Make Pride a Commitment, Not Just a Campaign

There is a certain predictability to marketing in June. Logos dress up in rainbow colors. Marketers vie to outdo their counterparts at other brands in finding clever ways to weave Pride into their messaging and limited-edition products. The news media publish “best of LGBTQ+ pride” lists on cue. And invariably, a raft of experts decries these mostly facile marketing moves by brands like Skittles, which in June trades its signature colors for gray, asserting that “only one rainbow matters during Pride” while donating only up to $100,000 — a tiny fraction of its estimated annual revenue of over $300 million — to advocacy group GLAAD.

It should be no surprise that this superficial flavor of Pride marketing is ineffective in elevating brands, especially for the very people it targets. When it comes to the LGBTQ+ community, brands have a trust deficit. For example, while 58% of straight millennials in the U.S. trust companies to do what’s best for their customers, only 47% of LGBTQ+ millennials feel the same way. And while 42% of straight millennials think companies will do what they say they’re going to do, only 31% of U.S. LGBTQ+ millennials believe that to be true.

For brands that seek to lead from the front by winning customer trust, the future of Pride Month cannot continue to be campaign-as-usual. For most companies, 2020 marked a watershed moment as they came to terms with racial injustice and initiated extensive structural changes in how they operated. That same kind of change must apply to Pride. Much as Pride Month is a time to celebrate, it cannot be divorced from the trauma of the hard-fought wins and, more importantly, from the systematic and structural changes that address why we have Pride Month in the first place.

Let’s face it: This is not going to be easy for most companies that lack an invested champion — like Tim Cook, who marches with other Apple staff members at the San Francisco Pride parade as the first openly gay Fortune 500 CEO, or like Chobani’s CEO, Hamdi Ulukaya. Ulukaya, an immigrant from Turkey to the U.S., has played a pivotal role in supporting initiatives like matching LGBTQ+ refugees with professional mentors.

So how do companies with the right intent but lacking a power source of inspiration get Pride right? Companies can create a shift in Pride mindset, from campaign to commitment, only through a disciplined, programmatic approach. This type of systematic approach focuses on three groups of stakeholders — the “three C’s” — central to the operations and existence of an organization.

1. Company. The first “C” is about the company itself. Employees are the lifeblood of most organizations, and employee experience feeds customer experience, enriching engagement and loyalty. Yet 50% of LGBTQ+ respondents, and 39% of respondents overall, decide against pursuing or accepting a position at an organization they believe is not inclusive. The sharp increase in interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across organizations augurs well but, without the genuine commitment that drives inclusion, these programs can quickly acquire a back-office feel of accounting for goals and metrics. Few companies have as storied a legacy of defending equality as IBM does. It wrote its equal opportunity policies in 1953, over a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it called for equality of gender expression as early as 2002. At McKinsey, the commitment to Pride spans a more than 25-year-old global network (GLAM and GLAM Allies) participating year-round in events such as Day of Pink and the first LGBTQ+ career fair in India.

2. Customer. The second “C” represents the traditional audience for Pride Month — customers (and prospects). A broad attitudinal shift among consumers is forcing marketers to think beyond the gender binary, but catering systematically to this shift takes more than rainbow-hued promotions. Real Pride comes from real change. Transgender and nonbinary credit card customers of Citi and Mastercard can feel pride when the name on their credit card reflects the name they identify with. Mattel, better known for the exaggerated sexuality of Barbie dolls, now has a gender-neutral Creatable World doll collection. Target, when faced with a boycott for allowing transgender customers (and employees) to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity, spent $20 million to expand bathroom options rather than back down.

Marketing also has a representation issue. The LGBTQ+ community represents 5% of the world’s population (a number that is undoubtedly grossly underreported), yet LGBTQ+ people account for only 1% of the representation in ads. And when LGBTQ+ people are represented, many such portrayals lack dimension and nuance. With GLAAD, Procter & Gamble has launched the Visibility Project to serve as a best-practice resource for advertisers, many of whom approach this subject with trepidation for fear of getting the nuances wrong.

3. Community. The final “C” explores the community at large — the context within which an organization operates. These past few years have seen businesses outpace every other institution in securing people’s trust, and the leaders of these businesses are now also expected to lead on societal issues. As companies wade into areas of social impact, they must develop programs that transcend “rainbow washing.”

Seeking ways to extend the effects of its Pride efforts, in the past few years, Unilever has shifted its gaze from where these issues are historically more salient in the United States (usually bicoastal) to where they are most pressing: five small cities that are rated among the worst in the United States for LGBTQ+ people. In conjunction with various organizations, Unilever’s United We Stand initiative plans to address issues like conversion therapy and the criminalization of HIV and monitor progress based on improvements in the cities’ scores in the Human Rights Campaign Index.

We are scarcely a year into one of the most significant global movements for racial justice. The Pride movement is cut from the same cloth. The 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in New York City, is at the heart of Pride Month, and the sense of marginalization that catalyzed that event similarly drove the more recent Black Lives Matter movement. Identities seldom occupy neatly demarcated compartments. The intersections of race, gender, and sexuality that companies must grapple with for their employees and their customers are complex and deserve to be addressed with commensurate thoughtfulness, beyond rainbow tchotchkes and clever slogans.