EMBiz: Washing Away Rainbow Washing
Washing Away Rainbow Washing
Cody H. Owens
What Is Rainbow Washing?
Hi! Cody here, Content Director Elevate My Brand, and I want to talk to you today about rainbow washing.
What is rainbow washing? Also called rainbow capitalism, it's when companies leverage the language and imagery of LGBTQ+ Pride to encourage queer customers to support their business without doing anything to support their queer customers or employees in return. So it's this imbalanced relationship where companies are very clearly (and oftentimes caught) trying to solicit support from their customers without actually having any sort of reciprocity in that process.
Sometimes, companies actually do make attempts to support their LGBTQ+ community, but then they back down whenever their support negatively impacts their business or the bottom line. So the truth is, at the end of the day, that if you are not going to be in full support of your queer community or your queer customers, even in the face of adversity, then you should probably just not make that support as public as a lot of these brands are doing. You don't want to get yourself into a tricky place.
And if your support of your customers is contingent upon something else, then that means you're not really 100% in their court.
How to Avoid Rainbow Washing
Here are some things that you can do to show that you really do support your customers so that whenever you slap a rainbow on your product during June for Pride Month, it doesn't just seem like a temporary pandering to those customers.
The first thing you can do is to demonstrate your support all year 'round. One of the easiest ways to do that is to include queer people in your content, right? So make sure that you're speaking to their needs and sharing their safety all year, put visibly queer people* in positions of power and in your content, just to say that this is something we're doing all year round. It's not just a one-month thing. (*By "visibly queer," I mean two femmes pushing the family stroller and not two white bears kissing in front of a rainbow window display. Please avoid stereotypes. Queer people do the dishes way more than they go to Pride Month events, so show be realistic and respectful in your imagery.)
The second thing you can do is to uplift your LGBTQ+ employees. Make sure that you have queer people in positions of power at your company and that those are people who are making decisions about how to move forward with the business and about how to reach out to your queer community. Because if it's a bunch of internal people who are not within that community trying to relate to that community, you're bound to make missteps.
The third thing you can do is to include this in your mission statement or your value sets. Make it public and make it clear that these are your values, because if you're only talking about it during the 30 days of Pride Month, then clearly, it's not something that you support all year long and it's not a priority for you. It needs to look like it's a priority.
The next thing you can do is to address community issues. Take feedback; do a survey or a poll, whether it's during Pride Month or outside of that, to ask people what their issues are, what their concerns are, and how you can better serve them. Ask them for their feedback. Don't make it just, say, "here's something we are doing for you based on what we would like from you," which is your dollars or your support—make it, "what can we do for you as well?"
Another thing you can do is speak up to impact LGBTQ+ policy and legislation. Whenever there's something major happening out in society or in the zeitgeist, make your voice heard. If you really do support the community, and you really do want their support in return, then make sure that you're doing things to support them in all facets of their life.
And then the last thing you can do very clearly is to make donations to LGBTQ+ foundations to support queer people in those communities. Los Angeles LGBT Center, Sage The Dru Project and ACLU Drag Defense Fund are just some of the ones that we have supported at EMB. But there are so many out there and so many wonderful organizations that you can literally have the receipts to say that you support LGBTQ+ people all year long because you've made those donations and you've made that mindful decision to support the community.
Final Thoughts
If you are going to try to market to the queer population during Pride Month by putting a rainbow on something or making a couple of social posts and then forget about them later, that is Rainbow washing. Because you're just leveraging the imagery and language of Pride for your own benefit without putting forth any sort of tangible outcome for the community.