Despite making up over 15% of the global population, people with disabilities are hugely underrepresented across all media, communications, and consumer touchpoints – from advertisements to packaging.
We know that creating disability-inclusive and accessible places, products, and communications drives greater social inclusion and access to untapped markets. There is a clear opportunity for brands to see both social and economic returns by championing authentic and inclusive disability representation. But progress can only be made when disabled people play a central role in business decisions and processes from the outset.
Despite some signs of progress and best practice in authentic disability representation, the global business community at large is lagging in its understanding and performance in this space. We have identified three key pillars of inclusive representation and the associated barriers to progress:
- Accessible Experiences: Ensuring that all consumers have equal access to experiencing a product or service along with its related marketing media and messaging should be the cornerstone of any company’s disability inclusion journey. Nevertheless, over 50% of disabled consumers encounter barriers to accessing content and products.
- Accurate Representation: Many brands are failing to accurately reflect the prevalence and diversity of disability within society, with just 2% of disabled consumers feel accurately portrayed in media and marketing. Companies must move beyond tokenism and showcase people with disabilities as they truly are: mainstream consumers with unique lived experiences who interact with products and services on a daily basis.
- Authentic Narratives: Media and marketing efforts perpetuate harmful cultural biases and stereotypes about disability in diverse industries and geographical contexts. Brands have a responsibility to harness the power of authentic narratives about disability to disrupt negative perceptions and reflect the diversity and intersectionality of lived experience. This means co-creating narratives with disabled communities and casting disabled talent in non-stereotypical roles.
The lack of disability representation with the workforce is perhaps the most pressing barrier to progress across all three of these areas. To see real change, disabled employees must be recruited, supported, and given opportunities to progress at every stage of the process.
It is clear that the status quo needs to change, and brands have both an obligation and a major opportunity to lead on disability inclusion by actively engaging disabled people in shaping their representation in media, marketing, and product design.
In our research with disabled consumers, we have observed an overwhelming demand for more inclusion and accessibility throughout the consumer journey. By ignoring this appetite for greater representation, businesses risk losing out on the global disability community’s monumental annual spending power.
There are signs of progress: 50% of disabled consumers recognise improvements in disability representation across media, marketing, and product design in the last 5 years. Now is the time for brands to build on this momentum by prioritising Accessible Experiences that serve the disabled community, Accurate Representation of the prevalence and lived experience of disability, and Authentic Narratives that move beyond outdated tropes and stereotypes.
Fundamental to these efforts is incorporating input from the disability community itself. Representation must capture the diversity and intersectionality of lived experience. Just as importantly, workforces need to represent and reflect the consumer base, so disabled people must be given a seat at the table at every stage of the process, be that in the writers’ room, at the design table, in the editing studio, or in board room.
It’s about flipping those stereotypes we see all too often as tropes of disability, and actually starting to have conversations where, yes, disabled people can have relationships, disabled people have friends, disabled people can be employed.
We are committed to supporting the global business community to improve their understanding, performance, and accountability in this space through Synchronised Collective Action.
Following the publication of our white paper on inclusive representation, we are working with the disability community and our Valuable 500 partners and companies to define KPIs for inclusive representation that will across a range of industries. They will aim to drive change towards increasing the authentic representation of people with disabilities in advertising and media, creating inclusive advertising campaigns, and ensuring all content is accessible for everyone within the disability community.
We will be launching our Synchronised Collective Action for Inclusive Representation later this year. In the meantime, we are supportive of the progress already being made by our companies when it comes to disability representation.
Excitingly, Valuable 500 company Procter & Gamble has recently announced a partnership with the World Federation of Advertisers, media owners, TV sales houses and other key industry partners to promote progress towards 100% advertising accessibility across Europe by 2025.
Some other great examples of inclusive representation from Valuable 500 partners and companies, Apple, Google and Lloyds Bank can be viewed in the videos below.
