How Marketing is Changing to Protect it’s People
Changes sweeping through the commercial landscape in recent years are obliging businesses to engage in intricate ways with the wider lives and concerns of both their employees and their markets.
Diversity and Welfare
The Equality Act of 2010 promotes opportunities for every sector of the population, by ethnicity, gender, faith, sexuality, disability or age-group. The WBC (Women’s Business Council), set up in 2012, ensures women achieve their potential at work. 2015 guidelines from NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) make line managers responsible for employee health and wellbeing, and ensuring older people have access to development and training. Other government supported initiatives come from the IOSH (Institution of Occupational Safety and Health), the Depression Alliance, NEST (the National Employment Savings Trust) and so on.
The benefits of innovating in health and welfare are convincing, considering that each year the number of working days lost to stress and depression has increased 23% since 2007 (15 million sick days), whilst worldwide 666,000 skilled employees are lost to cancer. In the same vein, BT and Virgin have increased the percentage of maternity leavers returning by extending maternity support.
Diversify and Prosper
Another cultural change nobody has missed is the enormous growth in the variety and quantity of advertising – we live today in a sea of video ads, pop-ups, spam mail, cold calls, blogs, websites, soundbites, newsfeeds, videograms and social media messages competing for our attention. Paradoxically, as a result it’s never been harder to build strong lasting connections with consumers.
Potential consumers come from increasingly diverse demographic and social backgrounds. Marketing teams that can draw on a diverse workforce have new insights into diverse markets and brand repositioning within them. This is why industries need a brand and strategy innovation agency like www.lightbulbinnovation.com/.
Successful players in the economy have realised this and are grabbing change with both hands. The value of welfare and diversity in terms of hard profits is increasingly supported by convincing scientific studies – research in 2013 by the American CTI (Center for Talent Innovation) found that companies with diversity were 45% more likely to have grown their market share in the past year, 70% more likely to have successfully entered a new market, and 158% more likely to understand how to target new consumers.
