Company Overview
Jose Confections is an upcoming company offering a wide range of products, including gum, mints, hard and chewy candies, and lollipops. The company is located in Salem, Oregon. The company’s slogan is happiness comes in different flavors for all, irrespective of their cultural diversities.
Background
This company believes in the cultural, racial, and sexual orientation diversity of its customers and the larger public it aims to serve as it expands its operations and activities. First and foremost, Jose Confections streamlined its workforce such that all its employees are people from different backgrounds in terms of cultures, races, ethnicities, gender, and sexual orientations. This, they believe, is the sure way it can strategically be able to offer a wide range of products that meets the demands of different customers it seeks to serve in the market. Through the diversity of its employees, the company is sure of tapping the best in terms of skills and experiences, which are key in building teamwork and research. With the diversity of personnel, the company has the instruments to understand different cultures, what their tastes and preferences are, and how they would love the company’s products to appear in the market (Gynn, 2020). Having staff from different races and cultures, Jose Confections believes, is the only way to create awareness and sensitivity on issues that would otherwise be ignored when making marketing communication for all audiences.
Diversity and inclusivity are reflected in Jose Confections’ marketing and communications strategies. The company truly believes in marketing that resonates consciously with its audience customers or audience. It is alive to the fact that such content must cover beyond just the image. It requires thinking through research on social and cultural differences among its customers (Gynn, 2020). Jose Confections is aware that the clients want to see themselves in the company’s content, and they want to feel like the company sees through them either physically, geographically, or even psychologically. Additionally, the company understands that it must create communication that makes customers feel that their needs, pain points, and thoughts are considered and fulfilled. Therefore, Jose Confections put all these into practice and implementation by creating a promotion content that is diverse with several people from different diversities included. Through this inclusivity, Jose Confections believes it will be able to provide a highly relevant marketing communication that goes beyond just recognizing diversity and inclusion but increases its brand perception, effectiveness, and loyalty among customers.
Best Practices Examples
Jose Confections is pragmatic in its approach to marketing communication because it believes in research and evaluation of best practices by other established brands in the market. It evaluated several companies which resonated with the company’s strategies and decided to infuse the approaches by the following firms into its market communications. Salesforce is one example since its marketing says the company marketers’ duty is to create and promote messaging that relates to people of all backgrounds, races, ethnicity, gender identity, age, religion, abilities, and sexual orientations (Gynn, 2020). Salesforce goes deep in its marketing communication by incorporating stories and voices of youth, Blacks, Hispanics, and other marginalized or underrepresented groups of people to deepen links with customers, which influences positive social change.
Another case example is Unilever’s ‘Dove Real Beauty Pledge’ of 2004. This powerful inclusion promotion to women of all ages, races, sizes, and sexual orientations has over the years evolved into a brand differentiator. Its approach in this promotion was to always feature real women and not models; to portray women as they are in real life; and to help different girls build body confidence and self-esteem (Gynn, 2020). Over 15 years later, Unilever is still getting positive media attention and a lot of customers’ praises. The marketing strategies by these companies of using all categories of people, irrespective of their ages, gender, races, and religion, incorporate their real stories and voices and bring out their identity. This is good for Jose Confections because creating an identity makes targeted customers believe and feel as being part of the company and its products.
Addressing the Negatives
The biggest mistake brands normally make when trying diversity and inclusion in their marketing communication is when they use it only as a marketing strategy instead of focusing on creating diverse marketing teams. They fail even in the environment setting, which must also reflect the brand messaging they want to portray (Bourelly, 2018). Having diverse teams, Jose Confections believes, will help it a lot by tapping from different talents, skills, and experiences, which, when put together, would research well and come up with the best adverts. Through diversity in culture, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual orientation, the company believes it will create a sensitive environment in which intended marketing promotions are screened and analyzed for offensive sections before being released to the media. Further, it helps the company to create core cultural values which are anchored on teamwork, shared aspirations, and a common language for all employees within its premises.
These mistakes give room for intelligent consumers to view branding messages as inauthentic. For example, In January 2018, a fast-fashion company called H & M uploaded an image on its website of a young African-American boy modeling a green sweatshirt that included the slogan “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle.” It caused outrage, and social media users called out the company for its lack of cultural sensitivity (Morse, 2021). Dolce & Gabbana, a luxury fashion line, also released a marketing advert that was viewed to be full of ethnic stereotypes. In that advert, the company showed a Chinese model failing to eat various Italian dishes using chopsticks (Morse, 2021). People were annoyed at how the marketing strategy depicted Chinese people as lacking an understanding of cultural diversity. Clearly, these two cases demonstrate how companies do mess up due to a lack of cultural identity within their operations.
Conclusion
Jose Confections cares about the diversity and inclusivity of its customers, so it streamlines communication with its workforce such that all its employees are people from different backgrounds in terms of cultures, races, ethnicities, gender, and sexual orientations. Likewise, it approaches marketing through research because it believes in the evaluation of best practices by other established brands in the market. It evaluated several companies which resonated with the company’s strategies and decided to infuse the approaches of Salesforce and Unilever. The marketing strategies by these companies of using all categories of people, irrespective of their ages, gender, races, and religion, incorporate their real stories and voices and bring out their identity. For Jose Confections, creating an identity makes targeted customers believe and feel as being part of the company and its products.
References
Bourelly, E. (2018). The biggest mistake made in diversity marketing, and how to fix it. Web.
Gynn, A. (2020). Diversity and content marketing: How brands can be more inclusive. Web.
Morse, B. (2021). The 7 most embarrassing branding mistakes. Inc. Web.