Even well-known brands with enormous budgets get diversity marketing wrong, and the reasons are almost always the same: the campaign was built around an idea the team loved, rather than around an understanding of the people it was meant to reach.
Good diversity marketing works best when it begins before the campaign, with a genuine effort to understand the people a brand hopes to reach: asking what matters to them, listening to how they describe their own experiences, and making room for answers that challenge assumptions. A diverse cast does not automatically make a message feel authentic. The difference is whether people are portrayed with depth and respect, and whether their perspectives helped shape the decisions behind the work.
Listening comes before representation
Diversity marketing is often treated as a creative task: broaden the casting, update the language, or create a campaign for a specific cultural moment. Those choices matter, but they cannot replace meaningful insight.
People are not interchangeable representatives of a demographic category. A broad label can include many identities, histories, needs, and points of view. And experiences can vary depending on factors such as age, location, language, disability, income, or family role.
That is why inclusive research needs to be part of the process from the start. The World Federation of Advertisers’ 2026 guide to inclusive insights recommends considering inclusion across the research lifecycle, from defining audiences and gathering data to interpreting findings and measuring results.
The goal is not to assume that one conversation or one campaign can speak for an entire community. It is to ask better questions, seek a range of perspectives, and use what people share to make more informed decisions.
Authenticity is more than visibility
Seeing people like yourself in an ad can matter. But representation feels more meaningful when people are shown as full human beings, rather than as symbols included to signal that a brand is diverse.
That distinction is reflected in research. In a Microsoft Advertising study focused on Gen Z, 76% of participants said they were more likely to support brands that were authentic in their advertising, and 70% said they trusted brands more when ads represented diversity. These are findings from a specific study, not a guarantee of how every audience will respond, but they point to an important connection between representation, trust, and authenticity.
Authenticity also depends on whether the message fits the brand’s actions. A campaign that celebrates belonging can feel hollow if the product, customer experience, or company behavior tells a different story. Research can help uncover those gaps before they become part of a public-facing message.
Make research part of the creative process
Good diversity marketing research does not simply approve or reject a finished idea. It helps teams understand the people, context, and practical needs that should shape the idea in the first place.
A thoughtful process can include:
- Define the question. Be specific about what you need to learn. Are you exploring how people view a product, testing whether a message feels respectful, or identifying barriers in a customer journey?
- Recruit the right participants. Make a deliberate effort to include the people whose experiences are relevant. A convenient sample may not reflect the audience you need to understand.
- Create space for honest feedback. Use clear, respectful questions and methods that give participants room to disagree, explain, or share something unexpected.
- Look for differences within groups. Compare perspectives where it is meaningful, but avoid reducing people to a single identity or assuming every person in a segment thinks alike.
- Bring learning back to the work. Let what participants share inform the brief, creative, product, service, and customer experience, not only the final campaign language.
The WFA guide emphasizes representative data collection and culturally informed analysis as ways to reduce blind spots and strengthen consumer understanding. In practice, that means paying attention not only to who takes part, but also to how the research is designed and how its findings are interpreted.
Choose methods that fit the people and the question
Different questions call for different kinds of research. Qualitative methods, such as focus groups and in-depth interviews, can help teams hear how people explain their experiences in their own words. Quantitative studies can show how patterns vary across a larger, targeted sample. Used together, these methods can offer both context and scale.
Recruiting matters, too. If a study is intended to reach people who are often overlooked in mainstream research, or who may be cautious about taking part, the invitation, setting, and approach can shape who feels comfortable participating. Respectful recruitment and facilitation help make it easier for participants to share candid feedback.
For some projects, listening should also happen beyond a traditional research session. Experiential research brings brands into direct, face-to-face contact with the communities they want to understand: in community settings, at events, and in the environments where people actually live their daily lives. Instead of asking people to come to a focus group facility, the brand comes to them, which can make participation feel more natural and the feedback more candid.
Brand ambassador engagements extend this idea. When ambassadors are genuinely part of the communities they serve, they can build trust that a traditional campaign often cannot. That trust creates room for honest conversations, and those conversations generate insight a brand can act on, well beyond a single event. These experiences work best when they are designed around genuine interaction and clear purpose, not as a shortcut to gather opinions without context.
Done well, experiential work also closes the loop between research and relationship. People who meet a brand in person, see that it listened, and watch their feedback shape what happens next are more likely to stay engaged with it. For brands entering a community for the first time, that foundation of trust can matter as much as the research findings themselves.
Zebra Strategies has spent more than 20 years building trusted relationships with communities that standard research can miss. Our work includes qualitative and quantitative research, participant recruiting, and ad campaign testing. Our services are shaped by a dignity-centered approach: meeting people where they are and treating their perspectives as central to the work.
Test the message, and listen to what comes back
Before a campaign launches, test how its language, images, and ideas land with the people it intends to represent. Ask what feels true, what feels confusing, and what, if anything, could come across as stereotyped or out of touch. Be ready to hear feedback that requires a change.
Testing should not be about asking participants to approve a decision the team has already made. It should give them a real opportunity to influence the work. When a concern comes up, investigate it rather than dismissing it as a matter of personal preference.
And listening should not end at launch. Track responses, questions, and feedback after the campaign is in the world. If people point out a gap, take that seriously and consider what can be improved. A brand builds credibility through follow-through, not just its initial message.
The contrast: when the relationship comes first
The pattern holds on the positive side, too. The brands that consistently connect with multicultural audiences tend to be the ones that have invested in relationships over years, not campaigns over weeks. They recruit from the communities they serve, test their messages with those communities before launch, and treat feedback as direction rather than as a hurdle.
The lesson is not that one campaign style sells better than another. It is that audiences can tell the difference between a brand that is borrowing an audience and a brand that genuinely knows one. The first requires casting. The second requires listening, relationships, and years of showing up.
For a useful example of why language deserves this level of care, read our white paper on terminology for Hispanic and Latino communities. It explores why terms that may seem interchangeable to an outside observer can carry different meanings and histories for the people using them.
Turn insight into action
The most useful research does more than produce a set of findings. It helps a team decide what to do differently: refine a campaign, improve a product, adjust a service, reconsider an assumption, or ask a new question.
That requires treating participants as people with knowledge about their own lives, not as stand-ins for an entire audience. It also means being clear about the purpose of the research, making participation respectful, and applying what is learned with care.
Diversity marketing that starts with listening can help brands build more relevant communication and avoid preventable missteps. More importantly, it creates a better chance that people will recognize their experiences in the work without feeling reduced to a label.
Start with a conversation. Make room for honest answers. Then let what you learn shape what comes next.
Ready to build a more informed approach to diversity marketing? Talk with Zebra Strategies about research that starts with the people you want to understand.
