If our unconscious bias is behind the marketing we produce how do we stop it - when it is unconscious?

We can only know what we know. Our unconscious reveals a lot about how we have been raised as people, and how we think as creatives and strategists in our work. The marketing and advertising that we produce reveals our values, our beliefs and unfortunately the flaws too. Some of our unconscious wiring reveals things that actually hurt other people, but we often don't even know we're doing it.

According to Kantar 2019 85% of marketers think they're doing a great job to remove gender stereotypes from our marketing. Sadly 63% of consumers think we're doing a terrible job at reinforcing stereotypes. I tend to agree. The agencies that also say that 'we do a pretty good job at this kind of thing' are often the ones that send a red flag up my pole because I know they are not thinking broadly enough about what diversity is. In the same breath that they say they're doing a great job, they can often reveal things that are clearly in what I call 'Diversity Oversteer' which is potentially going the complete other way, or they only do diversity in one area with confidence (probably gender).

Diversity is a broad area in my books and this is not just political correctness but an ability to reach the real customer out there. Diversity covers our gender (not just two of them either), race, culture, sexuality, abilities, life stages, age, urban or rural, socio-economics, neuro-diversity including personality typing, thinking styles, and intellectual capacity and education. We need to be communicating to our customers with a conscious ability to reach the segments that we need to and not just accidentally attract the same customer we always have.

Sales results are a poor indicator of your potential audience as this will be the result of your product creation, creative execution, media channels and often from customer feedback from the customer segment you already decided on. What if your potential customer was where the growth opportunity for your brand is but you were not aware you were polarising them?

We need to think beyond just casting too as an industry and consider the entire strategic and creative process.

Here are some quick tips on making sure you are not operating with unconscious bias:

1. Do the Right Market Research - Don't make your market research just feedback from your existing customer segments as you will just be reinforcing already defined segmentation and will restrict opportunity. Think back to early days of gaming with the likes of Nintendo purely making products for males. If you did market research on that audience you'd get nothing but validation that it was a gendered pursuit. If you asked the potential audience what they need to engage with the past time you find out insights like the fact that the whole family needs to play, that parents want children to move and exercise, and they don't want everything to be about shooting. In the case of Nintendo this gave birth to the Wii which revolutionised gaming and brought even greater market success to Nintendo. It was because they put aside their bias and asked questions like 'what do our potential market want?'.
2. Learn About All Types of Bias - Do what it takes to educate your creative and marketing teams on what bias looks like across all factors. Once you know what to look out for you are more likely to be able to prevent the accidental reinforcement of unresourceful communications.
3. Listen to your body - Many people say 'I trust my gut' and rely on it heavily for decision making. I can guarantee you that your gut is where unconscious bias lives and must not be listened to without testing it. 'Test your gut' is what you need to do instead. You can test your theories by swapping out the language and noticing if it triggers any visceral reactions in your body. If so, where is it and what could it be telling you? For example, many say that advertising agencies don't have older workers because they are too expensive. Imagine swapping that our with skin colour - "We don't have black workers because they are too expensive?". You see how this makes it obvious that a bias is in place? We could never ever say something like that about race, but age still slips by us. What else are we saying that we feel sits naturally in our gut but when tested no longer fits?
4. Test Group think - The group often validates beliefs that are engrained in society and that doesn't make them right. Listen to the quiet voice from someone who is starting to question things and test what they're saying with an open mind. The minority can be the most right sometimes.
5. Forget Who Said It - Many think that because a woman says something that is gender biased that it makes it okay. Or if a young child naturally makes everything blue for boys and pink for girls that it must be natural and part of their genetic make up. Children are indoctrinated even unconsciously from the very early days of life. Even if the parents are neutral in their behaviour the outside world has an impact from day 1. Women have become accustomed to the way things are in our world too, and often don't question things that are doing womankind harm just as much as men. So, don't think that because someone says something that they represent the whole of the population, and don't think that they're aware of the engrained bias that is sitting within their operating system either. Even the best of us with the best of intentions can still behave with unconscious bias at play whether we are part of the diverse group that we represent or not.
6. Don't do diversity oversteer to make a difference - Often when we become aware of what we have been doing to reinforce stereotypes we can automatically become an activist and stand against one side or the other. The true place for acceptance and balance is invisible - it just is. Being an activist is actually creating a new bias, the other way and giving permission for the dominant and unhealthy bias to be reinforced through social proof. Now we have women leading purchasing behaviour in most categories, but that alone is a bias caused from our past stereotyping that the woman is responsible for decisions in the home. With the population at nearly 50/50 male/female then over-representation of purchasing by women is clearly caused by past bias. Another example of this is where many brands have started showing a Muslim in a lot of their communications to demonstrate they are 'doing diversity'. We are now over-representing the Muslim community and may well be giving the impression they are over-populated in immigration, causing a backlash. We know that Australian's think there are 12% of the population who are Muslin when in fact it is little over 2%*. Our over-compensation in our marketing (especially Government advertising in my opinion) could be inadvertently creating racism that may not exist without this Diversity Oversteer. It is much like those people who mean well by trying to be inclusive but say things like "I'm friends with the Chinese lady next door" in an attempt to show they are not racist, yet defining the neighbour by her race like that will be perceived as racist these days. Our intentions don't count - it is what we actually do and say that matters. In our creative we need to be mindful to accurately represent the population without tokenism or activism. Showing a diverse representation of our population in a way that is genuinely integrated is invisible. It just is.

There are plenty more things we can do, but this is a start in the right direction. Many of us think about diversity and inclusion in terms of our office behaviour and hiring practices but it is a rare creative and marketing team who consider the strategic and creative process from every step of the way to counter their unconscious bias in every aspect of diversity.

Anne Miles is Managing Director of the strategic and creative collective Suits&Sneakers and is an advocate for diversity in the creative and marketing process as a brand performance and cultural imperative.

?Anne is sharing more on this at a free event September 19th 6pm sponsored by @MarketingMag and hosted by @General Assembly Melbourne. Register here: https://ga.co/2kAElTA/

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*Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Kantar Customer Study 2019. IPSOS MORI 2016.