How to Fight Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination with Marketing and Communication

It’s time for marketers, advertisers, and communicators to step up and make a real difference in the fight against bias, prejudice, and discrimination. And if you’ll give me a few minutes of your time, I’ll explain how they, and you, and I can make a difference. Because even if you don’t feel that you’re a marketer, you are a communicator, and you have the power to be an influencer.

I’m Anthony Miyazaki, and for over 25 years I’ve taught people how to become better marketers, better influencers, and better communicators—people from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, and from virtually every industry you can think of.

(If you'd rather listen/watch instead, play the following YouTube video. Otherwise, keep reading below the video.)

In our courses and programs, we teach students to conduct research to learn what people think, feel, and do. We work to discover the rationale behind why people think, feel, and act as they do. What are their attitudes, their beliefs, and their values? What are their desires and their goals? What are their fears and their insecurities and their embarrassments? What pleases them? What disgusts them? What do they pay attention to? And what do they ignore?

We teach our students to reach their audiences using various proven tools such as the AIDA model, where they first gain the attention or awareness of their audience, then get the audience to have an interest in the product or message, which hopefully is followed by a desire to follow the messaging, and then, if all goes well, a final action or change in behavior. We also teach about the power of communication and how it can be used to inform, remind, persuade, and connect with their audiences.

Most importantly, we stress the concept of having a clear strategy behind your communicative and persuasive tactics or actions. What is the underlying purpose of your work? What are the values on which that purpose is based? The values that are the foundation of your purpose. The values that uphold your purpose.

The reason why this is critical is because too many marketers—too many communicators (and remember, we are all communicators)—spend very little time connecting their core values to their communications, whether those communications are in words, actions, or the absence of words and action, which is silence and inaction. They proclaim on one hand to care about the world, to care about other people, to not be racist or sexist or ageist or to have the uncountable biases that each individual (including myself) has. Yet on the other hand they continue in their communications (perhaps unconsciously) to promote ideas and concepts and stereotypes and even products that not only perpetuate racism, sexism, ageism, etc., but also serve to instill in others those biases and prejudices and the accompanying acts of discrimination that are the seemingly inevitable result.

They may truly think that they are “unbiased” or “not racist” or “not sexist” or “not ageist” or that they don’t harbor any blanket negativity toward a certain group (whether based on the color of their skin, or their gender, or their age, or religion, or beliefs, etc.), but their actions suggest otherwise because they have not taken the time to connect their actions to their value systems. But it’s even worse, because they have not examined and reexamined their own values from an understanding that they are indeed biased in their thinking, and that they most likely will continue to be at least somewhat biased in their thinking, no matter who they are, because each of them has had different individual experiences in life and each of them has reacted differently internally to those experiences.

Let me restate this without the “they.” Because the “they” includes YOU and ME as well. It’s likely that WE all have not sufficiently examined and reexamined our own values from an understanding that WE are indeed biased in our thinking, and that WE will most likely continue to be at least somewhat biased in our thinking, no matter who we are, because each of us has had different individual experiences in life and each of us has reacted differently internally to those experiences.

Even identical twins—in fact, let’s go to the furthest extreme possible—even conjoined twins, if exposed all their lives to the same situations and experiences at the same time in their lives, would still think differently about them and react differently internally to those experiences, and would have as a result different worldviews.

None of us “see” the same picture the same way. None of us experience an event the same way, which means that none of us experience life the same way. We can never truly know how another person feels or thinks. But we can get closer to that knowledge through the two great advantages that we as humans have: the ability for deep communication and the capacity for empathy.

"We build empathy by learning more about other people and their individual feelings and individual experiences and individual goals and desires and fears and beliefs."

Our only hope is to recognize the individual biases that each and every one of us has. And then we need to build empathy for others. And the way we build empathy is by learning more about other people and their individual feelings and individual experiences and individual goals and desires and fears and beliefs. And as we learn about other people, we need to learn from the perspective that even our own individual learning processes are biased by our own individual worldviews that have been constructed by our own individual experiences and our own individual internal reactions to those experiences. 

 So what can we do?

 We can ask questions. We can listen. We can listen with an attempt and an effort to withhold judgment. We can listen with an understanding that we all are biased by our own worldviews. We can listen with an understanding that we’ll never truly know. But we can also listen with an understanding that our human cognitive capabilities allow us to think and feel and empathize. We can use our imagination and creativity to ponder what it might… what it might… MIGHT!… feel like if we had different colored skin, or spoke a different language, or had different beliefs, or we were taller or shorter or more or less attractive or had grown up in a different environment or with different experiences experiences that would have completely shaped our own worldviews and our own biases differently than what we currently have.

And while we listen and imagine and empathize, we will stand a chance of coming to a closer understanding of how someone else feels and why other people—other individuals—believe what they may believe, and say what they may say, and act as they may act. And although we will NOT completely understand—because we can’t—at least we’ll come closer to an understanding. And that is progress.

But we can do more.

We need to use whatever empathetic understanding we’re developing to communicate to others as well, particularly to others who are more like us, who have had similar experiences as us. To share the stories of our fellow humans and to use the persuasive skills we’ve learned from birth. We all know how to persuade. From our very first cries as a baby to be fed, to all the times that we’ve tried to get someone else to listen to and to validate our thoughts and feelings and beliefs, we’ve been using the power of persuasion, the power of communication, the power of influence, the power of marketing.

Each of us can make a difference. You can. I can. WE can. We can recognize that we each are individually different and although marketers of products might categorize us into various “buyer segments” or “target markets,” we—as communicators of caring and love and justice and opportunity and equality and peace—should not be judged based on how someone else categorizes us into a particular group. Because no one group defines us. We’re children. We’re parents. We’re siblings. We’re Black or White or Asian or Hispanic or rich or poor or all sorts of combinations of those experiences. Each of us is unique. And every person should be considered for who they are without blanket statements regarding what group someone belongs to, particularly if someone else determined in their worldview which group each of us is assigned to.

Let’s make something clear. I do NOT completely understand you, whether you’re White or Black or Asian or Hispanic or poor or rich or formally or informally educated or live in the city or the suburbs or the country. And you do not completely understand me. But you and I — WE — can have a closer understanding as we each listen to each other with an open mind and a recognition that we each already have our own worldviews based on our own individual lifetime of experiences—some good experiences, some bad, some beautiful, some horrific. And as we learn about each other and become closer in our understanding, we can better help each other to achieve each other’s goals and overcome each other’s obstacles, and solve each other’s problems—even those problems that we initially didn’t recognize or initially didn’t believe even were problems—because we each thought differently about the circumstances or the situation or the experience.

It's good to care about other people. But remember: you cannot care until you empathize. And you cannot empathize until you have some degree of understanding. And you cannot have understanding until you learn about someone else’s perspectives and hopes and fears and experiences. And you cannot learn about someone else until you have open communication.  And for anyone who says that caring and empathy and understanding are not enough, they’re right. But we need caring and empathy and understanding in order to motivate and encourage and inspire people to act in a way that will overcome biases and prejudices and discrimination. The goal is to reach a true mutual understanding where we can cultivate mutual communication and cultivate a desire to be there for each other and consistently uphold the freedoms that have been promised to us.

"And for anyone who says that caring and empathy and understanding are not enough, they’re right. But we need caring and empathy and understanding in order to motivate and encourage and inspire people to act in a way that will overcome biases and prejudices and discrimination."

Each person—each of us—is at a different location on this path toward the true mutual understanding that allows us to view each other as fellow individual humans rather than as different groups or categories or target segments of people.

Successful marketers hold fast to the concept that you cannot truly serve your audiences unless you understand them and know how to communicate with them. They accomplish this by listening with a true intent on empathetic learning. Their goal should be to understand individuals thoroughly rather than to quickly segment or categorize.

We can use the tools of communication and empathy if not to eliminate, at least to reduce, bias and prejudice and discrimination. 

First, we can recognize that each individual has a different set of biases or a different worldview than the other person in the room, that biases are not broadly distributed to each member of whatever group or category of people someone might feel inclined to construct. This means that each of us learns about others in a different way. This also means that forming an opinion of an individual because that person is a member of one group or another is inaccurate, unfair, and counterproductive.

Second, we can put maximum effort into understanding other individual human beings. We need deep communication, open minds, and a true desire to understand from the other person’s perspective—the other individual person. No group membership or affiliation dictates the personality, feelings, and potential of any of its members, whether that membership is self-selected or imposed upon the individuals within that group. And no individual can be a completely accurate spokesperson for the experiences and feelings and behaviors of other individuals in a group, which means that our understanding has to be on at the individual level.

Third, we can learn to listen compassionately and communicate openly, to tell the world that we are against the biases and prejudices and acts of discrimination that have been so commonplace in our world. But to do this, many people will need help. They may need motivation and encouragement and support. Too often, when someone tries to do or say something positive, the trolls rise up from the depths of social media to silence them and ridicule them and convince them that speaking up and speaking out is a waste of time. 

When you see a positive message that is attempting to bring people together, take the time to communicate your support. Maybe it’s as simple as a push of a Like button, or a supportive comment, or maybe it has to be a private message because you’re concerned that someone else might criticize you for just being supportive. That’s okay. Even with a private comment, you’ve helped by being supportive. You’ve contributed additional positivity. You’ve even strengthened yourself by building up someone else.

So join me. Or better yet, join others, in using our human abilities to deeply communicate and our human capacities for empathy so that we can come together and build a better and more peaceful world. 

Consider that peace comes only with true respect, not fear. And true respect comes only with empathy and understanding.

Peace comes only with true respect, not fear. And true respect comes only with empathy and understanding. 

Thanks for listening. And I’d like to listen to you as well. Please provide in the comments your ideas on what we can do to make the world a better place. What we can do to communicate better. What we can do to understand other individuals better. To reduce and eliminate group-based biases and all forms of prejudice and discrimination. We’re all communicators. We all have the power to influence. Let’s use it for something positive.