Winning Across Diverse Consumer Communities

This PSFK guide is a store experience playbook on DEI strategies for retailers and brands to help BIPOC customers feel seen, heard and represented in the retail experience, winning increased loyalty and share of spend along the way.

Executive Summary

We live and operate within an imperfect world. Top retailers and brands can find success by creating opportunities for the disadvantaged with thoughtfully designed products, experiences, and inclusive marketing; and by leveraging operational strengths and local partnerships to address inequalities with initiatives for communal good. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are guiding forces in consumers’ lives today, informing their preferred brands and products and increasingly deciding their purchase patterns and loyalty. This provides new opportunities for retailers to expand in innovative and impactful ways, showing consumer audiences that they are being seen, heard, and represented; and taking it upon themselves to bridge the gap between what is and what could be.

Report Overview

Consumers’ expectations around diversity, equity, inclusivity and engagement span the entire retail experience. In this report on DEI in business, PSFK iQ researchers have studied trends and emerging ideas to identify six strategies for business leaders to consider as they uplift, transact and engage with diverse, multifaceted, and often underserved consumer communities.

What You’ll Learn In This Report On DEI In Business

• How top brands and retailers are creating opportunities for the disadvantaged with thoughtfully designed products, experiences, and inclusive campaigns.
• Why leadership teams in inclusive workplaces are increasingly tapping their black employees as a valuable resource to better understand how to connect with both new and existing consumer communities.
• How leadership teams are leveraging operational strengths, and local partnerships to address inequalities with initiatives for inclusive cultures.
• With proactive practices across store environments, merchandising, and vendor selection, how both established and emerging organizations are ensuring that even “invisible” consumer needs are being authentically and representatively met.
• How retailers, brands and creatives are making a commitment to diversity to ensure real progress is being made to challenge the status quo and insure that inclusion matters.
• Why business leaders are taking actionable consumer-facing and internal inclusion initiatives to visibly demonstrate that all consumers are equally valued; representing, uplifting and activating around BIPOC audiences year-round.

What’s In This Report on DEI in Business

Within this inclusive business report, PSFK iQ researchers present the ways leading retailers and brands are making their BIPOC customers feel seen, heard and represented across all stages of the retail experience, winning increased loyalty, ensuring cultural diversity and improving share of spend along the way.

This report explains why inclusion matters and covers:

• 6 strategies to enact positive communal change with inclusive retail practices
• 21 best-in-class examples of how leading organizations are uplifting, transacting, and engaging across diverse consumer communities
• Case studies from diversity leaders Nike, Google, AirBnb, TikTok, Trader Joe’s, and more.
• Market statistics and insights into the changing consumer behaviors and expectations around inclusive practices in retail

Who Prepared This Report?

This report on DEI in business was developed by the same PSFK research department that since 2004 has provided trends-led innovation consulting advice to Apple, BMW, Facebook/Meta, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Volkswagen