Finding Your Brand’s Blind Spots With an Inclusivity Assessment

Reaching underrepresented audiences is not only vital to marketing success – and even presents an opportunity to connect with new audiences – it’s the right thing to do for patients. But all too often, brands aren’t even aware of their missteps. For example, how is your brand doing in terms of inclusivity, and what’s it doing to ensure greater reach and impact among potentially marginalized audiences? If you’re unsure about the answers, consider an inclusivity assessment.

What’s an inclusivity assessment, and why do you do them?

An inclusivity assessment is a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary evaluation of a brand’s ecosystem against a wide range of inclusivity metrics. It seeks to unearth the points of view of audiences that were previously ignored to ensure a brand expresses itself in ways that are reflective and respectful of its target audience.

Thinking inclusively means elevating insights on patient, caregiver, and HCP demographics that make sense for your brand and its disease state, and offering solutions based upon those insights. To do that, you must know which insights are relevant. That’s where activities like an inclusivity assessment come in: structured, required parts of the work designed to help teams overcome their blind spots and accurately understand how best to help their brand.

Okay… but what’s an untapped audience?

In this context, untapped audiences are demographic groups that are significantly impacted by a condition but are bundled into the general population without consideration of their unique barriers, motivators, or media consumption habits. Untapped audiences could include groupings based on generation, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, language, geography, socioeconomic standing – and many more. (For more on addressing untapped audiences, read our POV, “What Every Healthcare Marketer Needs to Know About Inclusive Marketing.”)

What can you learn from an inclusivity assessment?

In a recent assessment Intouch conducted for a brand that treats a condition more prevalent in Black than in white people, our findings helped us develop more inclusive messaging that also builds trust between HCPs and patients. The treatment in question is for a condition that affects “people with uteruses,” and we heard from patients and doctors that using language like that, rather than “women,” can be beneficial. For example, it can help trans and nonbinary Black patients feel acknowledged, and may help them become aware of health issues that might not otherwise be top of mind; and it can help HCPs talk to patients more comfortably and effectively, which is vital in building trust.

Examples of inclusivity considerations

• Ensuring that there are members of the brand team who can assess the work from a variety of perspectives
• Using terminology inclusive of, and specifically relevant to, untapped audiences
• Understanding and educating on how different skin tones can present skin conditions differently
• Assessing physical access to care when considering tools like doctor locators, including wheelchair access to an office, or rural distance to reach a location
• Addressing barriers to receiving care via telehealth, which could include issues of multilingual availability, access to technology, “technology quotient” or ability, and visual or hearing impairments.

Inclusivity – it’s not optional

Currently, Latinos, Asians, and Blacks have a combined population of 130 million – that’s nearly half the total U.S. population – and Latinos are expected to almost double their population in the next 40 years. And with one in four American adults having a disability, brands that aren’t considering accessibility also aren’t considering their whole audience. In short, brands that don’t prioritize inclusivity likely will not reach their full potential.

Conducting an inclusivity assessment is just one step a brand can take to improve its marketing efforts. The opportunities to improve how we understand our audiences are myriad, but since you can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you may not know what you don’t know, inclusivity assessments are vital to the success of your brand’s marketing efforts.