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Inclusion begins long before the point of purchase or form submission - even before someone considers engaging with your brand. It starts at the point of awareness - that very first interaction.

The moment someone first encounters your brand, whether through an advert, a piece of content, a billboard, a social post, or a digital display, they make an immediate and often subconscious judgement about whether your brand feels relevant to them.

This decision happens quickly - often in seconds. Your customer will make a quick, subconscious assessment of your messaging. Does this brand understand people like me? Is this product or service meant for someone like me? Do I see myself reflected in this message? If the answer feels unclear, uncertain, or simply not relevant, most people don’t investigate further.

For marketing leaders, this raises an important strategic question. Before we optimise for conversion, are we thinking deeply enough about who is entering the funnel in the first place?

Marketing defines the edges of your audience

Marketing does far more than drive traffic and generate leads. It defines the boundaries of your audience.

The channels you invest in, the audiences you target, the imagery you use, the stories you tell and the places your brand appears all shape who feels invited into your world and who doesn’t.

Every campaign sends signals about who your brand is for. Sometimes these signals are intentional. More often, they are by-products of creative decisions, media buying choices, or targeting assumptions.

For example:

A campaign that only appears in certain media environments may limit who ever encounters it
Imagery that consistently reflects a narrow audience can signal, even unintentionally, that the brand speaks to a specific group
Language that assumes shared knowledge or experiences can exclude people outside that context

None of these decisions are typically made with exclusion in mind. But collectively, they shape who wants to interact with you. This is why inclusion in marketing is not simply a communications issue - it’s a visibility issue. Ask yourself:

Who sees your brand?
Where do they encounter it?
And who never encounters it at all?

In many organisations, inclusion is often discussed in relation to hiring, culture, or internal policy. Within marketing teams, it is sometimes used in creative decision making, ensuring imagery reflects a range of people or avoiding language that could alienate certain audiences.

Of course, these considerations matter. But the deeper question lies earlier in the marketing funnel - who has the opportunity to engage with your brand at all.

If certain audiences never encounter your messaging, they never enter the funnel. If they never enter the funnel, they never become customers.

This is why inclusion should be considered not only within creative development but also within media strategy, targeting, and audience planning. In other words, inclusion is not just about representation within the message. It is about access to the message.

Representation = relevance

Consumer behaviour research tells us that people are more likely to engage with brands that feel relevant to them - and relevance comes from recognition.

When audiences see themselves reflected in a brand’s messaging (through imagery, language, environments or values) their confidence increases. They are more likely to trust the brand, explore the offering, and ultimately take action.

This might mean recognising different lifestyles, communities or family structures. It might involve showing products used in a broader range of environments or contexts. It may be as simple as acknowledging the everyday realities of different audiences.

When this recognition happens, audiences feel included - and when it doesn’t, they never fully connect with a brand and are unlikely to convert.

Visibility gaps are often unintentional

Now, we suppose for one moment that a decent marketing leader would intentionally exclude or under represent anyone. It’s more that marketing strategies rely on assumptions about where audiences exist and how they behave.

Teams often focus investment in channels that have historically delivered results. They build creative frameworks around established customer profiles. They optimise campaigns for audiences who already convert well.

Over time, the brand becomes increasingly visible to the same types of audiences while remaining invisible to others who may also have genuine need, interest or purchasing power.

Think big for better visibility

Inclusive representation requires marketing leaders to ask deeper questions about audience access.

For example:

Does your campaign imagery reflect the diversity of your actual customer base or only the segments you historically targeted?
Is your messaging accessible to a broad audience, or does it rely on language and references that only resonate with a narrow group?
Are you showing your brand in the environments your wider audience inhabits or only the most obvious media spaces?
Are you measuring reach in terms of meaningful exposure across audiences, or only performance metrics further down the funnel?

Designing for access

As marketing leaders, we often talk about optimising funnels. But this typically focuses on improving performance at later stages and measuring click-through rates, conversion rates, cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend.

Of course, these metrics are important. Yet they often overlook the earlier question of who the funnel is designed to capture in the first place.

If you want your brand to grow sustainably, it’s important to design your marketing ecosystems to ensure a broader set of audiences can access their message.

This means thinking about:

where campaigns appear geographically
which audiences are being reached and which are not
how different communities encounter your brand
how media choices shape visibility

Location-based marketing can play an important role here. By understanding where audiences live, work and move through their daily lives, brands can place messaging in environments that feel natural and relevant to a wider group of people.

This moves marketing beyond traditional demographic targeting and towards something more grounded in real-world behaviour - and in doing so, it expands access.

Inclusion strengthens commercial performance

Some organisations still view inclusion primarily as a social or reputational issue. But it really does need to be part of your growth strategy. The wider your visibility, the more opportunities are likely to come your way.

More people see your brand
More people feel the message is relevant to them
More potential customers enter the funnel

Inclusion at the awareness stage is a strategic decision about how wide your opportunity set can become. It’s about creating marketing systems that make sure a wider range of people actually encounter your brand in the first place. That means pairing creative with media planning and data-led targeting, and paying attention not only to who converts but also to who you’re reaching (and who you’re missing!) Awareness isn’t simply the top of the funnel; it’s the entry point for every potential customer. When inclusion is considered at that stage, more people see themselves reflected in your brand, and that wider sense of invitation is what ultimately drives growth.

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