How to Use Diversity Marketing to Boost Sales and Grow Your Laundry Business
For a long time, marketing efforts for companies big and small had one major common denominator.
Essentially, they all targeted an older, white audience.
Years ago, this strategy may have made some sense, but not any longer. Today, this approach is not only grossly outdated, but it also can actually harm your business – as it ignores the significantly changed realities of today’s diverse marketplace.
These days, Millennials make up the largest living generation in the United States and elsewhere. What’s more, Millennials are the most diverse generation in history.
They’re also a generation that values inclusion as a key factor in their purchasing decisions, with a whopping 70 percent claiming they will choose one brand over another (yes, this includes laundromats) based on the inclusion and diversity displayed by the brand’s promotions and offers. This means that it’s imperative for today’s marketers to embrace the concept now referred to as “diversity marketing.”
Here is an overview of diversity marketing, some strategies that business owners can use to make it the focus of their ongoing promotional efforts, and a few examples of companies who have done it correctly.
Diversity marketing refers to any marketing strategy that recognizes the differences within the subgroups of the target market – including age, gender, disability, religion, ethnicity, and sexual identity. Within these groups, it’s possible to further segment the market using factors like marital status, weight, educational attainment, income, and occupation.
In short, diversity marketing is a means of hyper-targeting a marketing campaign in a manner that will connect with the widest variety of people within a target market.
Target marketing is different from other types of marketing. In today’s global marketplace, there are more kinds of marketing than ever before. There are online channels, which include email marketing, content marketing, and affiliate marketing. Then, of course, there are traditional marketing methods such as print, television, radio, direct mail, and telemarketing.
A successful diversity marketing effort will contain a variety of messaging channels, including those listed above. What sets it apart from other strategies is that the specific messaging is 100 percent fine-tuned for the audience it’s trying to reach, and that messaging is delivered to the target group through that group’s preferred communication channels.
To work effectively, diversity marketing must be data-driven, authentic, and culturally savvy. When it’s not, it’s very likely the message will fall flat.
That’s exactly what happened to global fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana, which launched a poorly designed and executed social media campaign aimed at the Chinese market that ultimately caused tremendous damage to the company’s brand.
In D&G’s marketing videos, an Asian model is seen eating traditional Italian foods with chopsticks, with varying degrees of success. These videos were posted on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging website and caused widespread outrage because they seemed to depict Chinese people as uncultured and inferior. Clearly, not a good move.
In this case, the company selected the correct messaging channel in Sina Weibo, which reaches about a quarter of China’s 1.4 billion residents. However, the message itself was inauthentic, ill- conceived, and culturally insensitive. Therein lies the main challenge of diversity marketing. When done well, it can help a brand communicate with its target audience in a manner that feels familiar and is, therefore, effective. When done poorly, it can backfire spectacularly.
Here are a few tips to help design a culturally valid marketing program for your laundry business:
- Build diversity into your creative team.
- Make data your center piece.
- Build from the ground up.
- Understand the language of inclusivity by knowing the audience to which you’re speaking.
- Make sure to let your customers have a voice.
Now, here are three examples of diversity marketing done correctly:
Coca Cola’s “America is Beautiful” campaign. There is likely no better example of diversity marketing done correctly than this Coke promotion that launched in 2014. The advertising included a culturally and racially diverse cast singing a multi-language rendition of the song, “America the Beautiful.”
Another prime example of diversity marketing in action is the Guinness campaign “Friendship,” which kicked off in 2013. In these ads, a group of men is depicted playing a spirited (and physically demanding) game of wheelchair basketball. At the end, all but one of the players stands up from their chairs, revealing that they’d played the game to include a wheelchair-bound friend.
This ad was a grand example of an inclusive marketing message and was a top-performing advertisement at the time it aired.
Lastly, Chevrolet’s “The New Us” campaign demonstrated how a brand can boldly identify with a target subgroup in ways that competition either can’t or won’t.
The ads were aimed at the LGBTQ community and was the first auto manufacturer campaign to associate LGBTQ families with a major brand. At the time, it was recognized in the U.S. for its accomplishment, which led to a huge gain in favorability for the brand within that target demographic.
No doubt, there are many more examples. However, those that I’ve outlined above should convince you to implement diversity marketing within the overall advertising approach for your laundromat business.
To begin making diversity marketing the centerpiece of your future promotional planning and to begin to implement some of the strategies I’ve covered to help support your efforts is a worthwhile endeavor for any laundromat owner – and one that will pay dividends for years to come.
Make absolutely no mistake that properly implementing diversity marketing is not easy – then again, nothing worthwhile ever is. It requires serious effort and persistence. However, if you’re the type of laundromat owner who wants to do more than simply talk the talk and is truly serious about growing the business and achieving wealth, this marketing strategy just may be perfect for you.
