Bridging the Trust Gap: Culturally Intelligent Strategies for Brand Resonance

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I find that line in the sand to be quite ineffective, and almost troubling at how easily we are ready to go back to the status quo, which is to make profits without consideration for ethics. Cultural intelligence really tries to bridge that gap or bridge that divide to say we can do culturally intelligent work that is driving commercial advantage, and still be attentive to issues of inclusion, equity and fostering belonging among our audiences.

Kailey Raymond: Hello, and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host Kailey Raymond and today, we're talking about a topic I am personally passionate about. Inclusive marketing. In today's landscape, consumers are inundated with brands trying to appeal to them, but what is it that really catches their eye? It's those emotional experiences that speak to consumers on a deeper, more human level. By starting to think beyond our own lived experiences, and contemplate perspectives we wouldn't normally have, we can begin to connect more to intersectional audiences. We have to dig deeper to understand the diverse cultures of our consumers and what they're looking for if we want a chance at building successful strategies. Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel is changing the game with her inclusive marketing ideologies. She's the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers and Senior Insights Lead at Reddit. In this episode, we discuss the nuances of inclusive marketing, the importance of cultural intelligence, and fostering trust through co-creation. But first, a word from our sponsors.

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Kailey Raymond: Today, I am joined by Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel. She is the senior insights lead at Reddit, and the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy. She earned her doctorate in cultural studies from Duke, and has consulted for some of the world's top brands including Nike, Samsung, and Disney. She's a cultural theorist, writer, social critic and strategist, specializing in inclusivity within marketing, media and tech. Anastasia, welcome to the show.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Thank you so much for having me, Kailey.

Kailey Raymond: I am excited to dig in. You have quite an interesting background, blending of a lot of different kind of sciences together and building a lot of insights around our culture. I'm wondering, can you just share your version of your career story with us?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I would love that. I am a hybrid cultural strategist with a pretty non-traditional background as my bio alludes to. I initially trained as a cultural theorist, and I was on a rather traditional path as an academic researcher. And throughout my journey of graduate studies, I at one point sat at my desk and realized that all I was doing was studying culture in retrospect. So looking back, looking at the cultural history of the present moment, and I just felt an urge to be more firmly immersed in culture as it was happening, that's why I decided to become a cultural theorist and I wanted to understand pop culture. I wanted to understand trends, things that were evolving as I was watching them as a person living in society. And so at the end of my graduate training, I decided to transition naturally into cultural research and strategy. And so I went on to consult for ed agencies and innovation consultancies, cultural strategy for brands that wanted to utilize the tools of cultural analysis, specifically with attention to issues of identity like race, gender, and sexuality. So now, I sit on a team at Reddit, but continue to do that work in a lot of my thought leadership, and the book is the product of that.

Kailey Raymond: Amazing. Okay, so you're basically transforming a lot of your academic research into applications and in real life and you're making sure that brands are doing this right, thinking about it in the right lenses and the right frameworks. Tell me a little bit more about your role specifically at Reddit, and what you're bringing to life at Reddit right now.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I sit on the insights team and I work with our sales partners internally, as well as with our brand clients. My role essentially is to help our clients understand our audiences, and understand specifically, the culture of our platform. So a lot of the day-to-day work in my role involves conducting research, tracking trends, understanding how the current consumer conversations fits into the larger cultural landscape, and then partnering with our clients to really leverage that kind of intelligence, those insights to bring them to life as part of creative campaigns that are running on platform as one part of this work. And the second part of this work, being a partner to our clients in leveraging that intelligence for broader brand strategy and our clients ' understanding of what's happening in consumer culture at a particular point in time.

Kailey Raymond: I'm excited to hear some of your examples of some of the things that are working, some of the top brands you are actually working on as it relates to some of your work. Before we do that, your sort of book, let's talk about it. So you're the author of Cultural Intelligence Marketers. Just tell us what's the synopsis, what's your book about?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Book is coming, and I'm very excited to always talk about it as the author of the foreword to my book, Dr. Marcus Collins said, it's not a typical business book, and it shouldn't be. And so to your point earlier, the book really brings the concepts and tools from cultural studies, specifically from the methodology of cultural analysis, tries to break down those concepts, and make them applicable to the marketing context. So if you pick up the book, you will see a lot of terminology and a lot of concepts that I have aimed to adapt from the discipline of cultural studies, and really show how it can be beneficial in leveling up the work of marketers, strategists, creatives, researchers who are really trying to understand the cultural landscape that we inhabit, and we again, navigate through on a much deeper level. So in that sense, I think of it as in two levels. On one, it's a very practical manual that is filled with checklists, activities, prompts, ways to really help marketers know how to apply these concepts. But it also is in part a piece of thought leadership of inviting marketers to think about the current moment and what it takes for modern day brands to succeed in the current landscape.

Kailey Raymond: Which has a lot to do with being culturally literate and making sure that you have that cultural intelligence that you're talking about in the book. So can you just tell us a little bit about what cultural intelligence looks like in the lens of today as a marketer? What is cultural intelligence?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I try to arrive at a very specific definition in the book primarily, because we see the term floating around in marketing discourse. And if you look at its origins, it originally was coined in the field of cross-cultural management studies. So to really denote some of the attributes and characteristics like empathy and cultural sensitivities that are important in managing teams across cultural context, and what I argue in the book by providing a new definition is that, we need to borrow the terms from other disciplines in an intelligent way, in a way that actually applies to the specific context within which we operate as marketers, and specific business challenges that we have and that we assist our clients in solving.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: And so that brings me to the actual definition, which is that cultural intelligence, as I understand it, is an ongoing practice of tracking and analyzing signals, social forces, movements and culture, arriving at insights and knowledge about the cultural moment we're in, and then leveraging that knowledge not only for commercial advantage, but also for influencing culture and society in a positive way. So the reason I define it in that way is because we all know that audiences in the moment and in the foreseeable future will expect brands to be not only effective in resonating with them, but also inclusive, culturally incisive and so on. And so the definition as I conceive of it, really tries to invite marketers into that importance of rigor, precision, but also importance of our attention to social good in marketing.

Kailey Raymond: That makes perfect sense, and really I think something that you're already kind of pointing out is maybe this tension, maybe this beautiful union around practicality and purpose and like those two things I do think have often and kind of become a binary in marketing, especially nowadays. I mean those just recent forest or research coming out from their B2C team, talking about how a lot of the CMOs focused around profitable growth, this is gonna make sure that we're not really going after any of these purpose driven tactics. But I've seen plenty of research showing the opposite that companies that are doing well by doing good are actually more profitable. I think Patagonia is an obvious example to bring up there. So I'd love your take on that kind of binary that I'm describing of profit versus purpose and how it might be hindering marketers today. What's setting us back there in that binary thinking?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: You are exactly right. I think that we are seeing this kind of emergence of a binary discourse in marketing where a lot of recent conversations from advertising and marketing executives understandably show a kind of anxiety that we have around this year. What it means in terms of polarization, in terms of the backlash that marketing leaders, I mean, very understandably fear and expect and want to prepare for. In my opinion, what has happened is that we have normalized that idea of putting purpose to the side and we see conversations happening in the marketing community around going back to profit making, going back to being funny and entertaining. Certainly, all of these things are very important for producing effective advertising and marketing outputs, but there is a kind of binary and a line in the sand that we have drawn. It's either profit or it's purpose. And I argue in some of the writing that I've done beyond the book, that is really antithetical to innovation in any kind of new frameworks, new ways of thinking, new approaches that as marketers who are tasked with making sure the brands that we manage or service thrive in this environment, that that is in itself our responsibility.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: But when we think in and or either or terms, we are going to inevitably miss new ways of approaching the work in the particular climate where to be honest, we don't have easy answers. This work is messy, this work is complicated, and it requires a kind of bravery of doing new things, of experimenting, of going to market with a campaign that one might expect will cause some sort of feedback, which is part of our work going to market, receiving feedback, resonating with audiences or not. And so I find that line in the sand to be quite ineffective, and almost troubling at how easily we are ready to go back to the status quo, which is to make profits without consideration for ethics. Cultural intelligence, as I mentioned in terms of the definition of it, really tries to bridge that gap or bridge that divide to say we can do culturally intelligent work that is driving commercial advantage, and still be attentive to issues of inclusion, equity and fostering belonging among our audiences.

Kailey Raymond: It's interesting that the binary even exists, 'cause I think about things like greenwashing and rainbow capitalism, which are just such clear examples of a brand trying to hijack a trend and make some money off of the back of it. But it's like people know that this works and people know that investing in something that the perception of it is good. And in theory trying to drive inclusivity is good but sometimes they're doing it in perhaps a little bit of the wrong way. So as it relates to those two examples, greenwashing and rainbow capitalism, I'm sure there's plenty others. What's like the right way, what's the right lens that brands should be thinking about actually kind of driving that inclusivity around things like ESG, LGBTQ rights in a time when there's plenty of bills being passed in plenty of states, and it's an election year, at least in the states, lots of things going on where brands might wanna weigh in.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Absolutely. You bring such an important point around the skepticism also that we are dealing with. I believe it was Havas ' meaningful brands report from last year that said that around 77% of consumers think brands should be very transparent about their social commitment, but only 33% of consumers actually believe that brands are transparent. And we are seeing even in the Edelman's 2024 trust barometer that 61% of consumers, say that they don't believe what business leaders are telling their audiences, and that they are purposefully misleading the public. And so we are dealing here with a kind of tension where we are putting out messaging that consumers expect in terms of inclusivity, commitment to social impact to sustainability, et cetera. But on the other hand are also very cautious, very reluctant to believe, particularly large corporations or large brands. So there is a tension of how do we work through that, because I talk to a lot of marketers who really do wanna do good work, and want their brands to play an important role.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I think it starts with what I talk about in the book and that is co-creation, moving away from kind of exploitative relationships to consumers where brands just mine particularly marginalized communities for cultural ideas, insights, artifacts that are then adopted into advertising or marketing campaigns, and involving consumers more so into that process. And we see that already happening with some of the brands like Clear's for example, that is currently running a pilot campaign where they're actually bringing Gen Alpha creators, influencers, activists, artists into their process, starting with product design but also marketing campaigns, social media strategy and so on. And really putting the people that they are speaking to in the driver's seat of making some of those decisions or at least being sort of expert consultants in that process.

Kailey Raymond: That's really smart. I love that idea of co-creation and making sure that hopefully you're also paying those people along the way for their ideas and their insights, but making sure that they're a part of the decision-making team as opposed to appropriating or stealing. I'm wondering there's, we've been talking about some of like the theory and some of that. There's also this big trend that is happening as we speak, which is cookie list, which is affecting how marketers can actually get a lot of these messages out into the world, into the right hands. So I'm wondering as it relates to cookie deprecation, and the implications of targeting, what's the thing that you think about through this lens of cultural intelligence as it relates to cookie deprecation this year, anything that we should be on the lookout for?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I specifically think about it in relation to what we have come to know as "multicultural marketing", which is a term that I personally dislike and I've... Happy to talk about that and written it elsewhere on socials about it. But I think it is pointing to this kind of inflection point where prior to this moment, we have relied on traditional demographic targeting, traditional identity markers where we might be marketing "to the black audience" or the black community in singular, which I think also points to how we traditionally think about audiences very monolithic terms as if there is just one community that can represent all a variety of experiences and perspectives that an audience might have depending on age, class, educational background, income, et cetera. And there is a kind of move away from that where I talk to a lot of marketers who are trying to move away from the "Hispanic brief", or Gen Z brief and really try to implement more of intersectional thinking in to how we understand the audiences. So why does it matter for a kind of cookieless future that we are facing? And ultimately, that is the importance of contextual insights, community conversation as one of the drivers of how we understand audiences and how we target them. I think we're moving away from a kind of.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Monolithic approach to audiences, where we market in a particular way to women or market in a particular way to black audience, et cetera. As I mentioned just now, and it's all coming back to the essence of cultural intelligence. I see it, which is what is happening in cultural conversation. How can we reach consumers based on what they're discussing, based on what they care about, based on where their eyeballs are rather than who they are on paper?

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely. Yeah, I totally hear you. It's a really challenging thing to do because you're talking about intersectionality and making sure that you're hitting on a lot of the different unique identities, that all of us have that make us individuals. The best way that I've seen it done is through real customer data of like, I know that this person took this action and therefore we're gonna create an audience around them. Because demographic data can lead to some interesting choices that perhaps have nothing to do with, who you are and the decisions that you had made. But leveraging real first party customer data, at least you have those signals to be able to point you in a stronger direction of what the actual actions that somebody is taking and what that means to them. You mentioned something about where the people are, the platforms that they're on, where they're actually consuming the information that they're getting, which is something that brands obviously pay attention to.

Kailey Raymond: Another question about kind of where we are in this year is, especially in like post COVID world, it seems there's this decline in trust and safety teams like the real human beings that have been monitoring a lot of these social platforms. And with the rise of AI, a lot of AI bots or algorithms or whatever seem to be... I don't even know if that's an appropriate word because I don't think they're doing a very good job. The safety of people on these platforms. Again, it's an election year in the states, this could be really challenging. I'm wondering about this idea is the decline in trust and safety teams on all of these platforms, how does that coincide with inclusive marketing? What should brands be thinking about?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Yeah, I can only speak to this question as an individual who consumes media and as on variety of social platforms, but also as a researcher who is personally very committed to the idea that any sort of technology needs to be overseen by humans. Because in my own studies, in my academic past, a lot of my work focused on the way that bias can be ingrained in any kind of technology that is produced. We see that with AI and we can go back to think about soap dispensers that do not recognize darker shades of skin. And so in a similar way, I think with the rise of automation and natural language processing, etcetera, it seems important to think about the way that bias can be very easily ingrained into new emergent technologies. Again, it has always been the case and while you know, I personally use a lot of these technologies in my own research to become more efficient, to gather information, to help me copy edit some of the work that I'm doing, there's always an awareness in me or I try to cultivate that awareness of my own biases, how I'm using these tools as a researcher, how they're designed.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: And at the end of the day, to your point about inclusive marketing, it come back, it comes back to the question of ethics. Is ethics underlining the work that we are doing? And I emphasize that in the book Quiet Strongly, that ethical consideration cannot be an afterthought. It has to start with the beginning of our process, whether we are designing the brief, whether we are designing our research methodologies and we have to learn how to question how we are using the tools at our disposal. In what ways are we measuring data that we are dealing with? How are we analyzing it? Are we being really representative? And so for that reason I devote quite a few pages to the idea of questioning your own assumptions when we are using and relying on tools as well as our own judgment, which is always shaped by the environment or perspectives that we are accustomed to.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, no, I mean the implications of AI, you're right. I do think there's this efficiency piece, which is really where all of us have been having some productivity gains this year. But the systemic way that it can creep into a lot of decisions that might be made by an algorithm is the challenging one where humans there, there needs to be an intervention path there.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: If I may add just here, I think I anecdotally heard a lot of colleagues across the industry get excited about these new capabilities and reach out and say, How can I mine cultural insights, consumers insights using AI? And it felt like such an important example of let's pause. At that point the data was up to 2021 I think when I was having those conversations. And so I think there's excitement about being able to be more efficient, more attentive to culture, being able to unearth deeper insights. And then there's this importance of critical thinking of how we understand data, how we understand its reliability. And so it was such an impactful moment that I never forgot excitement. Coupled with this, in me a little bit of an alarm about how we deal with data as researchers.

Kailey Raymond: I wanna talk about the intelligent ways that you think in the future the brand strategists might be able to leverage AI beyond what we just talked about. Is there anything that you're like, this is actually what I'm excited about in the future for us to be able to leverage this new technology? This is what is going to unlock.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: As a brand strategist who is very heavy on research I see in my daily work, the importance of being able to use these tools to fine tune our work to make it a little bit more sharp. I mean just on a very personal level, sometimes when I am designing research questions or even things that I am working on in my personal life, in my thought leadership, I think there is an interesting creative way that some of the I technology can be leveraged conversationally as we do our work. Not to rely on it for the data, because I think that we have to be very careful about that when it comes to our day-to-day life and have a kind of cultural and media literacy baked into how we use these tools. But I think there are some ways to utilize, and I've seen brands star just utilize some of the tools to test creative ideas to generate potential pushbacks or even generate stereotypes that they can then make sure to avoid.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: So I use it as a tool of ideation, primarily of sense checking and if anything I find myself using tools even when I'm working on thought leadership for instance, as a way to gauge my own thinking and kind of test, am I making assumptions? Am I landing at the best ideas? What else can I generate that would spark new thinking in myself? So that's my preferred way of using it in my work besides obviously using it in terms of insights generation for my day job, but in my day-to-day life, I find it most useful when I am utilizing as a tool to compliment the human capacity for generating creativity. Which I feel very passionate about creativity being ultimately something that cannot be automated.

Kailey Raymond: I love that creativity cannot be automated, that is beautiful And something that I also believe in.

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Kailey Raymond: A lot of what we're talking about as it relates to how brands might actually be able to use some of these insights is founded on the trust in the information and the data coming back to us. So I'm wondering for you, if you had to define the term good data, what would that look like for you?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Excellent question. My mind goes first to the theme that we have been exploring and that is relevance. Asking the right questions that speak to the business challenges that our clients have before we even go and look for the data and certainly before we analyze it. So where do we start? What kind of questions do we ask? Are we asking the right precise questions? Without a kind of framework and understanding of what we are trying to accomplish with set data, I don't think we can actually arrive at "good data" that's actually useful and relevant. I also think of data as needing to be representative and in a lot of my past consulting work, that's something that I focus in my partnership with agencies and brands. Traditionally we have sidelined perspectives that have historically been marginalized or overlooked, etcetera. So even looking at our sample of data, is it representative across lies lines of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality class, which is often I find an afterthought for a lot of spaces in marketing.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: So making sure that our good data is representative of audiences that we seek to understand. And lastly, the third attribute I guess that I would want to highlight is reliability. I have consulted in the past and though have not worked inside an agency environment, have observed teams being under a lot of pressure under timelines, budgets, et cetera. And when it comes to cultural intelligence, which I think has everything to do with good data, it is so imperative for us to be focused on rigor, on reliability and validity of our data. And it is particularly important I think in the era of various trends. And I always laugh that I cannot remember any of the girl dinner labels or strawberry makeup or whatever where we have this high speed of culture and we often mistake something that might be a signal or might be trending in a particular niche community as a representation of larger consumer behavioral data. So yeah, relevant representative and reliable. I guess those are three Rs that I would highlight in my understanding of good data.

Kailey Raymond: I love that and I love the way that you started that with, you gotta know the use case, like why are you even asking the questions in the first place? And I think that that's where a lot of people stumble if I'm being honest, is they try to know everything when you don't need to. You need to be able to answer the questions that you wanna answer. Let's talk about the tactics off the back of that. So are there any examples that you or get excited about that highlight the use of some of this good data in kind of building some of these brand and strategy tactics?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I always think about the consulting work I did for one of the major beauty retailers here in the US that everybody knows and loves. And the way that a lot of my work with them over several years focused on really tapping into the good data and reliable data that had a specific focus on understanding perspectives of marginalized communities when it comes to beauty, aesthetic practices, beautification, et cetera. And the role that beauty has played in the communities that have been historically underrepresented in beauty. We obviously that has to do with hair care and managing different hair types. It also has to do with the products that accommodate and actively includes different tones of skin, but it also has to do with more mature consumers. Say women who have been historically left out of advertising, women above the age of 50 for example.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: And so that particular work that I did felt very meaningful. And I think primarily because I was also want to emphasize that good cultural data is not always quant data. There are ways to integrate mixed method approaches with rich quality of data that also meets the criteria of being relevant, being representative and reliable. And so in that particular example, it was gratifying because as a consultant you often go and you do a consulting project here and consulting project there and you often don't find or don't see rather the final results. And in that case, I think it was an example of seeing a brand, evolve into a brand that was not necessarily speaking about issues of inclusivity and was not that active in 2020. And then now three, four years later is one of the major players in the beauty category when it comes to specifically issues of marginalized audiences.

Kailey Raymond: That's amazing. Taking a brand from one place to another and seeing your direct kind of connection and influence in that and speaking to the moment in the culture and making sure that they're meeting that and meeting the expectations of consumers, which for a long time I'm sure there was that big gap where they're like, what about me? You know, like I'm not represented in the shades that you're kind of creating right now.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Exactly. And really driving the conversation. I think the question is for me at least as a cultural strategist is how can marketers utilize leverage and harness good cultural data to help brands not only market products and services, but really transcend advertising and drive the cultural conversation? I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine, Nikki Dev alia, who runs her own studio blank. And we were talking about this importance of more holistic approaches that exceed the kind of singular focus of brand strategy on solving a consumer pain point and speaking to a particular consumer needs state in the way that in this climate where we are fighting for attention of consumers, it takes a lot more for brands to be memorable and to really resonate. And that means creating emotional experiences for consumers. How do we do that? We need to understand their own lived experiences and that means going beyond our own lived experiences as researchers, strategists, marketers who are designing these processes, producing these outputs and saying, or rather asking ourselves what it is that I'm missing, what can I learn? What perspectives that I usually silence can I highlight?

Kailey Raymond: That's so right. And it's something that I talk about often, which is B2B is kind of where I've sat for my entire career and especially in B2B, we are just, we talk in such boring, terrible jargony words that have no emotion behind them. They don't actually show a value to a human that have no relevance to the culture and the conversation that's going. And so I do think that there is a space for brands, even B2B brands to be able to have that human emotional connection to their buyers. 'cause ultimately that's who's buying your product anyways. It's another human being at the end of the day. So I love that. I think it's exactly right is if you can touch somebody's emotional cord, you're more likely to be in driving the cultural conversation, innovating in the culture.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: More than ever. If we understand the cultural conversation and the landscape now people are searching for meaning. People are searching something that're bigger than themselves. And if we think semiotically speaking, I was in part trained in semiotics, most iconic brands are so to say, myths and culture. They act as a myth, which is a consolidation of symbols and signs that really connect with audiences beyond what is spoken. And that's part of what I talk about in the book. What is unspoken in culture is often most powerful, most resonant things that resonate with consumers, with people broadly on a almost subconscious visceral level of that human connection. And so we need to understand culture and we need to understand a deeper level of human experience and what it is that consumers are yearning for. And I think that's where the success lies for the next two years.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. Okay, so now I wanna ask you is you said the next two years, this is where the success lies. Are there any changes in the horizon as it relates to kind of your field that you're looking out for in the next couple of years? I know we're talking about this emotion, is there anything else that you're like, this is where this is headed? This is where I think that brands can go with this.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: I think a lot in the work that I do in public, the thought leadership around the moment we are in terms of big brand skepticism. And I alluded to that earlier where we are in a major moment of distrust. And to me it seems to be the distinction or difference between brands that are really going to stay top of mind and remain relevant and brands that might play it safe to the points we made earlier in the conversation and might start losing their standing. And so we talked a little bit about co-creation. I think that's what is really brewing right now. We talk a lot about polarization, we talk a lot about the climate we are in and the challenges. And as I alluded to before, in my mind the answer is not to step back, fall back. It's not to say we're going to avoid that, put that in a corner and not touch that at all and play it safe.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: And it's rather to lean into that innovation and ask ourselves, well what are people looking for and how can brands speak to that? And speaking to the example of Claire's, I think that is essentially what is happening in consumer culture where the skepticism surrounding brands, you mentioned greenwashing, et cetera, there is a desire of not only co-creation, but I think also impact. Material impact that brands can make in cultural communities. As a kind of antidote to performative, superficial inclusive marketing, I'm happy to talk about some of the examples that I'm really excited about. And I think all of them have in common, they're speaking to cultural and social issues, not only through their copy, meaning the campaigns and marketing assets that put out, but in actual dollars that they are pouring into the communities that they are engaging in one campaign or another. And I think that will stay with us. And coming from activist communities and being on the very opposite side of the business world, as somebody who once was very involved in grassroots conversation around businesses and corporations, I expect that that desire for impact and co-creation will only grow among the consumers in the years ahead.

Kailey Raymond: Which is really just saying like, prove it, right? Like you can say one thing and if you're doing another, it's gonna be really obvious to us. So just put your money where your mouth is and actually invest in the communities that you're marketing to. And the trust gap will eventually get closer and closer and hopefully at one point they'll meet. So let's talk about your steps and recommendations. If somebody's coming into this and they're looking to get started with inclusive marketing strategies, what would you recommend?

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: My first thought, which is what I talk about in cultural intelligence for marketers is what I call expanding your point of reference. It's no secret that historically marketing and I would say the business world more broadly tends to be a bubble of its own. Even when it comes to research under the pressure of deadlines, tight budgets, et cetera. We often go to our own social media to recruit folks for our research. In many ways, there are unspoken practices that perpetuate the same dynamics that we are trying to confront, transform, and evolve away from, and cultivating a culture of questioning in a team. I think it's very important cultivating a culture of questioning and expansion in our own thinking. And that starts with really diversifying our media consumption, where we show up, where we learn about what's happening for consumers. And it cannot be in New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, it has to be more expansive.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: And so from the perspective of understanding culture, in my view, any type of mainstream behavior initially happens on the margins. And so it is understandable that a lot of signals that we see on the margins will not involve into trends or social forces that really transform or shape consumer behavior, but it's worth paying attention to. So all that is to say diversifying one's media consumption, accessing different kinds of knowledges and experiences as part of the conversation that maybe we even disagree with. Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable with new ideas that we haven't considered before and bursting through the bubble. That's I think what cultural intelligence is really about in terms of marketing that is inclusive, genuinely inclusive and impactful as well as commercial advantageous.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. You are the decision maker. You are the one that has the power. Start questioning and make sure that it's a part of your own internal company culture and ethos that you live by. This has been really great and really relevant to I think 2024 and a lot of the challenges that marketers are facing today. So Anastasia, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel: Thank you for having me, Kailey. I had a blast. This was a huge pleasure. Thank you so much.