By sonia@soniaethompson.com (Sonia Thompson)

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As an inclusive marketing strategist and consultant, one of the things I find myself having to educate clients on is the right way to think about marketing inclusively.

At its core, inclusive marketing is all about helping a brand attract and retain more of the people who have the problem that brand solves.

Good marketing is inclusive.

The consumers your brand serves have a number of different identities that impact their product decision-making process, their degree of success, as well as the experiences they have while considering and using your product.

Brands that acknowledge the ways in which consumers are different, and then find ways to better serve those differences, are making a big impact with more consumers and growing as a result.

In the examples below, I’ll walk you through how seven different brands effectively approach inclusive marketing, which enables them to attract and retain more of the customers they want to reach.

Examples of Effective Inclusive Marketing

1. Mattel leans into inclusive product design.

More than 300 million people worldwide are colorblind. In the summer of 2024, Mattel announced its journey to making its games colorblind-accessible. The brand noted 80% of its games would meet this standard by the end of 2024, including UNO, Skip-bo, and Kerplunk, and 90% of the portfolio would be colorblind-accessible by the end of 2025.

A spokesperson for Mattel noted a driving force behind leaning into making adjustments to its products: “Many games require color differentiation, and we want to ensure our Mattel games are accessible to as many users as possible.”

As part of its inclusive product design process, the team collaborated with members of its design team who experience color blindness, partnered with experts who focus on color deficiency, and consulted with people in the color-blind community. This co-creation with experts as well as the community itself enabled the brand to deliver a product that worked for the consumers it wanted to reach.

Some of the primary changes included adding symbols or icons, patterns, and even tactile clues that help differentiate the various colors.