“Done well, inclusive communication doesn’t feel like a message about women. It feels like a message built with women’s realities already inside.
Every August, brands reach for the same visual shorthand: soft pink, a raised fist, a stock photo of a woman “leading a meeting.” National Women’s Day becomes a moodboard exercise rather than a communication one. And audiences, increasingly, can tell the difference between a brand that’s decorating a cause and one that’s actually designed around the people it claims to speak to.
The default audience problem
Most brands and communication systems are built around an unspoken “default” audience, and everyone else is treated as a variation on that theme. It’s rarely intentional. It’s just what happens when representation is added at the end of a project rather than built into the brief from the start. Author Caroline Criado Perez calls this out in Invisible Women, her widely cited study of how a “default” user, historically male, historically narrow, gets quietly built into products, systems, and messaging without anyone deciding it on purpose. Brand communication has the same blind spot.
The scale of the gap is measurable. Global research from the Unstereotype Alliance and Kantar, based on an assessment of over 16,000 advertisements across 61 countries, found that only 1% of ads feature a person living with a disability, while 33% feature people of different skin colours and ethnicities. That’s not a creative failure. It’s a briefing failure, representation left as an afterthought rather than a starting question.
That gap starts further upstream than the ad itself, in who gets to approve it. Women make up 46% of South Africa’s economically active population, yet Just Share’s 2024 assessment of the JSE Top 40 found they hold only 23% of executive management positions, the rooms where campaign budgets, creative briefs, and final sign-off actually happen. Screen representation is downstream of representation in the room.
Strategic design asks the harder question earlier: Who is actually in this room, and does our messaging sound like we know that?
Why this matters beyond one day a year
Inclusive storytelling isn’t a campaign format. It’s a discipline that shows up in research, in the images chosen, in whose voice carries the narrative, and in whether “real lives” actually mean real lives, or just a more diverse stock library.
It also isn’t just an ethical argument; it’s an increasingly commercial one. A joint study by the Unstereotype Alliance and Oxford’s Saïd Business School, using proprietary data from members including Unilever, Diageo, and Mars, found that brands with more inclusive advertising achieve measurably higher short- and long-term sales, greater consumer trial and loyalty, and stronger brand equity than those that don’t. Inclusion, in other words, is part of what makes communication effective. It’s part of what makes communication effective.
Geena Davis, whose research institute has spent two decades studying representation in media, puts the underlying logic simply: “If she can see it, she can be it.” It’s a line built for film and television, but it holds for brand communication just as well. Audiences build their sense of who a message is for by who they actually see inside it.
Done well, inclusive communication doesn’t feel like a message about women. It feels like a message built with women’s realities already inside.
Women’s Empowerment: Championing Inclusive Leadership
This isn’t an outside position for us. As a 100% women-owned strategic branding and communications agency, Design@Bay believes diverse leadership drives stronger ideas, better collaboration, and more meaningful impact, not just as a slogan, but as the agency’s actual structure. That structure remains the exception rather than the rule locally: women-owned businesses account for just 21.9% of total businesses in South Africa, roughly in line with the global average.
We proudly support the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), established by UN Women and the UN Global Compact, which recognise the vital role businesses play in advancing gender equality across the workplace, marketplace, and community. That commitment shapes how we lead our business, build our partnerships, and communicate on behalf of our clients, because inclusive, equitable outcomes start with who’s in the room making the decisions, not just who appears in the final creative.
Our perspective
At Design@Bay, inclusive storytelling and messaging aren’t a seasonal layer we apply around 9 August. They’re part of how we approach audience analysis and narrative from day one, because a brand that only remembers to be representative once a year was never really representative to begin with.
If your communication needs to sound like it knows who it’s actually talking to, Design@Bay is here for that conversation, not just this month, but every month.