The D&I checklist your marketing team needs

Making diversity part of every brand’s DNA is something we believe in strongly at Quip Brands. To do so, we’ve developed five important checkpoints that every campaign should pass before it’s approved. 

1.    Have diverse decisionmakers. Whether it’s your board, or your executive creative team, unless your decisionmakers are diverse, your campaigns will struggle to be truly inclusive. This includes clients, too.

2.    Use language with care. How we label people has a profound impact, so it’s vital when scripting or copywriting that every word is checked with a sensitivity lens.

3.    Check your biases and your blind spots. We all have them—whether they are cultural, age-based, gender or sexuality, we are inherently biased, and must be active in addressing our own. 

4.    Speak to, not for, minorities. Any time you can gain direct insights, you should. And, if you’re targeting a specific audience, engaging an expert in that space is essential.

5.    Empower through image. Whether it’s during casting or in the way your images are composed, it’s important that your visuals elevate and provide authentic representations of different identities. 

No more tokens, just true representation.

Australia is an aging population; more than half of us are female; we are truly multicultural; our first nations people deserve better; we have significant LGBTIQ+ communities; nearly one in five of us have a disability; we come in all shapes and sizes—yet the majority of our onscreen talent, our advertising and branding, continues to present a very white, able-bodied, young, thin, heteronormative view.

As the professional community widely responsible for forming a normalised image of Australia, all of us in brand management positions have a responsibility to actively address the lack of diversity in our content, talent and campaigns, too.