‘Bring somebody else to the room’: Marketers on how to build a more inclusive industry

There is a pressing and persistent need to make the marketing industry more inclusive. Marketing Week’s own 2024 Career & Salary Survey data reveals the profession has a socio-economic pay gap for full-time workers of 15.9%, meaning marketers from working class backgrounds are being paid less on average than their peers.

The issue is crystal clear for former Unilever, Kimberly-Clark and Jellyfish senior marketer and mentor, Yolande Battell. Speaking last week at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing (3 October), she argued the industry knows it needs to become more inclusive, but progress during the more than two decades since she started out has been painfully slow.

“There is progress, there’s absolutely progress, but the problem is it’s not fast enough. We are marketers. We are in this era of technology. Technology is changing at the speed of light and we’re catering to audiences that are really diverse. We know how important that is and yet we can’t retain the make up of our workforce that we need it to be. How can we not do that? How are we so slow?” she asked.

“Imagine if we can say we’re plugging those gaps as quickly as AI is taking over. There is so much more that we can all do. We absolutely can. We can cater to our audiences. We can certainly look after our people.”

One of the things I’ve found from my experience is a lot of people talk about ‘We recruit for attitude and train for aptitude’, and the thing that overlooks is opportunity.

Martin George, WeAreHere

Battell was joined on stage by former Waitrose customer director, non-exec director and mentor, Martin George, who argued Marketing Week’s socio-economic pay gap statistics prove the industry has much work ahead to become truly inclusive.

He pointed to additional data, which reveals not only that the profession pays people from lower socio-economic backgrounds less, but there are fewer of them to begin with.

The Advertising Association’s All In census from 2023, for example, found 20% of the industry is from a working-class background, compared to 40% of the UK population. Furthermore, 19% of people in the industry attended a fee-paying school, versus 8% in the general population.

Reflecting on the data, George urged the marketing profession to face into the issue and act immediately, arguing the motivation stretches beyond a sense of altruism.

“In my experience of leading teams, I’ve found diversity has been massively important. Diversity of opinions tends to be the fuel for transformational innovation and that is really important. Diversity avoids biases and stereotypes. It says a lot about the values of your organisation and that’s increasingly differentiating businesses in the outside world,” he said.

“It helps you appeal to more diverse customer groups, either locally or nationally or internationally, and it sets you apart as a world-class employer. People want to work for diverse organisations and if you’re attracting, motivating and retaining talent that is obviously critical if you’re trying to build a competitive advantage. It’s the right thing to do if you’re values-driven, but also the right thing to do if you’re building value for your shareholders.”

Fellow panellist Sarah Atkinson, CEO of the Social Mobility Foundation, noted the hidden barriers that exist within the creative industries, which can superficially feel more progressive than the classically formal workplaces of professional services firms and legal practices.

“Marketing, advertising, the creative industries, there’s just as many unwritten rules like what kind of trainers to wear and when is it OK to swear or put your feet up on a desk. If you don’t know anyone who works in the industry, you don’t know anyone who can tell you,” she explained.

Starting a movement

Reflecting on her decades in the industry, Battell recalled feeling like an “outsider” starting out at a time when there were no women in leadership positions, especially women of colour.

“As I’ve climbed up the ladder into my leadership positions – my diverse attributes are very physical – I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been mistaken for the wife or the assistant,” she said.

Seeing no role models of her own, Battell said she became her own role model and as she did so people started asking her more questions about her experiences. She realised she was starting to make a difference and her priorities shifted.

“I didn’t share my story before, partly because I didn’t want to stand out. I was an outsider already. I didn’t want to continue to be an outsider. But when people asked me this question one-on-one, I was able to make a difference. I could see that and my fulfilment started changing,” Battell explained.

“Yes, I wanted to hit all my targets. Yes, I wanted to build brands and help my clients, but actually I realised I wanted to make a difference.”

You do know the things that can make a difference. We know about access to opportunity. We know about internal sponsorships, networks and support.

Sarah Atkinson, Social Mobility Foundation

Battell works with a variety of organisations including MEFA Media for All and The Marketing Academy Foundation, working as a mentor for the foundation’s BeTheOne employability bootcamps aimed at young people from challenging backgrounds.

She recalled meeting a young woman at a bootcamp event in February who was so nervous she never made eye contact and stuck to scripted answers. Keen to help her, Battell followed up on a comment the aspiring marketer made about wanting to work in the charity sector. Going “off script” helped the young woman open up about her motivation to make a difference based on her experiences growing up in care.

“Even if I’d just made a difference to one person, I felt like I was doing something to bridge this gap,” Battell said of the moment at the bootcamp.

“Anybody who tells you they can’t make a difference, [you can]. Every single person in the room can do it.”

George also urged marketers to put inclusivity on the agenda and start the conversation within their businesses.

Young people invited to ‘co-create the future of marketing’

“One of the things I’ve found from my experience is a lot of people talk about ‘We recruit for attitude and train for aptitude’, and the thing that overlooks is opportunity. What we’ve found is a lot of young people simply don’t have the opportunity to consider a career in marketing,” he explained.

“They don’t go to university. Their teachers or career advisors in school don’t understand what marketing is or what skills you need. They don’t have any support that we might have enjoyed from family or friends, so they’re at a loss to think about marketing as a possibility.”

To rectify this situation, George has teamed up with Giffgaff CEO Ash Schofield, creative agency AnalogFolk and a group of The Marketing Academy Fellows on WeAreHere, a new collective connecting under-represented young people with opportunities in the marketing industry.

The vision is to build a platform where young people and brands come together to co-create the future of marketing. The founding group includes young people from under-represented backgrounds who want to change the industry from the inside out.

“Even the name is a statement the group came up with, which is basically don’t forget us. Effectively, what we’re intending to do is match-make between brands and opportunities,” George explained.

“What we want it to be is a place where young people can go and see the kind of opportunities that are available to them, so we will share case studies of people with backgrounds similar to them who are now in the industry and will tell their stories. We’ll share stories about brands doing great work in this space. We will talk about skills and capabilities that young people already have that lend themselves to working in marketing.”

WeAreHere is looking for brands keen to offer mentorships, school visits, internships, holiday jobs, or apprenticeships to get in touch.

‘Bring somebody else to the room’

Another practical way to bring about change is for brands to calculate their socio-economic pay gap, something the Social Mobility Foundation has been campaigning on for years.

Calling out reporting done by the likes of Santander, Amazon and Sky, Atkinson highlighted the experience of the Co-op, which in July published its first set of socio-economic pay gap statistics.

Calculating the pay gap between colleagues from professional and lower socio-economic backgrounds, the Co-op has a mean socio-economic pay gap of 5.2% and a median pay gap of 0.2%. The median compares the hourly rate of the middle professional colleague role to the middle lower socio-economic colleague role, while the mean compares the average hourly rate of pay.

The data revealed the retailer has more employees from professional backgrounds working in senior leadership roles, while the biggest pay gap identified is for women from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

I didn’t share my story before, partly because I didn’t want to stand out. I was an outsider already…But when people asked me this question one to one, I was able to make a difference.

Yolande Battell

“The Co-op is a great example, because the Co-op is a brand that has a huge sense of purpose and they were pretty confident that social mobility was in their blood and in their culture. It’s what they do. Yet they bravely wanted to test this out and make themselves accountable,” said Atkinson.

“They looked at the experiences of people working in the Co-op. What they found is they weren’t where they wanted to be. There are really good people in the organisation who weren’t going for promotions they were capable of – and the Co-op wanted them to go for – because they were worried about the risk of moving location, taking on bigger responsibilities. They couldn’t take that risk. That’s a really powerful conversation to have.”

She explained brands engaging in socio-economic pay gap reporting care about purpose, but they also care about business success and understand this work is essential to bridge opportunity, skills and productivity gaps. Moreover, employees – regardless of background – are paying attention to their company’s social impact, Atkinson added.

The Social Mobility Foundation CEO urged marketers to learn from professional services, law and the public sector in terms of how to begin socio-economic pay gap reporting. As Atkinson noted, many organisations from these sectors regularly top the foundation’s Social Mobility Employer Index, the 2024 edition of which will be published next week.

“[Pay gap reporting is] a challenge sure, but it’s not a wicked one. You do know the things that can make a difference. We know about access to opportunity. We know about internal sponsorships, networks and support,” she added.

“We know about the need to tell stories and share information. We do know how to do all these things, we just need to get practical.”

‘Background to the foreground’: How the Co-op kickstarted socio-economic pay gap reporting

Ultimately, success starts with normalising the conversation, said Atkinson, who encouraged marketers to get inclusivity on the agenda, which gives people the “permission” to start telling their stories.

Battell urged her peers to resist any form of tokenism, citing the number of times she’d been asked to front an event that had nothing to do with her capabilities. Changing minds takes work, she acknowledged, and starts with spreading the message.

“The people who are in the room [today] are already the converted. We’re preaching to the converted,” Battell added. “My other ask to you as individuals is to bring somebody else to the room, preferably a decision-maker who can make a difference. If it’s just one other person then we’re already doubling up and increasing the pace of change.”

Marketing Week’s Opening Up campaign is pushing for the democratisation of marketing careers. Read all the articles from the series so far here.