Connecting with LGBTQIA+ audiences is essential to creating a work environment that supports diversity and inclusion. Deepening your understanding of LGBTQIA+ related issues, including basic terms and concepts, can help you support LGBTQIA+ identified people. To better understand how to retain, develop, and enhance your interactions with LGBTQIA+ employees and reach their consumer base, take a deep dive into this toolkit for insight.
Bold Culture/Culture Hub Articles
Find the Right Causes for Your Brand
While many brands successfully use their platforms to promote social change and clarify their business practices, others miss the mark through superficial virtue signaling. Here’s how you can find the right causes that your brand can support without simply virtue signaling.
A Mixed Experience: For Some, Clubhouse is Revolutionizing How Marginalized Communities Engage
Anyone can start a ‘room’ sparking conversations ranging from health to politics. But, as the app grows with over downloads and despite it being in beta testing mode, it seems to have partially benefitted marginalized communities.
Trans Visibility and Commercialization: A Paradox
The culture has strides to make when it comes to broadening the spectrum, character dimension and development of many trans characters. But we seem to be heading in a progressive direction, thankfully.
Multicultural Marketing: What It Is, Why You Should Do It, and How to do It Well
Explore the dos and don’ts of inclusive marketing, with a focus on multicultural marketing in particular. These ideas can be applied to diversity and inclusion of generations, abilities, and sexual orientations and gender identities as well.
What the ‘Rainbow Wave’ Means for Brands Everywhere
The “rainbow wave” on 2020 Super Bowl night was a testament to what groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce have long argued: The purchasing power of the LGBTQ+ community is a force to be reckoned with.
How Microaggressions Have An Impact On Workplace Culture and Interactions
Microaggressions are everyday verbal or behavioral interactions that communicate some form of bias, prejudice, or negative attitudes towards a marginalized group.
Advocating for Marginalized People
Being an advocate means taking action. It means looking for all the ways oppression silences or erases marginalized people and intervening to stop the damage before it’s too late. It requires you to pause, pay attention, and design a recourse that helps those who are impacted to not only feel seen, but heard and supported.
Affirming the Experiences of Marginalized People
We must be aware that many of the experiences marginalized people have are key indicators of larger issues, often issues that are rooted in systems of oppression. Affirming them and their experiences by giving them space to speak freely about sources of harm reminds them that you are on their side and they can trust you in sharing said experiences.
How to Better Acknowledge the Experiences of Marginalized People
The first step to being a better accomplice requires us to do one simple thing: listen. In order to be able to fully affirm and advocate for marginalized people in our workplace, we must acknowledge that listening is the most important thing that any of us can do and often is the one thing we don’t do well.
Other Bold Culture Resources
As language evolves, the ways we describe ourselves change as well. The same can be said for members of the diverse LGBTQ+ community. Below we’ve pulled together a sampling of terminology and vocabulary with which any well-meaning ally should familiarize themselves.
Download Spectrum, a queer insights report, to learn more about the LGBTQIA+ community’s influence and affluence in media, marketing, tech, and advertising industries.
Third Party Articles
Understanding and Marketing to the Modern LGBTQIA+ Community
A massive cultural shift is underway driven by conversations around inclusivity and diversity—along with the #MeToo movement. This has had a major impact on marketers, not only on how they connect with the LGBTQ community, but internally on how they treat LGBTQ employees from a sexual orientation and gender identity standpoint.
Steps for reaching an LGBTQIA+ audience
For PR practitioners tasked with the goal of reaching diverse audiences, including sexual minorities, it is imperative that we look beyond the media-constructed imagery to gain a true understanding of who LGBTQ individuals are today.
Four Tips for Marketing to the LGBTQIA+ Community
It is important that brands understand the LGBTQ community and speak to them in an authentic, non-stereotypical way. CultureBeat can guide you in understanding this diverse group to build loyalty and trust. Here are four tips to aid you in authentically reaching this segment.
Insightful Tips for Thoughtfully Marketing to LGBTQ Customers
If you’re going to go where the money is—to pursue the greatest spending power—you’ll be joining an ever-increasing number of companies (still somewhat quietly) reaching out specifically to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer consumers.
#ShowYourPride: Engaging the LGBTQ+ Community Online
The LGBTQ+ community is a tech-savvy group with a proclivity towards online shopping. This community is a great audience to consider for ad spend targeting.
New data shows that half of internet users in the US said that if a company debuts Pride-related merchandise or content, they’re more likely to see that as a marketing tactic than as a true reflection of the company’s values, according to a YouGov survey.
Podcasts (shows or episodes)
Digital Marketing Daily by Google
Free, easy-to-understand lessons on useful business and marketing skills.
Relevant Episode:
Reach the LGBTQ Audience by Being Inclusive
Happening
Insights that inspire and illuminate your passions in life, love, & profession.
Relevant Episode:
Riding the Rainbow & Beyond: Marketing to a Queer Audience
Third-Party Infographics
Infographic: How Consumers Perceive and Respond to LGBTQ-Themed Ads
Gay social network Hornet commissioned a study of 800 people from Nielsen to determine the impact of LGBTQ ads on consumers, and the ads passed with flying (rainbow) colors.
Third Party Case Studies/White Papers
LGBTQ Marketing and Advertising: Best Practices
The report found that LGBTQ workers, businesses and consumers are directly shaping the American economy.
US LGBTQ Consumers Favor Companies That Support Equality, But Feel That Outreach Is Insufficient
Fully 85% of US LGBTQ consumers agree that corporations that support LGBTQ equality are more important than ever, and 78% agree that they tend to support companies that market to and support the LGBTQ community.
Recommended Books
For more than a decade Jenn T. Grace, the Professional Lesbian, has helped organizations connect with the lucrative LGBTQ market. In this, her fourth LGBTQ book, she takes us behind the scenes of her professional and personal life as she shares stories that illustrate the do’s and don’ts of doing business with the LGBTQ community.
