Converting inclusive practice into competitive advantage: the £50 billion disabled market is there to be won!

The UK Disability Discrimination Act was introduced ten years ago and communications professionals can no longer ignore how their brand addresses this issue. It’s no longer simply about ‘ramps and rails’; businesses are adopting far more sophisticated approaches to disability.

There are 9.8 million disabled people in the United Kingdom according to the Department of Work and Pensions. Current estimates by the Disability Rights Commission have them spending in excess of £50 billion pounds per annum.

Disabled people are out there, making brand choices every day. The charity Leonard Cheshire, in conjunction with market research agency TNS, found that disabled people are often the primary decision makers and purchasers for their households, most notably in food and groceries, but also across a range of household products and services.

For communications professionals, the question is whether you are facilitating all of your customer’s abilities to fulfil their ultimate potential: the purchase of your product or service.

Factors driving inclusivity

But there are two significant forces at work driving communications professionals to adopt an attitude that’s inclusive and considers the rights of disabled people.

Firstly, the legislative environment places a key demand on all people within business, including communications and marketing, to act as promoters and guardians of the rights of disabled people to be able to fulfil their full potential. Failure to do so is backed up with the threat of legal sanction, and more insidiously, brand damage resulting from negative coverage in the media.

Secondly, clear commercial benefits of an inclusive approach to marketing products and services are beginning to emerge. The Leonard Cheshire/TNS study showed that 60% of the population say that they would have a more positive impression of a company that includes disabled people in their advertising and communications.

One-in-three people affected by disability say that they feel companies do not take impairments into account when developing and marketing products and services. The opportunities for brands to take leadership in this area are clear.

So what are the keys to successfully implementing an inclusive approach?

Learn the language: Brand custodians over the last 20 years have made great strides in tackling issues of race and gender. Although there’s still a long way to go, a level of understanding and an ability to discuss these two subjects now exists for everyone at the planning table. Communications professionals now need the same skills with regard to disability. They need to develop a ‘mental toolkit’ that allows them to discuss the inclusion of disabled people freely when it comes to the development and implementation of strategy.

Tokenism isn’t the biggest danger: Many people within marketing and comms teams fear being tokenistic; the ‘token wheelchair user’ in an advertisement for example. The reality is that people do not usually see even incidental inclusion of disabled people in creative executions as tokenistic. Creativity, intelligence and a willingness to consult with disabled customers and disability organisations will give the best chance of success.

Make it real: Backlash against apparently worthy disability initiatives can occur when it is perceived that the company has not undertaken the initiative to improve business, but rather to ‘tick the disability box’.

Talk to customers and disability organisations: Finding out how customer impairments affect brand choices in any product or service category is key to developing an appropriate approach to inclusivity. By talking to their customers and disability organisations like Leonard Cheshire, B&Q has not only widened its appeal to its market, but has also uncovered opportunities for new products that appeal across the board.

And B&Q isn’t alone. BT is winning awards for incorporating disability into its creative approach to marketing products and services, and in a similar sector Virgin Mobile has actively challenged stereotypes of disability with their use of disabled actors and real-life narratives. Freeserve stunned cinemagoers with an inspiring treatment featuring a double leg amputee and Sony Playstation shows its customers the danger of assuming that disability equals limitation. And all approaches have successfully served the same hard-nosed business aims at their core: build the brand; sell the product.

For B&Q, BT, Freeserve and Playstation among others, thinking inclusively has energised the brand in ways that have significantly contributed to its success. As the population ages, and as consumers demand that disability is treated on the same level as race and gender, companies who intelligently adopt principles of social inclusion will consistently find themselves ahead of the pack.

Leonard Cheshire (www.leonard-cheshire.org) exists to change attitudes to disability and to serve disabled people around the world. It has been supporting disabled people for almost 60 years and is active in 55 countries. The charity supports over 21,000 disabled people in the UK.

Leonard Cheshire runs tailored seminars for companies and marketing communications agencies. The sessions use empirical research and real world practice to inspire creative thought and an inclusive approach with regard to disability.

If you would like further information on these sessions, please email Peter Dickens at peter.dickens@lc-uk.org, or call on 020 7802 8290.