We now are right in the middle of Pride Month. You’ve now seen what many brands around the world have crafted this year to share their allyship with the LGBTQ community.
If you are aware of how virtue signaling works, you’ve noticed that what most of these campaigns want is to engage with these subjects from a safe distance. And if you are a member of the LGBTQ community, it will be very easy for you to notice how annoying and plastic a cynical campaign can feel.
Queer Voices Are Important!
The queer experience entails so many issues, just to name a few: the plight for equality in civil rights, efforts to make health care accessible for every member of disadvantaged LGBTQ communities, the amplification of personal stories about queer identity, and a long etcetera.
Pride campaigns need to understand what Pride Month is. In this article, we want to go through useful ways your marketing campaign can celebrate pride in a way that truly speaks to the LGBTQ community.
Don’t Just Do The Bare Minimum
Pride Marketing is important. This month is an annual event that creeps on many brands. Most brands usually don’t plan their pride campaigns ahead of time. As a result of this, they don’t pay enough attention to what promoting inclusivity is actually like.
We’re not going to build a better future just by putting the pride flag all over your marketing campaign. To positively impact LGBTQ people you have to pay attention to what their struggles are.
Support for the LGBTQ community should not be performative, but genuine. The philosophical approach to pride is the first thing we should seek to change when formulating our pride campaign.
It’s not just making a rainbow version of our brand and calling it a day.
Research Pride Month’s History
Social media allows our marketing campaigns to take many forms. Answering simple questions, like why is pride month celebrated in June, can go a long way.
Some good examples of brands that did great pride marketing campaigns are Sony Interactive Entertainment and Absolut Vodka. In their respective industries, they both created respectful strategies to commemorate Pride Month.
Acknowledge Queer Icons
Your campaign can focus on educational content, giving your audience different perspectives on why pride is reaching for necessary and positive change. It’s fascinating to learn about how far the struggle for civil rights has come for the LGBTQ community.
The fights that had to be fought, throughout history to our current day, go a long way when bringing into perspective how important it is to make pride month an important celebration of queer identities.
To exchange ideas has an impact on how people understand these subjects. Brands need to understand the Stonewall Community Foundation. And by beating the disinformation, we’re all one step closer to comprehension.
Queer Youth Is a Very Important Online Demographic
LGBTQ youth have a very strong social media presence. A large percentage of them refer to their online communities as chosen families. Understanding that Pride Month has an emotional value for LGBTQ people will help you understand what the community wants to see.
What’s Stonewall Inn? Believe it or not, a few hours of research will give you a sense of how long, complex, and painful Pride Month history is.
Rainbow washing is only a new way to invisibilize the actual history of how the LGBTQ community has made the pride community and events like the pride parade an important part of creating awareness in the whole world into how important their cause is.
If you make a tone-deaf statement or your brand comes off as insincere you can be sure you’ll be getting bombarded by queer teenagers. They are very quick to notice these cynical messages and won’t stand by without letting you know they caught on to you.
Pride Marketing Campaigns Have To Be Genuine
Imagine you have two brands. One of them puts a rainbow flag in a single social media post. The other one had their vice president publicly speaking about their company’s support of equality, committing to empowering queer employees and affirming how essential to their corporate mindset equality and diversity are.
After seeing these two examples of a Pride Month campaign, which one do you think shows more commitment to the LGBTQ community?
We Are Not In The 80s Anymore!
In the past six years, a brand’s support has gone from being a novelty, always appreciated by the LGBTQ community, to something so common that the language and gestures used by companies feel cliché and disingenuous.
When talking about a disadvantaged and historically oppressed group of people, void implications of solidarity do little to make us feel seen, understood, and represented. A bad support message to make a relevant statement can feel worse to queer people than silence.
Remember Queer People Are People
Any marketing specialist knows that there is a certain “voice”, a certain writing style, and a speaking tone that helps you create relatable content for your audience.
Even though all brands are different and no campaign is the same, a marketing department is a year-round effort to always be on top. An effort to be different, to stand out from other companies.
Understanding The Language Is The First Step
Communication is key to understanding. So it’s essential that as a brand you understand your audience’s language, and strive to speak in a way that’s relatable and appreciated by them.
If you are cisgender and straight, you may see the flag and just see a rainbow. For some people, that rainbow represents their pride after a struggle they have had to face their whole life.
It’s Not Just a Rainbow!
A rainbow flag should not be treated as a cosmetic to check out a box in a calendar but as a cultural symbol of how many people celebrate pride. For many people, celebrating pride is connected with a very important part of their identity.
We must always remember that there are people who engage with Pride Month not only as consumers or customers but as human beings—members of the LGBTQ community whose chosen family has given meaning and validness to their identity.
Amplify Queer Voices
If you look for them, they won’t be hard to find. All companies have queer people in their workforce. Promote and create spaces for them to share their experiences. They are employees just like the rest of you, putting just as much dedication into their work.
Apart from that, their distinct experiences and perspectives as members of the LGBTQ community can prove a valuable asset to the company. As queer employees are more empowered, the company has a stronger way of engaging with pride month marketing.
Pride Month Is Bigger Than You Think
Pride month is an opportunity to give great queer stories a place in our accustomed flood of social media posts. Make your campaign a way for people to learn more about not-so-popular queer personalities. Create a plan to share one of these stories throughout pride month and you’ll see how your company will benefit.
You don’t have to be queer to learn valuable lessons from studying and listening to testimonies of the queer experience. It’s a part of human history we have not been taught to understand, even if we are a part of it, and letting erasure win is not an option.
What Have We Learned About Pride?
Although a rainbow flag always feels right and is an easy way for any pride campaign to show support, celebrating pride takes more than just a social media post.
The ideal way we should tackle pride month as employees is to foster a healthy and inclusive work environment. To truly celebrate and support the LGBTQIA community, brands should take action.
Your Pride Month campaign is an opportunity to show that you understand how important it is for the LGBTQIA community to be free to express their needs and create real diversity. Brands are just brands at the end of the day, they are only capable of saying what the people behind them make them say.
You could organize a weekly pride parade and make limited edition products, like a virtual assistant pride collection with only queer professionals. That would still not be a real support for members of the LGBTQIA community if the campaign stays as just an artificial message put out there by a brand.
The queer community would value real interest in formulating real shows of support and diversity for the LGBTQIA community as a whole.
Where Does Freelance Latin America Come In?
Pride and diversity may even be thought of as a touchy subject for some companies. In Freelance Latin America, we think of it as an opportunity to share a message of love and freedom.
We love our queer employees and always make sure to hear what they have to say and contribute to our projects. We have always become stronger from doing this, and we can assure our clients that our great results have always been tied to our inclusive hiring policies and strong focus on diversity.
You can learn more about how to take part in Freelance Latin America’s role in encouraging LGBTQ professionals by following this link!
See more articles by Andrea Corona.
