Advertising Age interviewed the Reckitt U.S. Chief Marketing Officer for Hygiene, who advocated prioritizing multicultural marketing—in contrast to other major brands scaling back and/or abandoning DEIBA+ initiatives.
Herein lies an inherent issue. That is, why must multicultural marketing be categorized as a DEIBA+ maneuver?
The Reckitt CMO insists targeting Black and Latino audiences constitutes a business imperative for brands like Lysol and Airwick. Reaching distinct consumer segments with relevant marketing has resulted in heightened brand awareness and greater sales. Although it would be interesting to compare the White marketing budgets with the multicultural marketing budgets. Is it a case of cash versus crumbs?
So, why is multicultural marketing thought of as DEI marketing? Dove and Always primarily target White women—a group typically at the top of DEIBA+ prioritization lists—yet these brands’ campaigns aren’t viewed as DEI marketing. It’s highly unlikely that the advertising generated for such brands is financed with crumbs.
Indeed, “prioritizing multicultural marketing” might be an oxymoron of sorts, as categorizing an effort as multicultural automatically de-prioritizes it.
In short, White marketing—and its White advertising agency creators—receive top priority. No amount of Lysol and Airwick could affect the stink of that reality.
Why Reckitt Is Prioritizing Multicultural Marketing As Others Eliminate Policies
Gary Osifchin, U.S. CMO for hygiene, on his multicultural playbook and why it works for the company
By Jack Neff
Numerous brands have scaled back or scrapped diversity, equity and inclusion programs in recent months, including Lowe’s, Ford, Harley Davidson, Deere, Toyota and Tractor Supply. Others have pulled back on investments in diverse-owned media or content focused on Black or Hispanic consumers, at least pending the outcome of next month’s election.
And some brands that have stayed the course in DEI marketing and media investments are staying quiet about their strategies.
But Reckitt’s Gary Osifchin, chief marketing officer of its U.S. hygiene business, which markets such brands as Lysol, AirWick and Finish, said the company is sticking by DEI in marketing because it works for his brands. And he’s not afraid to talk about it.
Osifchin, who sits on the board of the Association of National Advertisers’ Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, spoke with Ad Age about why Reckitt is staying the course on DEI in marketing despite the pushback that has made others turn away.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AIMM has recognized Reckitt for doing a good job with multicultural representation in its ads. But DEI has become controversial in the U.S. How do you deal with that pushback as you try to make your advertising representative?
I’ve personally been involved in reaching different audiences for over a decade now, from a brand perspective, because a source of growth for brands will continue to be reaching new audiences.
We will continue to reach the population that we reach today, but also bring in new consumers in different subsets of the population that are growing, whether it’s Hispanic, African American or Asian American.
The need to reach them from a product standpoint, but also from a communication standpoint, so that you’re relevant, is critical. I really tie it back to Reckitt’s value system. It’s not just on our website. It’s real. It’s a commitment to represent and amplify diverse communities in our marketing and in our product development. It’s part of our growth strategy globally. You take it down to my business in the U.S. and big brands like Lysol, or Finish or AirWick, it’s hugely important for me to reach those growth audiences as a source of business growth, but also to reach them in resonant and relevant ways. We need to make sure that we’re not just presenting stereotypes or trying to go after the dollar.
It’s important from a growth standpoint, and the right thing to do in times where things are challenged. I personally believe consistency and conviction matter, and certainly in the last three years that I’ve been in my role, the consistency and conviction as a leader that I’ve had in terms of ensuring that we instill the right insight into our product development or communications development to truly understand what will resonate with different cultures and backgrounds and the total audience.
Tell me about Reckitt’s multicultural playbook.
I very much built a multicultural marketing playbook that is now embedded in the organization. It’s tied to the full-funnel consumer engagement team that I’ve set up and lead to ensure that from insight to strategy and to product and communications through our testing processes that we’re fairly representing and authentically representing the people we want to reach. Our media investment strategy is then tied to that, in terms of who we want to reach. Our R&D and product strategy is tied to that where it matters on things like fragrance, Lysol with our Brand New Day line, or on AirWick with our Vibrant line, which over-indexes among African Americans and Hispanics and was developed to reach them from a fragrance standpoint.
It’s tied to Reckitt’s growth strategy, and therefore it’s important for all of my marketing team to understand, so it’s not just me as a leader championing it, but I really have it hardwired in the thought process.
It starts with deep understanding of insights. If you think about Finish, the way Hispanic consumers think about dishwashing and auto dishwashing is, different than the general population. Hispanics, we found, from an insight and data mining standpoint, actually think that doing the dishes by hand is an act of care and part of the family cooking and preparation and cleanup experience, and that a dishwasher won’t do as good of a job as I will hand washing. That comes [in home visits] and ethnographies and diving deep.
Our consumer engagement full-funnel team, who are responsible for all of our media investment, planning, strategy and execution across touchpoints, is wired into the insights and analytics team and wired into the brand team. If we know reaching a Hispanic audience on Finish is important, which it is, and we have an insight, we need to create content and communications to do that. Then media investment needs to follow that, and then the right measurement needs to follow.
We formalized the creative development process to ensure early on, at the briefing stage, when we want to do Hispanic specific, or we want creative to be informed by African Americans or others, that in the brief we’re clear on it.
We’ve been using CIIM [the Cultural Inclusivity Insights Manager developed by AIMM in cooperation with member companies]. It’s helped us [with] pieces of creative, both ones that were intentionally done for a specific audience and ones that were not, just to get a benchmark. And we see that on Lysol, where we were intentional in a Hispanic or African American insight, that we outperform our other creative. So it shows me that it’s working.
If I’ve been in a pitch of agencies, I put CIIM in as one of our metrics early on, and then we use Link from Kantar for measurement. And then we have our positive portrayal panel, which is unique at Reckitt. [We] have set up a process so that folks in [employee resource groups] are trained on how to evaluate creative and what to look for and watch out for. We also have embedded it with our big agency networks, their own use of their own equivalents of positive portrayal panels, so that they have their eyes on it.
There have been times when it’s worked exceptionally well. I’ll tell you, there are times where it worked so well that it stopped me from putting forth some creative, because all of us in the process missed stuff, but when the consumer spoke up in the quantitative and told us, “no, that’s off, or that’s presenting a stereotype,” we listened and didn’t move forward.
We set up a process, I call it multicultural closeness … where we can do virtual conversations with consumers of different backgrounds and diverse cultures, and it’s available to everybody from marketing to R&D. We run it with our C-suite and our leadership team in North America, where they have access to have interviews, to just talk about topics … to just get better intimacy and closeness to our consumers from a multicultural perspective.
Media at the end of it is so critical for us to ensure that we’re investing in reaching diverse audiences and minority-owned media companies.
For influencer content, we have over 250 diverse creators. Some 80% of my creator influencer content is from diverse creators, and that’s a way for us to ensure that we are reaching audiences with voices that they trust.
Then, on the back end, it’s marketing metrics [such as] household penetration, buy rate, category growth, market share, looking at that from Hispanic and African American perspectives and understanding are we moving the needle. And our equity trackers are doing that too.
How is it different from how you used to do marketing?
It’s like what we knew as I grew up in marketing, 20-plus years ago, but applying then a very nuanced approach along the way to ensure that you’re presenting authentically to the people you want to talk to.
If you’re Hispanic American watching content in English that everybody else is watching, and I reach you in that, well, then, don’t talk to me in Spanish. Talk to me in English, because I’m receiving my content in English. That’s very different than when I actually am immersing myself in a Hispanic podcast or a piece of content online through an influencer, then talk to me in Spanish, because that’s the world I’m in at that moment.
Have you seen any evidence of DEI pushback, either comments or direct communications, based on the work that you’ve done?
I go back to consistency and conviction, conviction that it’s the right thing to grow my businesses for Reckitt and our brands. The process I talked about has prevented missteps and ensured that when we’re doing communications to a specific group, or when we’re launching things like Lysol Brand New Day, which is very much meant to appeal, from a fragrance standpoint, to African Americans and Hispanics, that we’re testing product with them, so that it actually delivers against what we want it to.
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