Inclusive Marketing Beyond Buzzwords (Black History Month Edition)
The Copywriter Column #243
Every few months, the same thing happens. Brands dig through their stock photo libraries, post something about Black History Month (or the other holidays), and hope it lands.
Most of it doesn’t.
And if you’ve worked in marketing for more than a couple of years, you can feel the difference between a brand that means it and a brand that’s checking a box.
But here’s what I want you to sit with: the problem isn’t the post. The problem is that inclusion only shows up when the calendar says it should.
If your marketing efforts only reflect the people you serve during designated months, it doesn’t reflect them at all. It performs for them. And your audience can tell the difference.
This isn’t an article about what to post for Black History Month – after all, I am the very working definition of a bearded white guy.
But it is about building the kind of marketing practice where the question “would our audience feel represented by this?” gets asked on any given Tuesday.
The real problem with performative inclusion
You’ve seen it. The heritage month graphic that doesn’t connect to anything the brand actually does. The stock photo swap where the creative stays exactly the same but the faces change. The Slack thread two days before the month starts: “Should we say something?”
If you’re asking whether you should say something, you’ve already answered the question. You don’t have anything to say. You have something to react to.
The root cause is simple.
Most teams treat inclusion as a content topic instead of a creative standard. It gets assigned like a campaign brief. Someone writes it, someone approves it, it goes out, and everyone moves on until the next awareness month rolls around.
If you’re a copywriter, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of this. “Can you make this feel more… diverse?” is not a creative direction. It’s a symptom of a team that hasn’t thought about inclusion until the deadline forced them to.
If you lead a creative team, ask yourself an honest question. Does inclusion come up in your process only during heritage months or after a PR misstep? If so, it’s not a principle. It’s damage control.
Principles show up every day.
Campaigns have end dates.
What inclusive marketing actually looks like as a principle
So what does it look like when inclusion is built into the work instead of bolted on? It operates on three levels. And most teams only think about the first one.
1. Language
This is where most people start, and it matters. The words you choose carry assumptions.
Who is your “default” customer?
When you write “professional,” whose version of professional are you picturing?
When you say “family,” what does that family look like?
Every piece of copy reflects someone’s experience as the norm. The question is whether you’ve examined whose experience that is.
2. Representation
This goes beyond visuals, though visuals are part of it.
Who shows up in your testimonials? Your case studies? Your email campaigns? Not as a diversity checkbox, but as a genuine reflection of the people you serve.
If your customer base is broad but your marketing only features one slice of it, that’s not a creative choice. That’s a blind spot.
3. Process
This is the one most teams skip, and honestly, it’s probably the most important.
Who is in the room when creative decisions get made? Whose perspective is missing from your brief, your review, your approval chain?
You can fix language with a style guide. You can fix representation with better casting. But if the people making the decisions all share the same blind spots, the work will keep reflecting those blind spots no matter how many stock photos you swap.
The principle underneath all three: inclusive marketing isn’t about adding diversity to your messaging. It’s about removing the assumptions that made your messaging narrow in the first place.
And if you need the business case to bring this to a stakeholder, the data is clear.
A 2024 study from Unilever and Oxford’s Saïd Business School found that inclusive advertising delivers 16% higher long-term sales and makes brands 62% more likely to be a consumer’s first choice.
Microsoft’s research showed that inclusive ads drove a 23-point lift in purchase intent across all audiences. Not just among represented groups. ALL audiences. The highest lift was actually among viewers who weren’t personally represented in the creative.
That last point matters. Inclusive marketing doesn’t shrink your audience. It grows it.
How AI can help (and where it can’t)
AI tools have gotten genuinely useful for catching biased or exclusionary language. They’re worth building into your review process, with one important caveat: they’re a first pass, not a final answer.
Here’s where they add value.
At scale, human reviewers miss patterns. We get used to our own defaults. But AI catches the things we’ve stopped noticing.
A gendered assumption in a headline. An ableist phrase that’s become industry shorthand. Terminology that’s shifted since the last time you checked the style guide.
Several tools are built for this.
Enterprise platforms like Writer let teams set customizable inclusive language rules tied to their brand guidelines. Salesforce used Acrolinx to audit and replace non-inclusive technical language across their entire product documentation.
And for individual writers and smaller teams, Grammarly Premium flags sensitivity and inclusivity issues, Microsoft Editor checks for bias across gender, age, race, and sexuality, and the free open-source linter Alex.js catches insensitive patterns across 218+ categories.
But here’s the limitation you need to understand: almost all of these tools analyze text only. They don’t evaluate your visuals. They don’t assess cultural context. They can’t tell you whether your tone feels authentic or performative to the community you’re trying to reach.
So, obviously, AI is only one layer of a review process. It catches the obvious patterns. But a human reviewer with cultural competency catches the rest. The strongest workflow pairs both. Let the tool do the first scan. Then put human eyes on the work, ideally eyes that bring a different perspective than the person who wrote it.
The principle here is the same one that applies to every AI workflow: the tool accelerates your judgment. It doesn’t replace it.
The simplest place to start
If you’re a copywriter, try this before your next project ships – read your copy one more time and ask a single question: “Who might not see themselves in this?”
Not as a guilt exercise. As a craft exercise. It takes two minutes. And once you start doing it, you’ll be surprised how often the answer changes something.
If you lead a creative team, add one line to your brief template: “Who is this speaking to, and who might it be excluding?”
That question, asked early, changes the entire conversation before the work starts. It’s easier to build inclusion into a brief than to retrofit it into a finished campaign.
Inclusive marketing isn’t about getting it perfect. Nobody gets it perfect (especially me). It’s about building the habit of asking better questions, consistently, across every project.
And that’s what separates a principle from a performance.
Resources: Writing more inclusive messaging
If you want to go deeper, these are worth your time.
Style Guides and Language Resources
Conscious Style Guide — A methodology for making inclusive language decisions, not just a word list. Updated continuously. AP Stylebook editors have called it the best tool book available.
Diversity Style Guide — Searchable database of 700+ terms drawn from 23 source guides including NABJ, NCDJ, and GLAAD. Best for quick terminology lookups.
GLAAD Media Reference Guide — The standard reference for writing about LGBTQ+ people accurately. Used by AP, Reuters, and the New York Times.
Frameworks
Unstereotype Alliance 3Ps Framework (Presence, Perspective, Personality) — A practical three-question test for evaluating representation in any creative asset. Backed by UN Women.
Books
Inclusive Marketing by Jerry Daykin (Kogan Page, 2022) — A practical book available for marketing teams. Checklists and frameworks for every stage of creative development, with case studies from Guinness, Microsoft, Unilever, and Mattel.
AI Tools
Alex.js — Free, open-source language linter that catches insensitive writing across 218+ patterns. Good starting point for individual writers.
Want to dive deeper into the principles that make copy actually work for your team?
I’ve distilled 20+ years of marketing expertise into a free micro-course called The Minimalist Copywriter’s Playbook. It covers the 5 core principles I use every time I sit down to write – ones you can apply immediately.
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