lost sales, and limited distribution. Organizations have a choice: they can make their marketing inclusive by representing the diversity of users or make it exclusive by focusing their efforts on a single demographic.

Marketing should be the culmination of all the previous chapters' work—an extension of the inclusive practices integrated throughout ideation, user experience design, and user testing. It should reflect the diversity of perspectives baked into the product; it should not be an inclusive advertisement for an exclusive product.

What makes marketing resonate? Three factors:

• People: If your organization has diverse representation across its brand, more people will feel included and welcome and open to buying or interacting with your product.
• Product: The product must reflect the care taken to accommodate the differences among individuals. People from underrepresented communities ...