The question of personal identity and expression has been growing conspicuously since the pandemic.
After Covid, we noticed a palpable shift in behaviours across society that seemed indicative of a need to have a voice and feel heard. Organisations have since tapped into that collective mood, aligning themselves with causes, values and sociopolitical positions that are important to them and their target customers.
However, there’s a huge gulf between the brands that meaningfully intertwine their values with the identities of their clientele, and those who pay lip service to the latest trending area of discussion. It’s a space we explored in our recent podcast series More Than A Feeling.
In 2026, the concept of identity is predicted to be one of the driving forces in consumer behaviour. This makes it imperative for brands seeking to create greater customer loyalty and engagement to understand and reflect their values in their customer experiences. However, is it as simple as declaring your beliefs? CGA’s Chief Delivery Officer, Carla Hall, looks at how you can turn identity expression and brand values into inclusive customer design.
The rise in value-driven business
It’s no secret that GenZ, and to some extent Millennials, are archetypally value-driven, seeking to engage with brands that reflect the things they believe in, from sustainability to social responsibility. There’s nothing wrong with businesses having values and being held accountable to them – on the contrary, authenticity is a very good thing. However, there’s a precarious edge to proclaiming a stance on sociopolitical issues in an increasingly volatile world of cancel culture and rapidly shifting perspectives.
The Future Five report from The Future Laboratory says: “The end of the sex recession is empowering people to more overtly explore their sexual desires and needs, while religious teachings and celebrations are getting a modern makeover to make them more accessible to spiritually curious younger consumers. Yet anti-modernity movements steeped in misogyny and buoyed by roll-backs in DEI will necessitate forward-thinking brands to find more nuanced and impactful ways to support and inspire progressive change.”
We famously hear about brands who uphold their values with great success. Patagonia, for example, focuses on environmental sustainability and ethical business practices, which is demonstrated across its activities from production to customer service. Key instances include using recycled materials in 99% of their products, operating a repair/reuse program, ensuring Fair Trade labour, and more. TOMS is another business promoting its values exceptionally well and in line with the customer experience, with packaging made from 80% recycled materials and its earthwise™ framework.
Then again, there are also examples of businesses that have come unstuck by pushing out messaging that is perhaps intended to piggyback off trending perspectives. In those instances, it would appear it’s been done without either considering their target market, or ensuring that those values are deeply representative and relevant to who they are. As a case in point Pepsi’s 2017 ‘Live for Now’ TV advert saw Kendall Jenner diffusing a standoff with the police by handing them a Pepsi. The ad received backlash amidst the rising tide of Black Lives Matter. The perception was that it trivialised a complex set of issues.
One might be forgiven for simply avoiding the expression of values altogether, positioning oneself as a benign bystander. The reality is that isn’t really an option because it either renders your brand uncompetitive in a value-driven environment, or you declare a set of values by default, leaving your position open to the interpretation of others.
Aligning your values with your target market
So, what is the role of these heartfelt identities when it comes to the consumer experience? The connection is how you meaningfully present your brand values to engage with your target customer base. In this, there is a challenge as to how brands, and to some extent the representatives of those brands, express their beliefs whilst ensuring that they relate to their target market.
From our perspective at CGA, getting this right is rooted in knowing who you are and what makes your business a success. While that might seem obvious, there are a lot of organisations that are successful at the outset, but don’t really understand why. The result can lead to accidentally cannibalising their own business.
Knowing who you are
Knowing why your customers come to you (or don’t) is essential to connecting with them at each stage of the customer journey. It’s those guiding principles, when they’re truly enshrined in the organisation and the people within it, that allow you to identify whether a trending topic is relevant for you to engage in or not.
For example, President Trump’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) walk back is a testing point for many businesses in the USA and around the world. If you are not obligated to engage in DEI policies in the workplace, now is the time when you can decide whether you continue to do so, or not. Do you really believe in those measures, and the consequences or lack thereof of engaging with them?
Knowing who you are and what you stand for at your core as a business will directly impact how you create customer experiences. We are pleased to have seen many of our clients very deliberately double down on their DEI commitments in direct contrast with Trump’s position.
Knowing who your target market is
Once you know who you are, you also need to know who your target customer is, and this leads to the importance of market segmentation. If you know what you stand for and which customers will align with those values, you will appeal to the right customer base rather than trying to be all things to all people.
Ask yourself – have you segmented your market and overlapped those segments with your values? In doing so, you will find multiple segments whose beliefs intersect with your own in different ways. For example, customers who shop at ethical fashion outlets or designer brands may still have relevance to fast fashion manufacturers, but how businesses engage with them may shift.
Inclusive customer design
Segmentation and identifying your target markets is the groundwork that’s essential to having the ability to design to appeal to the right audience, but to do that you have to know who you are and what you stand for. It’s the other side of the coin.
We have all seen websites, ad campaigns, and been on the receiving end of customer service that is conspicuously designed to tick boxes when it comes to equality, fairness, accessibility, sustainability, or politically correct viewpoints, without really adding any meaningful value to the experience for anyone.
Designing with intention is the thing that sets businesses apart, and crucially, it’s what turns true customer insights into tangible commercial value. For example, research from Kantar shows that advertisements that score well on the Male Gender Unstereotype Metric “generate up to 20% more engagement and improve long-term brand perception by 15%.”
Turning data into design
At CGA, we help brands achieve greater customer loyalty and retention through empathy, engagement, and customer centric transformation. Key to that is not merely having ideas and opinions but looking at business objectives, available data and knowing what your business stands for, with clear values. Commonly, businesses have plenty of operational and financial information but lack the customer insights and a clarity of their own values to understand the full story and connect the dots. That’s the challenge we are here to solve, to deliver meaningful, modern customer experiences by turning data into design you can feel confident in.
Get in touch with CGA to find out more
