Marketing in an era of heightened social awareness

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Brands today live under a social microscope

Consumers relate to and buy from brands that care about the issues that are important to them and those that have not been seen to act responsibly, or whose activities have misfired, have been accused of greenwashing, diversity-washing or worse. Consequently, brands are expected to wear their hearts on their sleeves and show up wherever their customers want to find them, celebrating their identities and taking a stand for the causes that matter to them. The reality is the customer experience is an evolving and dynamic manifestation of what a brand really stands for.

Representation matters

If audiences don’t see themselves reflected in these experiences, they are less likely to respond. This is Inclusion 101 and it sounds simple enough, but the pace and scale of today’s experience machine make this extremely challenging.

And while the scale of the content challenge grows, customer segments that were once considered marginal now encompass a sizeable portion of the world’s population. For brands to grow they simply must be relevant to these consumers. They must show up for every audience on every channel in real time. And they must speak to those audiences in a meaningful way.

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$4.9 trillion

spending power of African American, Asian American, Native American and LatinX consumers in the United States

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£3.9 trillion

LGBTQIA+ global spending power

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$13 trillion

disposable income of people with disabilities (PwD) globally and their friends and family who act on their connection to PwD

Marketing in an era of heightened social awareness is a new report from Wunderman Thompson that examines:

today’s social context and why representation matters
the size and revenue opportunities of market segments that have typically been overlooked in the past
the current state of play in the content industry and how the drive toward hyper-personalised, omnichannel experiences is creating a crisis of brand control across a wide range of domains
how technology is currently stepping up to help brands come to grips with this content challenge

Finally, the guide introduces our own AI tool, Brand Guardian, developed to give marketers content quality assurance at scale and ensure that all content is representative of and accessible to every audience.