Transcripts
1. Introduction: I really love how visual art can be the process of trying to bring order to the unknown. Capturing and freezing a single moment, and then translating it for the world to see, it's actually a wild situation. Hey, what's going on? My name is Aundre Larrow. I'm a Brooklyn-based visual artist. I specialize in portraiture, art direction, and videography. But today we're talking about how to maintain your brand's visual language while keeping an eye on inclusivity. Photography means the world to me. Through visual art, I've had the opportunity to travel all over the place and meet interesting people. I particularly love portraiture or documentary style and film because it allows me to get to know someone intimately in a short period of time. Through that, I've really come to chase inclusivity, because so many of our stories are similar, with these different twists and turns of different flair. It is really important to me today to impart on you how you can take time to look through your brand's vision, your brand's goals, and creatively think about new ways to entice new users that might have different stories, different root interests, but are still viable customers for you. It's about looking at who you think your core user group is and figuring out new ways to expand that concept internally and externally. I was excited to teach this class because as we march to a more equitable future, I think it's vital for us to find ways for our societal goals and our business goals to merge. It's easier for us to more naturally include diversity in our marketing materials, in our hiring process, in everything that we do, if we can identify different ways that our product can be used by different user groups. Too often, I think we make assumptions based on things that have existed for a long time, that end up being unhelpful and frankly impact your bottom line. As a photographer, my background is in visuals. But often what I'm being paid to do is to take a brand's vision and project it for everyone to see, to make it beautiful. In that experience, I've really learned the importance of understanding how powerful it can be just a capture a different user than normal, maybe the ads that someone's used to looking at, the value in them seeing someone different using that same product. The reason I wanted to teach this class was to say, although it's not easy, over time, it makes more sense, and will make you more money to continue to expand your user base to include as many people as possible. Inclusivity is everyone. For many of us, our work is our life. It's generally reflective of our values, who we are, what we hope the world to be. I hope that everyone that can take this class will take this class. No matter what role you have in your company, it's important to think expansively about all the people that can be a part of that brand story with you. Your main takeaway from this class is to figure out how to be more imaginative about who your customer base can be, and to be excited about all the new ways you can market your product and all the people that might want to use it. I've worked at startups before, I've worked at magazines or the newspapers. I know the importance of just getting a story or a product, or just a vision into the hands and the eyes of more people. By the end of this, I hope that you can make a comprehensive plan to market to three new user groups, and then you can take that plan and you can use it. I'm excited to see the questions you have and to see the progress you make in this class. Honestly, thank you so much for trusting me. Let's get to work together.
2. Articulating Your Value Proposition: What is your brand's value proposition? I'm sure you know. What excites you about the brand? What makes it special in the space? When I was 24 and got my first full real job at a startup called Walker and Company, I didn't really know what that word meant. Walker and Company is this really cool brand that is focused on making health and beauty products simple for people of color. With our value proposition, it was super interesting, especially with the main product, the flagship Bevel, because it was focused on making shaving easier for men with coarse and curly hair which seems really simple. Because initially, as we're talking about inclusivity, when you say coarse and curly hair, you think me. You think a black person, you think razor bumps, you think going to Walmart and buying Bump Patrol or some other product. The thing that I thought we did that was super fascinating from the beginning was not saying that all our products are just for people of color. Having our mission statement be to make high-quality products for people of color, but taking each product and saying that it is inclusive for all people of coarse and curly hair. Then the photographer ended up doing for the brand was a nice mixture of just different folks with different skin tones and then different backgrounds, and different ages that we're all just folks that suffered from razor bumps. That expanded from maybe just black men to black and brown men to men of all ethnicities, but also including women and trans folks. Taking that brand proposition was so fascinating, because it was a high-quality product focused on teaching you the importance of every step of the process of shaving, and in doing so, informing people about their skin and about how to take better care of it. It was a really fascinating experience, because the value proposition was so apparent, just in the very name of it. Other things I've worked on, value proposition, it can be something completely banal. Like if you're a fan of beer, some beers they change color when they're cold, some of them you can buy them with their name on them. They're just little fun ways to market to your user, especially if it's something that's in a populated market. So what is your value proposition? What makes your brand special? What makes the company that you work at stand out in the market? For brands we love like Nike, it's that they associate themselves with winners. They have great marketing, and we know their value proposition is, Just Do It. We have to ask ourselves, what is it that leads us to buy more of these shoes or more of these shirts or anything like that? What is that thing for your brand? How do you identify it? If it's not already clear to you, then you should pause this lesson for a minute, and just take time to write out what your product does, but also what makes it unique. Why do people buy it? That is where you find your brand proposition. When you start with that value proposition, the opportunities to market it are endless, because all you have to do is just boil it right back down to that question. What do we do well, and why do people buy from us? Talking about Walker and Company, to just show you some visual examples. I loved working here. It was a really cool experience for me as a photographer to learn the value and consistent imagery, the value and visual language, and how it translates to your customer base. Some of the main tenets we had as a brand, obviously we're focused on high quality ingredients and obviously high quality photography. One of the first shoots I had for them was this ingredient shoot, where essentially I was photographing some of these natural ingredients that were in each product, and it was a new experience for me. I never really tried photographing aloe vera or anything like that. Knowing our value proposition as it's even written here, is that these are all natural things that are great for sensitive skin. It's also a pretty simple shoot. I just had a black seamless, I put this down on a table, use some natural light and a reflector, and just photographed these. This is a good example of both understanding my value proposition and then later understanding who the users were. You can see the copy helps prevent razor bumps. Just really nice and simple photography that really shows great visual language that speaks specifically to the value proposition. Working there, it was great because we understood that shaving really meant each time you shave, that was like becoming a new version of yourself. Throughout that, we market different things that would help folks take care of themselves better. Even one year we did a whole site refresh called, A New Guide for New You. This was the expansion of the value proposition into the positives for the user. It was targeting at just different other things you could use to take care of your skin, take care of your face, take care of your body, the clothes that you bought. This is just a reminder as we talk about inclusivity, that there are many ways for you to execute it, but it really starts with saying, what is my value proposition? How can I parse that value proposition out into many ways, so that I can bring it to my customer and they can share it with their friends, or I can bring it to new customer bases with excitement and accuracy? All this talk about value proposition, you have to use itching to write about yours. Well, that is what our student action is for this lesson. Take a couple minutes, write out what you believe your brand's value proposition is. Even if you already have it written out, if you already have a mission statement, all those things, put those to the side, and just for you, what do you think makes this brand special? Why do customers continue to come back to you? Write that down, and if you have more than one thought, wreck it out, tear it out. That way later, this might help you better market to those new user groups.
3. Understanding Your User-Base: This is weird to ask for in a video, but I want you to close your eyes, take a deep breath and center yourself. When I ask you to, I want you to just take a piece of paper and write out the attributes of your main user. Who was it you market to? When you think about the person that buys your product, what do they look like? If you're unsure, go to your marketing materials and tell me what you see the most of. Is it a certain age group? Is it a certain ethnicity? Is it a certain gender? Without realizing it, our implicit biases can creep in when we market. Because often we want to hire people that look like us, talk like us, and are reflective of the truths that we already know. As we take a minute to establish our user, let's be as plain as possible. Is it 30-45 year-old white women? Is it 18-year-old black men? Is it 65 and up Asian women? Let's just take a minute and understand who we've been marketing to, and then ask ourselves why? I say this because it's important to shift your perspective as a marketer and as a company in general. It's not always bad. When I worked at Walker and Company, one of the first jobs I did there, it was amazing. We did this project called Find Your Barber. It was a genius idea. It said we know that our main user group are black men between 28 and 40, and at the amount of money that they spend, because this is a high-quality product, these are generally people that travel quite a bit and deal with the issue of how do I get my hair cut it in a new city? We did as a little solution and as a way to build further customer loyalty, we made a program called Find Your Barber, where we took research and asked ourselves which cities do we sell our products most in. It was cities that are actually really black; Atlanta, Charlotte, Oakland, Miami, New York, Philly. I went and did [inaudible] about barber shops. I would try to focus on about five shops around the city that had different attributes. Then made these little reviews for people so that they could find a high-quality shop that maybe felt like an older barber shop where they can have a ton of conversation or one where they could pop in and out. But almost all the shops that I highlighted were all very black. Looking at it now, as I really think about that shift of perspective, this wasn't the smartest thing because I'd spent all this time and honestly company resources on a tool that was limited in some way. Because, yeah, maybe there are some white dudes or Asian, do is go to black shops or maybe there are some women that go there to get an undercut or to cut their hair but generally, I was saying, without realizing it, that this double product is exclusively for black people. That wasn't the most helpful. As I started to talk to you about how to shift your perspective after you wrote out who you think your user group is, now it's time to ask yourself why? For example, there are some brands that I love that are in the Portland, Seattle area that are really outdoorsy, focused on rain or outdoor wear. I've always been curious why those brands always market only to 18 year-old white man, because in theory, the outdoors is for everyone. When I say shift your perspective, what I want to say is maybe if you take your brand value proposition like let's say we make a jacket that's waterproof. It might help to market to people in the city in New York to say, ''Hey, what do you do in a blizzard or snowstorm?'' Where else do people need this all whether material, where else do people use the shaving cream or this razor. Starting to take that user group that you have for your main user group and mixing it with a value proposition, you should be able to find a gap to say, ''Okay, people who love our products for this reason. Why is it that we're only marketing to this group of people? How can we change that?" There's such power in that thought. I just want you to sit in it for a second. I'm going to be quiet for about 5-10 seconds, and then after that, we're going to talk about some conclusions and we're going to keep going and keep this energy out. Thank you again for choosing to watch this class. Let's take a second and just really think about who else we could include in our user group.
4. Reviewing Your User-Base: How did that 10 seconds feel? Did you get a moment to really think about your users? Well, now we're going to take some time to think about your potential users. In this lesson, we're focusing on pursuing diversity by auditing our current work, that's our past marketing materials, our current marketing materials, our overall language of the company. Essentially, what we're asking is, what is our visual language saying about who we are most excited about, who our customer base is and who we've included on our little click of our brand? How do we expand that? One of the best examples I've ever seen of diversifying your customer base was done by Pedialyte. Pedialyte did an amazing job of shifting their customer base from just parents buying this drink for their kids to college students trying to take care of themselves after maybe a really intense weekend. It was just a really fascinating way to increase their base of customers from maybe 30 to 45, to go all the way down to maybe 18 and up to say, "Hey, if you exercise or if you're drinking alcohol, or if you're doing anything to restore your nutrients, this is a really safe and healthy way to do that." It's fascinating Pedialyte in a way became the layman's Gatorade. Their sales did better because of it. What I want you to leave this lesson with is an excitement to find new customers, new users, and new ways your product can be used. It might be a new value proposition or just might be a new way to market your product. But either way, your creativity can really sore here. To do that, I'm going to show you some of my past work and things that we did to diversify the subjects that I captured in it. Here's some ways that I've expanded the customer base in the past of projects I've worked on visually. To start with is this project level called Story Behind the Cut, it's actually a fun story focused on haircuts and what inspired folks haircuts. One of the main things that I wanted to do differently for this project was to make sure that I included more black women, because we were seeing that a lot more black women were purchasing the product and using it to shave their legs, arms, armpits, whatever. Because of the focus on the process of shaving, a lot of folks felt like they were learning it for the first time and they felt excited about a product that was marketed as a high-quality product for people of color. There's some different images in here that I thought did a pretty good job. They were elevated and simple, but I think it was just a really simple and smart thing to say, I'm setting up this photoshoot. We have the space, we have the backup, we have the lights. How much does it help us to market to a ton of men when we could just increase the amount of women? Representation is very fascinating because sometimes it's just the psychological barrier of seeing yourself that helps unlock the door to then be excited about using that product. I'm not saying to be exploitative. If it's a user group, if it's an ethnicity, a gender that you know nothing about, I I there's great value in hiring a consultant or someone to your team that can speak to that experience. But by unlocking that authenticity, you then create more opportunity to yourself to have more users, with a product you've already paid to do research and development on. You've already paid the market. Now it's just time to shift some of the marketing materials so that it shows everyone that can potentially use it. This was a big shift for me, just understanding the importance and the value of showing not only men, but women, and then also, I realized just the value of making sure that I had not only people of color, but white people and brown people as I captured, and gets me to work on this project. One more note about Walker and Company. One of the last projects I worked on was a Valentine's Day Campaign. Every year for Valentine's Day, we did a big push to market to couples the idea that this product was one that would help men of color take care of themselves, so it was an easy gift for their partner. But every year it was pretty heteronormative. It was usually a black man and a black woman. Although that's very beautiful and very important, in the last few that I worked on it, I asked myself why I hadn't considered using non-heteronormative couples. Although we didn't do that exclusively, one of my favorite things we did were portraits of this lovely Brooklyn couple of black men that both shaved their face and their head. It was a really cool moment for me where I started to understand, hey, this value proposition not only can work on people's faces and their heads, but it's not just something for a woman to buy their men. It's something for anyone to buy for anyone else that takes care of their skin. That expansive thought was sadly, honestly really revolutionary for me and I'm sad to say that. But I hope that you're having that moment right now where you can say what I said, which is if this is a product to take care of your skin, why can't everyone use it? To take something as exciting as this, something as lovely as this, and just show two smooth skin men that are in love with each other, that are dressed beautifully, it was really amazing to capture them in an aspirational style, very similar to the brand. But now I'm saying, hey, this year we want to market Valentine's day to make sure it includes this non-heteronormative couple. Next year or next shoot, we should be continuing to expand what that definition of the customer base says. In doing so, grow all the people that are excited about using the brand. Another example I wanted to bring up outside of their looks, I know you're tired of that, is my very good friend, Becky Simpson, has this really cool brand called Chipper Things. It's really beautiful, optimistic brand that's just focused on being positive and accepting who you are and really enjoying it. Becky's a national based creative and Chipper Things has been highlighted all over Allure, BuzzFeed, Britain Co, Apartment Therapy. It actually became really apparent to me, to know fault of her own, that the brand was really over indexing on 18-30 year-old white women that were really enjoying life. That's awesome, but why not other folks? When she and I talked about what we wanted to do when she had her Earth Day collection coming up, she, these really beautiful illustrations that one said I'm my mother's daughter. I thought a lot about that concept and the strength of that. One of my friends has a company that's named after her grandmother and I thought to myself, how awesome would it be for me to take this brand that by no fault of its own, has really been marketing very intensively to white women and make sure that it's showing all sorts of women of different shades and backgrounds. This one I actually didn't make a particularly big deal about. In terms of what the Walker and Company, I had to make a very deliberate decision process. With this, I just sent some different models to the art director and said, "This is what I want to shoot and why?" They said "Yes." Just the fun of these shirts, like making it up as I go, or I'm my mother's daughter, there was a freedom in capturing not only black women, not only white women, but literally four women from different backgrounds. It still fit the age demographic and still have that carefree attitude, but it was really fun to expand what their visual palette is as a brand. As I continue to challenge you in this class, as you look at your marketing materials, what are you seeing the most of? I want to challenge you to instead of think, this is what my customer looks like. I want you to instead ask what my customer thinks like. What do they read? What are they excited about, and how else do they spend their money? If you find out that the thing that you sell is anytime Allure magazine writes about it, your sales go up 500 percent, then maybe it's time to think about, what else is in Allure magazine? What else do people at Allure purchase? Where do these people shop? Figuring out ways to then expand out and market. That, although it sounds like a simple idea is very quietly revolutionary. It's the idea that where your customer spends, you should be able to meet them and invite them into your brand family. The very last example I want to show is a recent project I did over at Bandits Bandannas. This is a really rad small company that focuses on the the spirit of being abandoned. I know that quarantine has made bandannas cool again, but often if we saw people wearing bandannas, we'd assume they were either cowboys or people that were pretending to play stick up or something like that. But generally with his brand, they are based in California and they have a very desert vibe, desert look. They hired me to capture collaborations they did with New York artists. So many of our marketing materials were really desert focused, people enjoying a drink in the desert or driving mopeds and all these expansive areas when my truth and where I live is very New York. It's very urban. There's people everywhere. What does it look like to have that carefree attitude in a city of millions? We talked about it, I asked them, how can I capture your customer in a new way? They said, "You have your reign to do what you want." What I did was I went through their site and I looked at different images they had captured in the past and asked myself, if I change the environment, what exactly am I distilling from each image? Their value proposition, theirs was simple. We collaborate with local artists to create soft quality bandannas that people can enjoy in their regular life. It's my job to bring that to life. Looking at their brand audit, I thought they already did a great job of marketing to literally everyone, but I think sometimes we talk about the concept of representation, not only as important to show people, but to show people in environments that are familiar to them. This goes back to what I was saying before about taking the time to hire people that authentically live in the user group that you're thinking of working with, even just to consult. If you don't have the opportunity to do that, run A and B tests with your marketing materials, or have a user study group. Just to show you what we ended up choosing for these images, were these really large, and actually right here on the main page, these images of just freedom and that tongue and cheek, like I do what I wantness of New York mixed with the idea of an urban bandit, an urban explorer. Someone who's excited about their surroundings. That can be anywhere, but the expansiveness in an urban area is really based on the person and what they choose because sometimes that environment can be really confining. To distill all that down into a student action, what I want you to do is to take that vision of your ideal customer, your ideal user that you wrote in less than two. I want you to think of potential variants that you can have in that customer. If you wrote that your customer is a certain age, ask yourself if that's because of the cost of your product or because of who currently uses it. If your customer is a certain ethnicity, ask yourself if that is because that's predominantly who you work with or because for whatever reason, your product only is marketed to that ethnicity. Asking yourself these questions can be painful and weird and you're welcome to pause the lesson for a second. But when you come back to it, what I want to encourage you to do is to answer those questions so that you can then ask yourself the next question. Who else can we invite to the party? Why would they want our product?
5. Identifying What’s Missing: We've seen a ton of examples. Now's the time to audit. For this lesson, we're going to go over a couple of strategies and things to look out for, as well as some easy ways for you to think about how to market your brand in a way that feels natural to you and inclusive of new user group. There are two things I want you to avoid; tokenism and single campaign strategy. What is tokenism? Tokenism is the idea that you can just throw another user in, sneak him into some marketing material and not say anything about it. So it would be the equivalent of doing a large campaign and having 20 models and a single one of them being an older person, or single one of them being a person of color or single one of them being a woman. As you start to change how you want to market to your user groups, you have to be deliberate about it. What does that mean? That means saying to yourself, am I placing this new marketing material, whether it's language, imagery, videography, illustration, etc, simply to appease a concept of a quota? Or am I being proactive and saying, "Now I want to speak to this user group." So for example, after story behind the cut where I started to use more female models, I said to myself going forward as I start to capture things for social media, it's important for me when I have hands touching the product, different people using it, that I show, not just men, not just men of color, but women, white men, other groups that can use it more frequently. It doesn't have to be dominant. Obviously if your main user group is bringing you a lot of money, you don't want to do anything that will upset that. It's important as you build these user groups up to naturally include them in your marketing material in a meaningful way. That brings me to my second point; single campaign strategy. Your brand, your company has established trust with your users by being consistent and reliable over time. It wasn't with a single campaign. It might have gained some new users or gotten some press and media. But the thing that has made you sustainable over time is being consistent, is being solid, and is being reliable for your customers. If you're going to market to a new user group no matter who they are, whether it's an older population, a younger population, different ethnicity, different gender. You need to be committed to not just a single campaign. Even if those returns aren't amazing the first time, you need be able to step back in and be able to be courageous and confident to do it again a second, and a third time. Because what you're doing is you're starting to blaze a new trail for not only your company, but also for your customers to come in and say, I believe this product can also be for me. That power through visibility takes time to build. Let's say you're having a hard time thinking of these new customers. Let's do something that we generally like to avoid. Let's think about your competitors. What do your competitors do really well? How's their value proposition different than yours? More importantly, what users are they attracting that you aren't with a similar product? By looking at your competitors, you can ask, how can I better market authentically to this user group that I currently am not doing a great job at. What am I missing? What are my competitors doing well? That is your student action for this lesson, it's for you to audit three competitors and to document 3-4 takeaways you can get from their marketing materials for user groups that you do not market too well now. This should be really educational moment for you because by looking at a product that's similar to yours, it's easier for you to see how to market to new groups. You shouldn't copy, you're stealing someone else's marketing materials or anyone else's goals. But just the action of saying, this is being used to market to this group or to this group. You can say to yourself, what am I missing? Not only as a marketer, but what are we missing as a company in general. The power in that is making it easier for you to take those first, second, and third steps into finding new customers and gaining their trust just like the ones you already have now. Your product is amazing. Let's get into some more hands.
6. Taking Action : We've gone over your value proposition, we've talked about your user, we've talked about ways to audit what you're currently doing, and we've talked about ways to look toward the future, and how to gain new customers. Now, I want to talk about strategy and a way to go forward from making this a feel-good class to an actionable class. First and foremost, I want you to lead with authenticity. If you're expanding to a new user group, after you've initially gone through your plans as to how you want to market that user group, I think the next important thing is for you to do focus testing, and or hiring a consultant that either has experienced marketing to this user group in the past or preferably someone who this is their life experience. Someone who can tell you, "No, that one, look that way," or "Yes, that feels natural." There are many times in the past where I've been hired specifically for campaigns that target toward African-Americans or people of color or Caribbean folks from my Jamaican descent. There's times I've had to tell a client, that would never happen in real life. This doesn't look natural or this is weird. That little bit of understanding goes a really long way. We've already come and talked about how we want to secure the user group, why we want to secure the user group, and why we should care about it? Let's go that last hurdle and make sure that there are people working on this that can speak to it from experience. On the focus group angle, it's really important if you have the opportunity to run this by multiple people. This can be a confusing time. Trying to market to a new customer base, specifically one that you don't know anything about and have no personal experience with can be scary. The process of it, although scary, is tremendously worthwhile. I would encourage you to use time and patience as your greatest allies. After you've put together a plan, after you've hired a requisite person or worked with the focus group, the next thing to do is to understand that the trust your company's built up is one that took time. It didn't happen in a month or in a single campaign, or often in one single year. As you set sales and campaign goals for these new user groups, I encourage you to take time to have goals that have flexible targets, and to have the ability to revisit something again and again until it's reached the level that you want it to. The main pressure point here is that it can be expensive to go after new users. For my office fans out there, in the episode where Ryan started the fire, you actually learned that it's twice as expensive to go after a new customer than an older one. If you do get that budget to go after new customers, I'd encourage you to set reasonable goals with flexible dates. Your brand grew a ton with time. To grow this user group, you're also going to need time. You'll need to great creative, you'll need great personal experience with the authenticity. But the biggest thing you can lead with is time. Now, as you come up with a new plan to market to your new customers, the reason why I wanted you to work on your value proposition, and the reason why we open the class with it is to say, let's boil down to this value prop. There are sometimes where the value proposition might be different for different user groups, but often it's very similar. If your value proposition is different based on the different user groups you have, I'd encourage you to be very careful with the language you use because you don't want to turn off your current customers from the product they love. Failure can't be set by a two-week brand campaign that ran one time. Success can't be set that way either. In choosing to take this class, you're committing to an ongoing decision, one that factors in inclusivity in your marketing and in your brand's very presence. Remember the company that hired you? It took time for them to build where they are. It's going to take time as you start this initiative to market it to this new user group, and so I want you to be patient with yourself and with that initiative, and over time it will yield great success. I'm excited to see what you do next.
7. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made it to the end. Now, this is by no means the end of this process. Inclusivity is a constant and deliberate action, but you made it to the end of this class, and I'm excited and thankful that you chose to spend that time with me. For your class project, remember, we're taking your value proposition, your initial view of your main user group, potential new user groups, as well as the ways that your competitors are marketing to them to create a new comprehensive plan as to how you are going to add new user groups to your brand. This is exciting, because it's about a more equitable future, but it's also about making more money. Please as you finish up this class and you finish your project, please share in the discussion boards. I'm really excited to hear your questions, hear your thoughts, and see what you make from this. Thank you again, and have a great rest of your day.
Aundre Larrow, Photographer
