As Marketing Director for Bol’s e-commerce team, Fiona Vanderbroeck is responsible for using consumer insight to strive for diverse and inclusive marketing, which meets business goals.
Diversity, inclusivity, and equity (DEI) work will never be done. It’s not a checkbox to tick. You can’t create one campaign or ad, and then think: “We’re finished”.
That’s certainly not how we approach it, anyway. Our mantra is to be “the shop of us all” and DEI is very much at the heart of everything we do. My role as marketing director is to help bring that promise alive in how we position ourselves and interact with all consumers.
Inclusion is about acknowledging and respecting differences, and creating space for that. It is reflected in the content, the creativity, and storytelling you do. It's where all people can thrive. And although we’d all like to think that’s what seasonal holidays are all about, sometimes it can feel very different.
Around 15-20% of the world’s population is neurodivergent. This is a non-medical term for when someone’s brain processes, learns, or behaves in a way that is different from what is considered “typical”.
Christmas can be an exceptionally difficult time of year for neurodivergent people with changes in routine and overstimulating spaces. And that’s what inspired our Christmas campaign last year.
Beyond tinsel and trees: Creating an ad campaign reflecting us all
Inclusivity is not something that just happened overnight or that we need to prompt people to remember. It is derived from our purpose ‘to continuously advance our platform for a better tomorrow for us all’. This is what makes us tick. It means we are committed to lead the path towards a better tomorrow for us all.
Having said that, we don’t claim to know it all. We learn and improve every day. That was also the case when we started to think about our latest Christmas campaign. We wanted to bring the spirit of the season, but without the stereotypes. Many ads at that time of year feature dinner tables, huge crowds of people, turkeys, presents, and a lot of stimulating experiences — lights, music, and colour.
But the holidays are celebrated in many ways, and that was our key insight. We wanted to show the spirit of caring, togetherness, and kindness to others, but reflected in different ways.
We have authentic DEI conversations, we work with the communities we’re reflecting in our advertising, focus groups, and professional companies outside of our brand.
It was in one of these sessions that our partners at Google, DEI focused agency Studio Samen, and creative agency Dept, showed us insights around neurodiversity. And one of the team shared their own experience. This highlighted that people can be overstimulated by lights and sounds, and find this a particular challenge during the holidays.
It was a story that we felt not everyone might know or be sensitive to. At the same time, we wanted to balance that information with the knowledge that other people love Christmas lights and decorations.
It was a challenging contrast but we knew that if we could find a way of balancing the two we could tell a different story. This is the video ad we came up with to reflect these two opposite experiences:
Our core ambition for this ad was to emphasise the overarching Christmas message and show how caring for each other could come across in lots of ways. Just like how the grandfather who goes beyond the expected to create a beautiful Christmas for his granddaughter in our video.
We discussed extensively with the team, our creative agency, and the neurodiversity community, what was the right thing to do in terms of casting to ensure an accurate representation. In the end we chose not to use an individual that was neurodivergent because the filming could have been too impactful on them. We wanted authenticity, but if you know you could impact someone, it’s not worth it.
Unwrapping heartfelt customer comments
We know that people turn to platforms like YouTube for content they care about. And we saw that in the overwhelming – and quick – responses on our Christmas campaign.
Within minutes of the ad launching on the video platform, we received the first heartfelt comments that showed us the importance of representation in marketing. Alongside people thanking us for highlighting this topic, another frequent, positive comment came from people saying “I recognise myself”.
The response was beyond our expectations. We had over 1.2 million views on YouTube in under 2 months on our longest ad, and our average view rate was a whopping 55 seconds on a 60 second video. We also saw an increase in Christmas gifts and decorations sold, more new customers in this category, and a significant uplift in top of mind awareness, brand consideration and brand preference in December.
Keeping inclusion burning bright beyond the holidays
And that’s not where we’ll stop, inclusivity is not a project.
For instance, internally, we listen to feedback from our own neurodivergent colleagues about how challenging an office environment can be. With these insights at heart we created awareness workshops for managers and introduced a cool down room. It's a physical place where people that need it can destimulate from daily impulses, get away from events, or simply reflect.
It’s a structural and ongoing part of what we do. We keep evolving. And, we will continue to learn, as the ways we can improve to be more inclusive will never stop.
