Diversity and Inclusion in the Fashion Marketing

In the last decade, the common attention paid to the acceptance of diversity, elimination of stereotypes and discrimination of any kind has increased considerably, and, after a really long and difficult journey that started many years ago, our society is becoming day by day more inclusive and variegate. 

At a marketing level, it is therefore interesting to understand whether investing in a more inclusive, non-stereotyped and more diversified vision can practically result in intangible advantages.

In KPI6 we are always eager to meet new talents, collaborate with important institutions, and launch innovative challenges.

We have recently started a collaboration with the LUISS Guido Carli University, participating in some classes of the Bachelor’s Degree course in “Management & Computer Science” held by prof. Francisco Villaroel Ordenes.

The challenge wanted to test our young analysts on a real challenge that they will face up in one of their first job experiences.

The goal was to solve a problem for its management, using the data offered by KPI6 on the market, on the players, and above all on consumers. The challenges involved many industries, from automotive to technology, passing through retail and entertainment.

Students:

The goal of this challenge was to understand if the marketing industry is keeping up with the new diversity standards that the community demands, especially in the fashion industry.

We started by retrieving data from Twitter and from the Web, trying to collect the greatest possible number of peoples’ opinions about the topic.

In order to do this, we decided to search for “posts” or “comments” containing both words associated with marketing and words associated with inclusion and diversity.

Sentiment around this topic is divided into 58% positive and 42% negative. How to interpret it?

We went deep into the matter, highlighting the words most used around negative tones and those that, instead, were most present when the sentiment was positive in nature. 

To do this, we isolated the two sentiments, performing two different analyses.

As we can see, Positive sentiment seems to be about Diversity, Integration and Inclusion.

The negative sentiment, instead,  seems to be about Rights, Racism and Inequality.

The major insight that we got was that we are not living in an immature society that is slowing down the innovative and inclusive proposition of the marketing industry but that instead is the marketing industry that is not keeping up with the new standards that the community demands.

After analyzing the theme of integration and diversity in the whole world of marketing, we wanted to focus our analysis on a specific industry, namely that of fashion, as we believe that it is the most difficult and reluctant to adapt to certain themes as, by definition, deeply rooted in traditional beauty standards. 

We, therefore, collected the data on Twitter and on the web, looking for words that expressed diversity with respect to the canons of high fashion and words that instead reflect them.

We denoted that the general opinion on this topic is quite at the same level, and therefore we can deduce that the diversity associated with the world of fashion is an appreciated and therefore outdated topic, fortunately. In our opinion it is a great result. Probably just a few years ago the results would have been much more unbalanced.

Fashion companies are therefore evolving, and addressing certain issues certainly increases the power of a brand, but not only. From a broader point of view, business and society go hand in hand, and we believe that, especially in such controversial worlds, the role of these companies is fundamental. Addressing these issues not only aligns you with modern thinking standards, but creates a new way of thinking around you, triggering a process that, if well addressed, brings a lot of positivity to your brand and a lot of money in your turnover.

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