How Avoiding Inclusion in Your Imagery Limits Your Audience

Representation, representation, representation.

You’ve probably heard the term a lot lately and odds are you agree with it especially when it comes to business branding and imagery. All too often, though, businesses – especially smaller ones – are making the mistake of not following through with diversity and inclusion in their brand imagery.

What do we mean by that?

To be blunt: your images are still too white.

Having worked with businesses large and small, we’ve had many meetings about brand imagery that start with “we want to focus on diversity and inclusion,” only to hear weeks later that they really want their imagery to reflect their audience better by using mostly photos of white men and women.

SMH.

You’re Limiting Your Audience by Limiting Your Imagery

This may sound like a small detail, but the truth of the matter is when you limit your imagery to reflect what you think your audience is you are, in fact, limiting your audience.

This may come as shock, but your audience is not solely comprised of a certain race or ethnicity or gender identity. No matter what your business is. And if it is – you’ve got a larger problem that a few articles on marketing are not going to fix.

When you open your imagery to reflect people from all walks of life you are inviting a larger swath of customers (humanity) to see themselves reflected back at them using your product or service. You are also stating quite openly that your product or service is so good that it is for everyone. 

Check Yourself + Your Imagery

Now, before you say “oh, we don’t do that,” and disregard this article, I want you to go and review the past few flyers, social posts, blog pictures, etc. that your company has released. What is the diversity breakdown? How many Black people were in the photos? Asian? Hispanic? Indigenous? Women? LGBTQIA+? Old? Young?

Diversity and inclusion don’t just happen in branding. You have to work at it, consciously. Stock images are still heavily weighted with photos of white men and women. Finding quality images can be time-consuming.

If you have the budget, make a conscious effort and do a photoshoot with a fully diverse cast of models. If you don’t – spend some time building up your own image bank from free stock photos and have them at your fingertips when you are ready to design marketing material or post on social media.

Open Your Audience + Grow Your Brand

When you start to use diversity and inclusion in your branding, your audience will expand. You will be able to shift your entire marketing strategy seemingly overnight because you have effectively widened your audience base. Even if you don’t recognize it, when your images are limited, your entire strategy molds around that.

Marketing has always been about targeting your audience. When you widen it, you widen your opportunities as well.