Ep 19: How will Pride 2030 be marketed?
Shownotes
We're back! In this episode, Joyann questions what stage Pride marketing is currently in and ponders which direction it should go in the future.
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'How are you portraying love in marketing?' blog
Transcript
00:00
Hi. Hi, everyone. Welcome and welcome back to the Marketing Made Inclusive podcast. I am your host, Joyann Boyce. It's been a minute. It's been a little while. Things have been moving in the space of AI beautifully, chaotically. That is the space I operate within the marketing world. So I took a tiny bit of a pause from the podcast, but also took some time to think about what I want for this podcast, what I want to be able to one, make sure that I can do it consistently because that's something I,
00:43
always want to commit to and what will add to the space of inclusive marketing.
00:50
So yes, we are back. We are back with a lot more intention in regards to what we're going to do. This is not saying that what we've done or the guests we've had has been nothing but amazing, amazing guests. The conversations have been amazing. It was just on my end, I felt like I was having all these amazing conversations, but still not answering the main questions that the majority of people meeting day to day had about inclusive marketing.
01:23
So myself and the team, we kind of sat and thought about what exactly we want the podcast to be, what is manageable for us internally.
01:34
This is small run operation here. I've got big goals and big ambitions, but it is a small operation. Yeah.
01:43
I've said ‘um’ a lot and I really don’t like saying 'um.’
01:47:17
However it is as of recording this, it's June which is in the market year calendar depending on region and company values and so forth, it's normally the month where the companies change their logos to the Pride flag. And which version of the Pride flag you is kind of how I tell now if they have the most current one, the one that includes Black and Brown individuals and indigenous individuals, I'm like, okay, they're a little bit more up to date. But anywho, companies change their
02:27
logo, they start doing pride events, they start committing to various things to celebrate, I would say the LGBTQIA+ community. However, I you all know me by now, I can be quite cynical in wanting inclusivity and representation. There's some things that just are okay to not do.
02:54:21
So some companies, you know, it's okay to not change your logo if you don't mean it, if you aren't committed to it.
03:02
However, there's another part of me that is thinking about my theory around spotlight, saturation and normalisation. For those who haven't heard me talk about this before, essentially I think a lot of things in society and a lot of things within the inclusive marketing space particularly, go through a phase of spotlight where with pride, I would say at once upon a time it was really radical for a brand to change their company logo to the Pride flag.
03:33
It was really radical for a brand. To say that they're supporting LGBT rights was really radical for there to be any pride-related product in a store or on sale or just anywhere. And I feel like over the recent years, I would say over the past five, maybe six years, I feel that the celebration of pride from a marketing and a corporate aspect has stepped into the saturation phase where it's just everywhere and it's lost some of its, some, it's lost a lot of its original meaning, but it's everywhere.
04:10
And these have benefits from making the movement more known and more aware. However, they have negative aspects because it's losing that meaning that understanding, and some companies are committing to
04:25
I don't know if I'd say celebrate, are committing to the marketing of pride without the authenticity of following the values.
04:40
I want to stay in the marketing line.
04:42
The company values should match the marketing, but sometimes it doesn't. So now that we're in a phase where the marketing team would probably change the logo, put out a campaign, run an influencer campaign or something, reach out to LGBT creatives to do all the things. Meanwhile, the company is doing almost everything opposite to that. I feel that now it's in the saturation phase and there's a potential for, I think, over the next couple of years for it to slip into normalisation where it's just expected.
05:18:21
It's expected that once June comes around, it's expected that companies will do these things. It's expected that companies will change how that logo it’s expected, it becomes normal. But that has diluted it and diluted the intention behind it a lot. Actually, before I go into negatives, let's talk about positive. The positives is the product and the content. And for individuals who are part of the LGBTQIA community, now is the time to shop.
05:56
Now again, I'm doing positive. We're not talking about ethics of these brands, but now is the time to shop. Now is the time to get anything you desire in a rainbow format. And five, six years ago, that wasn't the case. I think I saw on TikTok, someone had a full rainbow suit. I’ve seen rainbow LGBT pride baby clothes.
06:20
I've seen
06:21
any type of products you can think of. They have found a way to make it part of pride
06:30
and make it part of the, the Rainbow, which I'm laughing, but it's also kind of capitalism and marketing and product placement and all of that is fine. This, you know, just one that now leads to a sense of normalisation where, okay, we've, we've done it.
06:50
We've painted everything rainbow from the 1st of June to the 30th of June. I forgot how many days were in June. What is the next phase? What is the next thing to make this deeper? Because it won't stay this way forever. And I was trying to explain it to the team in the earnings sample. The comparison I could think of was where women rights whenever once upon a time it used to be radical for women to wear trousers in certain countries to be radicalised, to be like, oh my goodness, there's a campaign and a woman is wearing trousers or pants wherever you're listening to this.
07:33
And eventually it became okay. That's what a businesswoman does. A businesswoman, it became branded as this thing that a certain type of woman wears pants and now it's become so normalized, I don't think anyone would bat an eye seeing a campaign of a woman in trousers or pants. Like they'd probably laugh if anyone even pointed out.
08:00
And in the next phase of that is is making I say we're in now making gender neutral clothing where it is not labelled as feminine or masculine, it's just clothing and people could wear. So that's the next level of making things deeper. And marketing has a part to play in that. Marketing has its role to play in that movement.
08:20
And I'm wondering now where LGBTQIA+ rights and representation and how that's reflected in marketing. What is what is the next phase? What is the next phase for brands? Now that they've committed to June and committed to that month, how are they going to take it deeper? There's aspects in terms of truly supporting the movement, you know, committing to changing policies, committing to give equal rights to all variation of parents, committing to that.
08:57
There's internal things companies can do. But I'm questioning now what are the things, the marketing teams are gonna do?
09:06
And it's funny, I get these questions, but I really want to pose the question to our listeners and to the individuals who listen to the podcast, because I do feel that if you tune in to this podcast and type of content that we create, you're already thinking about inclusive marketing in a way you already have a mindset that is of change and of curiosity and of wanting to make the marketing sector and advertising sector diverse and really reflect society, wanting to create campaigns that connect to as many
09:41
people that are interested in your products as possible. So what's next
09:47
for Pride? What would the marketing campaign for Pride Month in 2030 look like?
09:57
Will it even be a month?
09:59:
My kind of productions is one of two ways we go. One way we go back to the spotlight and companies start committing now to a letter rather than just the whole flag and committing to campaigns that represent intersections.
10:23
And when I say a letter, I mean LGBTQ. I plus each of those letters stands for something. And within each of those, like if we look at lesbians, the representation of lesbians in marketing campaigns tend to fit a certain stereotype. Is it now that brands go back to the spotlight phase and start thinking, okay, how can we represent picking organisations?
10:49
Or at,
10:51
oh,
10:54
Let's say Apple? Apple is showing us how to use that new product in the home and how it is, you know, a family-friendly product. And they are starting to think how can they represent families in a new way, focusing on lesbian couples and start to think deeper about what that persona looks like? Can they represent a queer, disabled, dark skin lesbian couple that doesn't fit the conventional stereotypes?
11:27
You know, where one is feminine, one is masculine presenting and you know, you know the tropes. I don't need to break it down. So that's one avenue. Brands come back to the spotlight phase and they focus in on the letter and they pick that letter and they go ham on a campaign
11:42
the other phase is it's no longer a marketing month.
11:50
That a marketing team just has their own time of the month where they're like, yeah, so we're going to celebrate, I think that sentence times of the month, I'll never go away. So for Mother's Day, we're going to celebrate all the lesbian mums and yeah, that's what we're going to do.
12:12
We're not going to do in June, which is going to do it whenever or, you know, we're going to celebrate trans women, trans men, just on a random October and just, you know, have it there. I caveat that second route with I don't think every brand can do that without going through the original steps of, you know, warming up that current audience to let them know that that brand is aware of where that brand supports or will celebrate, or I don't even know what phrasing I want to use.
12:57
But I do think there's a phase that brands have been established for a long period of time need to go through before they can dive into LGBT any day of the year, you know, and even dive into intersectional LGBT because a lot of the times, especially with some clients in the past when I've looked at their campaign content and we've done audits for them to majority of their representation of campaigns or same sex families is white gay men, and that's probably as deep as it goes in regards to we've done something here.
13:42
I'm curious to know, I'm questioning your thoughts. I'm curious to know in 2030, do you think Pride Month will be still a month for marketers? I'm not taking it away in terms of what the actual month stands for, I do think that will continue and people will continue to push and, and demand hopefully by 2039 demand for basic equal rights.
14:09
But I do think that as a month for the community itself will remain. But I'm talking about in the market year calendar in the current format that it is somewhat checkboxes somewhat, you know, on the 1st of July you change everything back and pretend like it didn't happen. What would that look like in 2030?
14:28
So yes, feel free to tweet me.
14:32
I am at Joyann Boyce on all social platforms. That is J O Y A N N B O Y C E. I would love to hear your thoughts on what Pride Month will look like in the market year calendar in 2030. As I said at the start, where rebalancing and reshuffling and re-organising, etc. I think with the podcast. So hopefully you enjoy the new format of how things are going to be rolling out.
15:04
And we've got lots of interesting content planned, but thank you so much for listening to the Marketing Made Inclusive podcast. I will speak to you soon.
