How can your brand have a more meaningful impact during Pride Month?

 (Written as a LinkedIn blog, originally published here.)

Wrote some words to help straight people have a better understanding of what #PrideMonth is and how a #brand they work for can contribute more meaningfully to the movement.

As 2020 continues apace, many communications and marketing teams are thinking about how their brand can support Pride Month in June. Pride Month – a period of both celebration and raising awareness for the LGBT+ community – has become a key part of many brands’ marketing calendar, with rainbow versions of brand logos and branding now a common sight throughout June.

For many LGBT+ people, the superficial sight of the now well-known Pride flag, incorporated into familiar or favourite brand logos, is indescribably pleasing – a sure sign of the huge leaps of progress we’ve seen for LGBT+ people in recent decades. But dig just a little bit into the detail of the campaigns, and they can prove to be, at best, confused and naïve, at worst, hypocritical or meaningless.

It’s not surprising. With straight people being the main driving force behind these campaigns, there’s a big knowledge gap in understanding exactly what Pride is, what it means to people, and how their brand can join and encourage the momentum of what is a now a hugely successful movement.

A straight friend of mine who works for a large PR firm recently got in touch for some help with a pitch to a client, a well-known transatlantic brand. Last year the brand had engaged with Pride, which included changing their name to a mildly amusing LGBT+ pun. But the campaign was unable to show any real benefit for LGBT+ rights. It’s engagement with Pride Month had proved superficial only. My friend wanted to propose something more meaningful, but was clever enough to acknowledge she wasn’t really aware of the issues. As a friend of hers who is a G in the LGBT+ alphabet*, did I have any ideas?

What is Pride?

For me, I’ve been immersed in an understanding of Pride from when I first came out – I went to my first Pride parade in London in 1997. It was both empowering and a huge amount of fun (themes we’ll come back to below). I’ve been to many Pride celebrations in different cities around the world since then. As such, it’s easy for me to take for granted that straight people will just get it, but a lot of the time they don’t. A prime of example of this was last year’s astonishing development of a ‘Straight Pride’ in Boston, which wholly and aggressively missed the point of Pride.  

So, for straight people managing a brand and wondering what on earth they can do this June to engage with Pride Month, first you’ll need a bit of context – some Pride 101.

Pride started off as a protest movement, much in the same way as the women’s or civil rights movements. We mark it in June as that’s when the Stonewall riots, a key turning point in LGBT+ history, happened back in 1969 (although Pride events do take place across the UK and the world from spring well into autumn). The first Pride march in London took place in 1972 – part of a growing public demand from LGBT+ people for social and legal recognition in this country. Pride marches remain just that in many other countries where it is illegal or not tolerated to be LGBT+.

Celebration vs education

Here in the UK Pride has evolved into a number of things:

1. a celebration of the change and progress that has occurred,
2. an opportunity to maintain the visibility we now have in society (where women are quite obviously women, BAME people are quite obviously BAME people, LGBT+ people can easily blend into society and be forgotten – we need these events and ongoing media coverage to remind people ‘WE EXIST’ (a common phrase used in rights campaigning)), and
3. an opportunity to make each other and straight people more aware of the ongoing issues that LGBT+ people here and around the world face today.

1 and 3 can conflict with each other and sometimes cause disagreement in the LGBT+ community about the tone and purpose of Pride. Part of this debate is around the inclusion of big-name brands in Pride parades – which dominate them with huge, colourful floats blasting out pop songs – and brands waving the rainbow flag in their marketing during Pride Month. On one side, this is great – validation and acknowledgement from the mainstream, perfect for element no 2 – and it is an incredible, validating experience for the LGBT+ employees and customers of that brand.

On the other side, brand activity and the carnival, party element of Pride can drown out element no 3. Brands embrace the celebration aspect so whole-heartedly, it’s easy to forget 1) the huge problems that have been overcome, and 2) the huge problems that still remain. At best it’s naïve, at worst it’s willfully ignorant and jumping on the bandwagon to cynically capture the attention of the many LGBT+ people with disposable cash (the ‘pink pound’, as they say).

A good example of a brand missing the point is Barclays’ work with diver and Olympian Tom Daley in 2017. He went to his first Pride sponsored by Barclays and was posting videos and photos from the day on his social media channels. Knowing the importance of your first Pride as an out gay man, I shudder at the cynicism of this, capitalism at its most invasive. But I don’t think either party was to blame per se – there was clearly a lack of knowledge about the complexity and meaning of Pride.

The comedian Joe Lycett also took umbrage with Daley's posts, feeling it wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of Pride, and started hash-tagging other banks under Daley’s social posts. Subtle and silly, but he felt he’d made his point and left it at that. But then other people started doing it as well! It became something of an issue. Lycett does a very funny skit about it in his recent stand-up show, which I won't ruin here. 

If you watch Daley’s YouTube video about the day, you can see Lycett’s point. Barclays chose a nice-looking, married, middle class white gay man and got him to film the nice, middle class Barclays staff and the mostly straight crowd having the best time evs at Pride. But Pride is so much more diverse and eye-opening and political than what you see in Daley's video, which generously features an occasional shot of a drag queen.

We don’t even get to hear what Daley’s husband says in his speech at Trafalgar Square, just him geeing up the crowd. There’s zero sense of element 3 of Pride, which is arguably still the most important element. Someone watching Daley’s video will only come away with the sense that LGBT+ rights is job done, good for them.

What are the issues that LGBT+ people face and how can brands help?

There’s lots of ways brands can contribute in more meaningful ways to counter the potential cynicism of their involvement. When I was working at Cifas, rather than just stick a rainbow version of the logo on social, we published comments from the CEO about the work he’s doing to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the organisation. We felt the acknowledgement of Pride needed to have some meaning behind it, that it needed to reflect the organisation's behaviour towards minorities. Cifas was doing meaningful work around D&I, so why not talk about it?

D&I has become a key focus for many companies. For LGBT+ people specifically, the business case for enabling talented LGBT+ people to be themselves at work is clear – they work better and are more productive. What is your brand doing in this area? Rather than D&I remaining just an internal discussion, be public about it. That way more talented LGBT+ people will be drawn to work for the company in the future. It is a key internal discussion you can leverage as well – e.g. what D&I guidance is given to customer-facing colleagues? Can a lesbian couple expect to be treated as a straight couple? Will a trans person feel welcomed and safe in the hands of your brand? If so, why not reflect that in your marketing and PR?

D&I doesn’t have to be a conversation just for Pride month either, there’s no reason not to talk about it all the time. But also with LGBT+ rights, there’s other awareness touchstones through the year – this month, February, is LGBT History Month in the UK, perfect for talking about the things that have been achieved so far. There's International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia on 17 May. Then there’s Coming Out Day on 11 October, which gets a huge amount of traction on social. Coming out is a hugely complicated and difficult process that straight people won't be able to fully comprehend – there’s nothing you go through that’s similar. Helping achieve a better understanding of that is useful for LGBT+ people in engaging the sympathy and support of straight people.

There’s also a lot of campaigning done around getting the support of straight people in progressing LGBT+ rights. We can’t do it on our own, and it’s mostly straight people that will drive changes in the law and in society. Also, it’s more powerful when a straight person calls out homophobia than when we do it – it says more clearly: this is socially unacceptable. Straight people that are motivated to stand up for LGBT+ rights, or willing to normalise LGBT+ people in society, are called ‘allies’.

I have a particular straight male friend who fits this bill. One of the many reasons I’m friends with him is his willingness, seemingly instinctual, to normalise my sexuality – not just with me, but in front of his other friends. He’s made me feel more comfortable in social situations where I might otherwise just stay quiet and not get too involved. I know he’s got my back. Normalising LGBT+ people for straight people, and then getting them to normalise us for other straight people, and calling out homophobia and discrimination when they see it, is a key piece of work in gay rights. It’s the only way things will get better.

Another big issue for LGBT+ people here in the UK is mental health. We grow up feeling unsafe and feeling shame, in constant fight or flight, which is embedded during childhood. It manifests itself in adulthood in many ways – depression, drug problems, sex addiction, etc. There’s a fantastic book I’m reading at the moment called Straight Jacket by Matthew Todd about overcoming the legacy of shame. And that’s why it’s called Pride – to counter our feelings of shame, if only for one day. So, if your brand has any kind of social responsibility programme, supporting charities that tackle LGBT+ mental health issues would be something worth talking about.

Trans rights is another key issue. Some people seem to have accepted that homophobia is no longer socially acceptable and moved their bigotry over to trans people. The debate centres around: is a trans woman a woman, is a trans man a man – what toilet do they use? Even progressive hero JK Rowling has joined in, disappointingly. As such it’s probably a more difficult issue for brands to engage with, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t – at the same time, trans people are becoming very visible and successful in the mainstream: Caitlyn Jenner, Eddie Izzard, Sam Smith, Laverne Cox, to name a few. And while not trans, but certainly playing with ideas of gender, the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race makes it clear that a mainstream audience will engage with something different if it’s presented in a way they understand – in this case a reality show. Again, donating to trans rights charities or campaign groups as part of social responsibility programme, and making trans people feel seen and welcome in your marketing, would be something worth talking about.

Internationally, it’s a mixed affair for LGBT+ rights. 27 countries have made same-sex marriage legal, and 43 countries recognise homophobic crime as a hate crime, but in 70 countries same-sex sexual activity is still a crime, and in 9 countries you can actually be put to death for it. Amnesty has a good global overview, including a bit on why LGBT+ rights are important. In the US a key issue is treatments to 'cure' gay people (two good films about that came out recently: The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased), and the rolling back of LGBT+ rights by the Trump administration. But I’m guessing most readers of this will be focusing on UK campaigns. Hopefully the above has given you enough to chew on.

Obviously, it’s hard to give you specific ideas – only you know your brand and how it can collaborate with the Pride movement. But hopefully a better understanding of that movement triggers some ideas for you – ideas that will have a more meaningful impact on the progression of LGBT+ rights. I’m here if you have any questions, and I’d be very pleased to hear how you do this June.

* How you refer to the LGBT+ acronym in your communications is an editorial decision. It has a varied and highly political history, with some versions having 11 letters. The difficulty of including all the different ways people might identify themselves suggests to me that labelling something as complex as sexuality or gender is a non-starter. But for now we’re still in the business of labelling things to help people understand them – labels are still useful. I go for the acronym LGBT+ as most people know and understand those four letters and you’re still acknowledging that there are more identities out there in need of recognition.