Your messages aren’t received in a vacuum. When they conflict with your customers’ worldview, it can signal your brand isn’t for them.
Sydney Sweeney is facing backlash once again for an ad campaign she is featured in. This time, it’s for sports betting company Novig, where Sweeney is a strategic partner and equity holder.
The campaign features Sweeney in a series of sports-themed images. In many, she is nude, with sporting equipment strategically covering her body—footballs in one, a tennis ball and racket in another.
The campaign has drawn criticism from women athletes, including Olympians, who say the imagery sexualizes women in sports at a time when female athletes have worked for years to be recognized for their athleticism rather than their bodies.
I saw one woman on TikTok explain that she had spent years learning to appreciate her athletic body. After seeing the campaign, she found herself second-guessing her clothing choices.
There’s an important lesson for marketers in that reaction: Your customers don’t encounter your marketing with a blank slate.
Your customers bring years of programming to your marketing
Brands spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to communicate: features, benefits, differentiation, and calls to action. But customers experience those messages through everything they have already seen, heard, experienced, and internalized. Culture has been messaging to your customers long before your brand ever gets the opportunity to.
I see this already with my six-year-old daughter. She has made comments about sports being for boys. That isn’t something my husband or I taught her. But she has watched us watch the World Cup, where the players she saw were men, along with countless other images of men playing sports.
Those inputs are helping her construct an idea about who sports are for. So we intentionally introduce other inputs. We involve her in sports, which she loves, and we will watch the Women’s World Cup and other women’s sports.
Imagine the accumulated impact of decades of cultural programming on the customers encountering your marketing.
In 2018, Cosmopolitan UK put plus-size model Tess Holliday on its cover. One woman’s response on social is burned into my memory. She wrote that if she had seen women who looked like her on magazine covers growing up, it might not have taken her more than 25 years to love her body.
I once complimented a woman on her beautiful curly hair. Her response? “Thanks. It took me 20 years to love it.” When I later shared that story on social media, another woman commented it took her 20 years to love her curls, too.
Your marketing becomes another input into those narratives.
Marketers have been programmed, too
Marketers aren’t standing outside of culture. We’ve been absorbing its messages, too.
I once conducted an audit of a healthcare brand’s marketing materials and noticed something striking. With one exception, every doctor pictured was a man.
The brand hadn’t intentionally decided doctors should be men. The company’s marketing team was mortified when I brought it to their attention. There was no strategy meeting where someone declared that men should represent medical expertise and authority. And yet, that was the message the collective imagery communicated.
Cultural programming about who we associate with expertise and authority had found its way into the brand’s marketing without the team intending to reinforce it.
That’s why examining the narratives embedded in our creative matters.
Every brand participates in the programming, intentionally or not
Who appears in your marketing is part of your message. Every person you cast as the protagonist communicates something. So does the person portrayed as the expert, executive, athlete, parent, successful customer, or person everyone else wants to be.
A few years ago, I saw an Amazon Alexa Super Bowl ad featuring a dark-skinned Black woman with natural hair as the main character. The product message didn’t need to change. But the casting itself offered a different input about who gets to be centered.
There are always two messages customers can receive: the explicit message about your product, and the implicit message about who belongs.
So when you show women in sports, what existing narratives about female athletes are you reinforcing or challenging? When you depict beauty, whose beauty is aspirational? When you show leadership, who gets to lead?
Your customers bring a lifetime of cultural inputs to how they receive your marketing. And the people creating that marketing bring their own lifetime of inputs to the work. Marketers spend enormous amounts of time determining what we want customers to think about our brands.
We should spend more time considering what our marketing helps customers think about themselves. Because our marketing becomes another input into the programming about who belongs, who matters, who gets centered, and what is possible for people like them.
The question isn’t whether your brand is contributing to that narrative. The question is, what are you helping your customers believe?
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Feature image credit: Courtesy Novig
