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Supporting image for What is Inclusive Marketing? (And how do I get started?) – Lola Bakare
What is Inclusive Marketing? (And how do I get started?) – Lola Bakare
The Agents of Change

What is inclusive marketing? How does it differ from multicultural marketing? How can you add inclusive marketing to your own brand and communication, without coming off as inauthentic or just jumping on a bandwagon? Lola Bakare has heard these questions before, and she’s here to help you navigate these waters successfully.

Done right, inclusive marketing allows more of our customers to see themselves in our brand, and helps us reach a wider audience. As Lola Bakare simply explains, you’re leaving money on the table if you’re not thinking about weaving cultural conversations into your marketing.

Rich: My guest today got her dream job as a marketing director at The Daily Dot, think Buzzfeed for intellectuals. From this experience and various roles on the front lines of marketing leadership at PepsiCo, New World Pasta, Diageo, and Dell. For world-class brands including Gatorade, Ronzoni and Smirnoff, she developed deep client-side experience and honed in on becoming the person her leaders approach when they needed someone to help them figure out the ‘how’. In the five years since, she was called to serve as a consultant in marketing excellence, she’s transformed the success of marketing and executive teams in commercial real estate, healthcare, tech, startups, fine arts organizations, and beyond. She also serves on the advisory board of Monument Lab. Today, we’re going to be taking a look at inclusive marketing with Lola Bakare. Lola, welcome to the podcast.

Lola: Rich, thank you so much for having me. I’m so thrilled to be here with you.

Rich: Well, I’m glad you’re here too, because I want to learn about inclusive marketing, a term that I hadn’t really been all that familiar with until late. How do you define inclusive marketing?

Lola: Great question, Rich. And I have to say, we’re taping this on February 1st, which is a very timely moment. It’s the beginning of Black History month. And so I’ll start the definition with just grounding us in that. Inclusive marketing is really about thinking about marketing in a way that considers more than just the bottom line in order to get the most bottom-line impact. So how can we be thinking about the communities, customers, and stakeholders we serve in terms of their expansive identities and using that as a way to do the things that we know marketing does best. Which is making emotional connection. So it’s taking the sort of social impact and push towards diversity, equity, and inclusion movement that we’ve all been seeing heightened over the past few years and using that to come up with more successful marketing strategies. We’re including the cultural context into how we think about marketing.

Rich: Okay. Now I did a little research before we got on the podcast today. And if I’m correct, you’re an English major, correct?

Lola: Of course.

Rich: All right. So am I, so I love all other English majors. And I found this quote you had said in one of your articles, “Marketing is an ideal career path for an English major because you spend four years taking a story and being asked to have a stance or an opinion on it that can lead to something else. And you learn how to write to persuade your reader to believe that, too. And as marketers that’s fundamentally what we do.”

Lola:  Oh, my gosh!

Rich: Yeah. Great quote, totally 110% agree with it. Just wondering if you knew that you were going to get into marketing when you were an English major in college?

Lola: I did not. It’s a great question. I’m glad you went there. I would say I had the privilege of going to college with the mindset of this is about intellectual discovery. I’m going to take the classes that speak to me, whether it’s… I think the weirdest class I took, which ended up being awesome, was 18th century intellectual history. And the professor would come in every day and embody the sort of posture, voice, and mindset of one of those philosophers and teach us their perspective. That was the class. It was amazing. It was almost like going to the theater. So I approached college that way, and becoming an English major was something I gravitated towards because I love to read and talk about what I just read, and then build new ways of thinking that I can share based on integrating all that knowledge. So that was just something that spoke to me from a marketing standpoint, I got into marketing… I went to University of Pennsylvania, which I’m actually just down the street from right now in Philadelphia. I was told by a friend I should start going to the executive presentations that folks come came and gave. You know, different companies because the Wharton School is there. And for us liberal arts majors, you make a lot more money becoming a page at NBC or an entry-level publisher, so we might as well just go and try to get those jobs, too. And I was going around to these cocktail parties and ended up meeting the team at Pepsi and just fell in love with the idea of marketing from there. So that was it, it was really fate.

Rich: That’s awesome. And I actually went to college, I started thinking I was going to be a psychology major like my dad was. And my freshman year I had a very mediocre Intro to Psych professor, and an amazing Intro to English professor. Which in some ways, all liberal arts are the same, you have to defend your belief system. That’s really what it comes down to. And like you said, you have to tell a story. So I think all English majors can make fantastic marketers, and all psych majors can easily. So when you have a love of English and psychology, you should definitely consider it.

Anyway. Alright, so let’s get back to inclusive marketing, now that we’ve taken this trip down memory lane with you. How is this approach of inclusive marketing different than brand just creating segmented marketing that targets individual groups? And is there pros and cons to each?

Lola: You are prepared, Rich, you are prepared. It is so different. And the nuance and the difference is key to making the most of its impact. So when you think about segmented marketing and what a lot of people think of as multicultural marketing, that’s really about creating a different strategy, different visuals, different assets, different everything, to speak directly to a segment in terms of your belief that people of – call it different races, you know, different cultural identities – tend to be motivated by the same things. And that those things are different than folks in other ethnicity categories. And so you need to speak to them in their own language, in their own way.

But the problem is the premise of the multicultural marketing of that sort of thinking is that there’s multicultural and then there’s mainstream. And the unspoken definition of mainstream is what? Well, you. It’s white.

Rich: Those people who aren’t watching at home, I am a white male. So just keep that going.

Lola: And we love that about Rich, but the reality is that there are lots of things – as we just demonstrated, Rich – that you and I have in common. Why would you go to the inefficiency of creating a different marketing strategy to reach us when we have such fundamental shared experiences and beliefs. And my hypothesis, I think this is true because we are tribal people. And what is that? If you think about the psychology of humans, we are tribal because we believe that we do better as individual if all of us thrive.

There’s a great book called Net Positive, that talks about this, by Andrew Winston and Paul Pullman, two white men. But they talk about this so eloquently in that book around why businesses need to be focused on this whole conscious capitalism idea. It’s based on that fundamental belief, right? So if we all have that, you and I, that fundamental belief that we do better as individuals when everyone in our tribe does better, then you don’t really need to think about social impact, purpose driven initiatives. Any marketing, to speak to the emotional connection to those sorts of outcomes as something that should only be segmented to the people it is benefiting.

So that’s kind of a lot of an answer. But to sum it up I would say, multicultural marketing misses the mark because it almost segregates us in ways that aren’t actually true, and thus drives inefficiency.

Rich: And maybe getting back to your original point about you and I have so much in common, it’s the stories and the underlying emotions that are going to resonate the most. I mean, there’s obviously an argument to be made that when you raise a group up, segment or group, however you want to look at it, that it does play to their emotions and things like that. But what you’re saying is, it also creates this separation, this otherness, between “mainstream” and “multiculturalism”. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that sounds like what you were saying.

Lola: Yes. That is what I’m saying. And that’s not to say, you know, I have a friend who works in the film industry, and we’ve been talking about this a lot. And it’s not to say that there’s never a place for culturally segmented marketing initiatives. But just like any other tool in our marketing toolbox, let’s only use it when we need to, and let’s not think of it as necessarily related to the idea of doing inclusive marketing. And another term I like to use is ‘social impact marketing’. We can kind of talk about how those two fit together. Let’s not, let’s think of that as a very tactical tool that is necessary when there are differences that make one message, prohibitive language is a really important one.

So of course I want to speak to my Spanish speaking customers in their language in order for my message to resonate with them. There’s no getting past that. There are other examples of this that are really important, but especially as we get into the mid and late 2020s, we’re moving past a world as the onslaught of just sort of support around the need for equity after George Floyd’s murder showed us all. We’re moving past the idea that that only mattered to black people. We’re moving past the idea that the black, male community being treated fairly by police is something that only affects the black, male community. That affects all of us as a society.

And so as marketers and creators of culture, whether you’re in small business or you’re at PepsiCo, and maybe even more importantly, if you’re in small business, you need to focus on efficiency. And so it’s almost leaving money on the table to not think about how the way you approach your future customers can weave in some of these really important cultural conversations.

Rich: That’s awesome. I’m also just thinking about like marketing and advertising in many ways is its own art form. And you know, art often shows us the way the world should be, the way the world can be, and maybe we should be considering the impact beyond the dollar sign that our marketing and advertising has, whether that’s online or off.

Lola: Well, we already do. If you think about it, even back to the sixties, I always think about Mad Men, because my cats are named Peggy and Draper, and they’re always around here annoying me/delighting me. But you know, when you think about the painting and aspirational picture of a life or a solution that your product, your offering as a brand leader can create for the person you’re trying to communicate, that’s already embracing the idea that there can be a world where things aren’t as bad as they are today. There can be a world where an aspirational state exists. Whether you’re drinking a cup of Starbucks coffee and the feeling that you get from it, right? Or something bigger, like the way that GE might talk about some of their climate change or energy initiatives.

Rich: You and I are enjoying this conversation, but I’m thinking about the listener at home who maybe has a deadline, or has certain KPIs that they have to accomplish. And they’re like, that’s all well and good, but you know, why exactly is this important? Why should I care? How would you respond to that person?

Lola: I would say take it from me. I’m a child of business owners, my mom and dad. Dad ran a doctor’s office my entire life with her doing the books, him doing the doctoring. I know what it means to be responsible for your employees at the small business level. And it’s very important to me to make sure everything we’re talking about when we’re being theoretical can drill down into that context.

So we’re going to case study that right now. We didn’t prepare this people. Rich, I’m going to turn it a little bit on you and ask you to sort of give me a scenario. Let’s case study this of the sort of deadline or KPI pressure specifically that that person might be facing. And then I’m going to give you an example of how they can solve it through the inclusive marketing mind.

Rich: Sure. I’ll just think about a few of my clients that we’re dealing with at flyte right now. And I know we have a real estate agency that of course right now is having no trouble selling homes, but they’re having trouble with inventory. They’re actually struggling to figure out how do we get more people who want to sell their homes to sell them through us, because that’s how they make a lot of their money. So that’s one example. I don’t know if you want more than once you can pick and choose.

Lola: No, this is great. I spent a ton of time in real estate industry, so this is actually really awesome. So, okay. I’m going to ask you one follow up question. Is it that they are needing to get more of the share of sort of sellers coming to them specifically, or is the sort of addressable market of sellers smaller than they would like it to be?

Rich: be, I would say right now it’s probably more the latter. Like there’s just not enough people selling their homes. But certainly one that they’d like to make sure they’re getting a bigger piece of the pie in their geographic area as well.

Lola: You’re almost making this too easy. So I love this example. So one of the first campaigns that really inspired me to do my best to teach people about the power of inclusive marketing, was when I saw what Citibank did with their action for racial equity initiative. And that was, I think it was around summer/fall of 2020. They came out with not just a campaign, it was a campaign at the top of the funnel, but they also came out with the problem of ongoing solutions that we’re going to change the barrier to fair financing, access to financing, access to mortgage lending, that we know has been a systemic problem in the banking industry that black people specifically in this country have faced. So if I’m a real estate agent and I’m trying to get people to sell their homes, well okay. What’s the underlying emotional benefit or promise of selling home? It’s to get capital. And what does capital help us create? Generational wealth. So what is an initiative that a real estate agent could either get behind an existing one or somehow create a micro level to attract more sellers? I’m going to talk about the importance of generational wealth among black families. I’m going to start to talk about the power of getting the capital out of your home by selling and maybe moving to somewhere else, and talk about what you can do with that. And by the way, I’m going to promise you that we are aware, even if we don’t have a diversified staff yet, which I hope you know they do.

But let’s say just a husband and wife couple who happened to be white. We are aware of the problems and equity that are faced when you’re trying to sell and get the best deals and get the best, I know in buying it’s get the best mortgage rates and all that real estate stuff. We don’t need to go into the details of, we are the people who are aware that we want to get you the best offer and we know we’re up against. The fight of making sure you don’t get less because that’s something that we are champions of. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we’re studying. Just making sure that unlike all the other real estate agents out there, the potential sellers see that you’re really going to take care of them.

And then by the way, you’re opening up your pie. You’re making your pie even larger for potential sellers by specifically speaking to the reasons why generational wealth is important for people of color. By the way, you’re doing that in a way that reaches all of your audiences. So if I’m a white woman who really cares about social equity, which is going to end up being a hundred percent of us – again, where that tribe – this is where things are going, sorry Fox News. But this is what people care about. You know, I’m not going to even apologize for that because it is what it is. Ticker Carlson, you can tweet me later, sorry. But like, then those people are going to be attractive as well. It’s an emotional connection with everyone that actually endeavors to solve a problem that is real in a meaningful way.

So if you can get 10 people to set up. And get access to that capital and find new ways of making generational wealth who are of color. And then that brings in 50 more who aren’t, because you decided to talk about these real issues in your marketing. Well, I would say that matters because you just had a better year than you did the year before.

Rich: So many thoughts are running around my head, including everything from companies becoming B Corps, but also on the, not the negative side, but the challenging side, where I live in Maine, it is a very white state. It usually is between us and Vermont on which is the whitest state in the nation. So some of these things are a struggles for us. How does a business owner or marketer, especially if they are white, come across, do these things, and to be authentic? To not appear like they’re pandering, to not appear like they’re just trying to take advantage? Because that I think is, at least in the mind of a lot of white owners and marketers, the fear that they have. That it’s going to be seen as they’re just jumping on a bandwagon. How do we avoid that situation?

Lola: Well, I’m going to keep it really real with you, and I hope everybody out there in Maine is listening. The only way to appear authentic, is to be authentic. And so if we’re worried about looking like we’re jumping on the bandwagon, or that’s the story we’re telling ourselves, we’re already going down the wrong road. Did you ask yourself if you were jumping on the bandwagon when you decided to do Facebook ads? No, you just had a belief that they would work. So that’s really where we need to start. If you’re thinking about the bandwagon thing, you’re coming from a place of this is actually not true. The idea that somehow focusing on inclusivity or social impact can drive my business by addressing a real systemic problem in our society that matters to my customers. You don’t believe it yet.

So the first thing I would say is education is the way to get to the belief. We can talk about this and the social posts where you’re going to actually share this, but there are a number of books and resources I would point folks to, to sort of cultivate that belief, right? Most of them are on my bookshelf. And it’s not something that I think is an “if” because I’m so certain that it’s true. And we have business cases that show us this. That people allow themselves to get that education, they’re not even going to ask that question. So the real question is, how do I identify the place where my business should be playing? Just like any other strategy, where should we be thinking about causing a systemic change or helping one to come about that matters to our customers. That question is about looking at the reality of your brand identity, your industry’s history. Like we talked about the city example, where do we need to play? Like real estate, right? That’s a great place to say, okay, so what are the systemic problems that really are relevant to our industry? And then that’s where you start to find that really authentic problem to solve. So it is more about finding out ‘what’ then deciding if ‘why’. And if you’re still in the place of deciding if why, you don’t actually believe in it yet. Does that make sense?

Rich: Yes. There’s still, you know, you can call it ‘white guilt’, you can call it whatever, that we struggle with. So you and I talked a little bit before the show.

Lola: I would call it something. I would call it, because you know, we’re just going to be spicy on a Tuesday afternoon. I would call it, I don’t want to say the word ‘laziness’, but it’s less of a fear of consequence and it honestly, Rich, it’s more of a fear of inconvenience. It’s more of a fear of inconvenience to an end that doesn’t make a difference. So we go to Facebook ads. Again, people are willing to learn about how this new technology works, because they believe it will make a difference in their business. And so they’re willing to be inconvenienced. It’s more of a wanting to avoid that inconvenience than a guilt. When we talk about guilt, people can still feel warm and fuzzy about inaction, right? And like what you and I are doing here is we’re breaking down that ability for people to feel warm and fuzzy in place of an action.

Rich: All right. So let’s say that the listeners here have moved beyond worrying about what necessarily people will think about them or whether it’s authentic or inauthentic, because in their hearts, they feel like they’re doing the right thing. Let’s give them a blueprint. What does inclusive marketing look like? Especially because this is a digital marketing podcast, more on the digital side than perhaps the non-digital side. But what are some of the things that you might recommend for a brand that is ready to really hit inclusive marketing with all of their efforts?

Lola: Awesome. I love it. So it’s about thinking about how you take, let’s say you’re a smaller digital brand and you have your strategy for the quarter or the half of the year or even the year or whatever. You have your plays that you know are going to drive specific business outcomes that you’re measuring. So you take that, and you take a look at it, and then you start to evaluate it through the lens of – and you set me up so perfectly for this – what I call the RSR framework. And in the RSR framework, the R stands for revenue, the S stands for social impact, and the last R stands for reputational impact. So I didn’t say impact at the top, but it’s revenue impact. So these are the three sorts of impact that we want our strategic plays, that we may have already been mapped them out, to make in order for them to become what I would call ‘max move’s or inclusive marketing strategies.

So, okay. How do we go about approaching this? Let’s say that we know for the month of February, we’re focused on our email marketing strategy, we’re focused on creating content that gets opens, that gets folks to our website to purchase. And we know what open rate we want, and this is all very much at the end going to be able to measured, and how well did it work. So then we ask ourselves, how can I take my email marketing content approach? And right now the content is great. It’s set up to drive revenue. I’m featuring my products, whatever it is, but how can I do this in a way that does that? I checked that top arm, but I’m also making a measurable social impact in some way. And I’m also making a positive reputational impact to my brand in some way. What else could I do to this thing to allow to do both of those things as well?

And when you start to look at it that granularly, it all becomes really simple. So let’s say I sell electronics. Well, one of my emails, instead of just saying, here’s what we have in the store and here’s how good it is. I’m going to say, we really need you to buy today because since it’s the month of February and we talked about how Black History month is its own thing that I didn’t want to be just one month, but since whatever I believe in this, not even that it’s the month of February, we are going to be giving 10% of our profits of every purchase of a laptop in this 24 hour period to fund some sort of an initiative where we’re trying to diversify board rooms in the tech industry for e-commerce. Like, that’s a bad example, but we’re going to be doing something that creates systemic change. We’re going to be pouring into that with your resources. So please, for the reasons that you would buy from us yesterday, but also for this reason, buy from us. And that day your sales go up 10x. And that day you get press coverage that you’ve never gotten, because a brand like yours had never done that before. And that day you’re actually able to contribute to this initiative. Maybe you live in Maine and the people that you’re going to impact don’t, but that actually still worked. You see what I’m saying?

Rich: Absolutely. And that kind of leads me into my next question about earned media. And I was just wondering how that played with our owned media, or our paid media, and then how does it garner that earned media? It sounds like you have already kind of answered that question in advance, but I don’t know if you had any other thoughts on that as well.

Lola: I do, yeah. And so this is the fun of it is – and I had friends who told me this a lot, colleagues and clients (I refer to my clients as friends often that just goes to show that I need to get a life) – but you know, I come from a standpoint of having created this framework around inclusive marketing, but I’ve been a marketer my entire career. So I’ve got 15 plus years of experience doing this. And so how we think about the mix, and our tactics always comes into play in any advice that I’m going to give. So what I’m going to say next isn’t really unique to inclusive marketing, but it’s that one of the easiest ways to get earned media is by taking these success stories and boosting them to the right audiences.

So there’s so many creative things we can do, especially when you think about how granular LinkedIn targeting is. Now we can do this Day of Giving or whatever it is, and we can actually boost this to the trade publication editors in our industry. We can actually take our paid approach and target it to places where we know might spark that entry in to earn, even if we don’t have a fancy or expensive PR representative at this time. So we can do things to make our efforts work in ways that give us a two birds/one stone effect. And I think paid is one of the most under sort of leveraged areas where that is possible. I want my ads to cause a reporter to call me, and so that’s just one of the ways that you can think about this.

And then furthermore, we live in a world where you can almost create your own earned media. What about an ad that instead of just linking it to the site actually links to the initiative itself, right? Or our blog post that you wrote about it, but also links to your store. So just thinking about ways to kind of synergize your efforts and trying out things and seeing if they work. Because I would never, ever suggest anyone keep doing something that isn’t working for those KPIs that they need. But what I’m suggesting is, if you start to think about your role in creating a better society as a business, that can become a powerful driver of those KPIs.

Rich: Alright, sounds good. And what I’m hearing is, I’m just thinking back on the examples that you’ve given us. Citibank, I believe it was, or maybe it was Bank of America, but whichever one, it was kind of focused this idea on black people have really not gotten the opportunities or the rates that they have that white people have historically. So we’re going to address that, and they put that in their advertising.

Lola: And then they’re actually addressing it.

Rich: And they’re actually addressing it. It’s not just window dressing. The real estate agents, basically they could talk about the importance of establishing generational wealth and talk about it from a black perspective, but really, it’s everybody’s perspective. And again, maybe putting some money where their mouth is. You and I, in a previous conversation, spoke about another thing that flyte did where we did a scholarship for black students at a local high school called Black Minds Matter, and a 10-year commitment to that process. Again, that’s a different approach where it’s not what your money is necessarily doing, this is just something we put out there. Does that fall within this inclusive marketing piece? And if so, how does it work, and are there other examples that you can give us so people get their creative juices flowing?

Lola: Yeah, sure. I mean, thinking more about your initiative, I would say in general that falls more into corporate social responsibility. Which is great, philanthropy. That’s great if you want to do all of those things. What takes it over the line, and this is possible, can your corporate social responsibility, your philanthropic initiatives, actually become part of your go to market storytelling.

Rich: Tell me what that looks like.

Lola: Okay. Let’s think of a good example of that. It’s tough to pull from an example where it’s sort of like, that’s the egg and the go-to-market is the chicken. Because a lot of examples that are top of mind for me, it’s the other way around.

Rich: Alright, so give me one of those examples. And then maybe we can circle back around.

Lola: So one that I love from today that I saw actually was Clubhouse, a popular app that a lot of us use. You know, they’re still a relatively new company. They have an editorial piece that features three, not celebrity, but really excellent black woman creators on their platform as part of their call to, “Hey, come check us out. We have these creators on the platform, hear their stories.” And they’re folks I know really well, Dr. Tina Opie, a woman named Tony Street, and who was the third person? Why am I blanking on the third person? And my friend Denise Hamilton. Yes. She’s amazing, actually, you’ve got to check her out. So they are doing amazing things on the platform. And so as part of Clubhouse getting the attention that they would love to get on Apple’s sort of editorial front end of the app store, they’re telling the story of these three women. I guarantee you downloads are going to spike today because of that storytelling, but it actually also creates a meaningful impact for those three women and their ability to have awareness around everything that they’re doing. So they’re giving their platform to three other folks. Now you could argue that Clubhouse could also say, okay, we’re going to do a sort of philanthropic style initiative where we’re going to give support to black creators. They could do that in the background. You could argue that maybe they even are. But the fact that they’re putting that in the front of their storytelling is what draws the line.

So for you, is there any way that your educational initiative could become part of some sort of a video ad? Could it become part of how you’re attracting the attention of your future customers? If you do some sort of a pre-roll by where you’re trying to get folks to join your email list, is that part of what you use in a way that feels right and feels authentic? Does that start to make sense as to how that line can be drawn?

And then I think one other example, this is from big corporate but it’s coming to mind, if we expand this inclusive marketing piece to think beyond race, because it really is. There’s so many different elements of identity that need to be included. Accessibility is a huge one right now. So I remember I saw something from J&J, I think it was last year. Where at the top of their go to market in their television advertising, they were focusing on telling a story about how one of their products helps achieve a solution that’s needed for children who don’t have vision. And they do a lot of other stuff, but they’re telling that story in a television ad to make an emotional connection with people who care about solutions for children who don’t have vision. And so that’s the sort of thing that you can think about really doing it in a way that doesn’t feel opportunistic or isn’t real. Your CSR initiatives should be things that are actually happening so they can become part of your storytelling that does get to a place of inclusive marketing.

Rich: This has been great. Actually, I do have one more question I want to talk to you about. Undoubtedly, no matter what we do, we’re going to have haters and trolls because we’re online. Everything you say is going to come back. Tips for handling these people who are like, “I can’t believe you would say this”, or “You’re just pandering” or “This is important for all people not just black people, or not just Latinos, or not just Jewish people.” What is your canned response? Do you have an approach to these people?

Lola: You just thank them and keep moving. You know, Sainsbury’s, which is a grocery chain in the UK, did an amazing job of this. So one of the examples on my website is how they started to tell their sort of holiday come shop with us story on TV, by featuring real stories of families beyond the typical white, British family. One of them was going into Jamaican household, showing what they cook and really showing their holiday traditions, and putting that in front of the mainstream. They got a lot of backlash on social media. And they very quickly just came out with a message that said, “We are even more encouraged that we took this step, because the many voices of dissent that we are hearing was…” I’m paraphrasing, but it was something along the lines of, “… just really proved to us that this needed to happen. So thank you everybody for weighing in and we will continue to do what we’re doing.”  That’s it.

Rich: That’s a perfect response, perfect response.

Lola: And that works in every single example. There are going to be people even in the equity inclusion industry who might hear what I’m saying and think, gosh, we don’t want to be using social impact for revenue impact. And like, this is terrible. I can’t believe she’s… That’s fine. Everybody has a right to their opinion. And I’m going to keep sharing mine, unapologetically.

Rich: Awesome. Lola, if people want to hear more of your opinions, where can we send them online?

Lola: Well, I hope they do. I hope everybody subscribes and continues listening to your podcast, because that’s going to be part of it now. But I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so they can find me there. Just search first and last name. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well. And on both of those sources, it’s easy to find out how to subscribe to my newsletter and check out my website, and anything else that you’d like to see if you’d like to go deeper in conversation with me, all the information is there. So start with LinkedIn and Twitter. Oh, and Clubhouse, I’m on there a lot as well. And you’ll be sure to hear more of my opinions, maybe even more than you’d like.

Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have all those links in the show notes. Lola, thank you so much for coming and talking about.

Lola: Thank you so much for the invitation, Rich. And honestly, thank you for being someone who has the courage to have this conversation, because it really, really matters. And I can tell just looking at you, your intellectual curiosity comes from a place, not a protectionism of the old ways, but really I’m learning and inspiring others to think differently. And I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.

Rich: Wow. That’s that means a lot. Thank you, Lola.

Show Notes: 

Lola Bakare helps her clients succeed with successful marketing campaigns and strategies. Head over to her website to see how she empowers marketers to excel, and sign up for her newsletter while you’re there. And be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.