How Brands Can Show Culture More Honestly

There is a familiar kind of advertisement that appears around the world.

A diverse group gathers around a table. The clothes signal different cultures. The food is carefully selected. Everyone is smiling. The message celebrates unity, belonging or togetherness.

Nothing about the image is necessarily offensive.

It may even be beautiful.

The problem is that the people often feel less like characters and more like evidence. Their purpose is to prove that the brand has included different communities.

Remove the clothing, food and decorations, and very little remains.

This is where representation starts to feel like costume.

Culture is not simply what people wear during important occasions. It also lives in how they speak, disagree, joke, work, care for one another and move between different parts of their identity.

Brands that want to represent people honestly need to look beyond the most obvious symbols.

They need to notice how people actually live.

Diversity Can Be Visible and Still Feel Empty

A campaign can feature people from different backgrounds and still say very little about them.

Everyone may look different, but the characters speak in the same polished advertising voice. They hold similar expressions. They behave politely. They occupy a setting that could exist anywhere.

Their diversity is visible, but their individuality is missing.

This is generic diversity.

It gives a campaign a broad, inclusive appearance without making any of the characters specific enough to feel real.

Tokenism creates a related problem. One person is chosen to represent an entire community, usually through a limited collection of recognisable traits.

They may be dressed differently, speak with a particular accent or perform a familiar cultural role. Yet they are rarely given enough depth to exist beyond that identity.

They are not allowed to be unusual, difficult, funny, ambitious or contradictory.

They are present to represent something.

They are not present to be someone.

A major academic review examined 337 studies across areas including race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, body size and sexual identity. It found that audience responses to diverse representation are influenced by factors such as authenticity, accuracy, identification and credibility. Simply placing a diverse person in an advertisement does not guarantee a positive response.

Audiences are not only asking whether they can see themselves.

They are asking whether they recognise anything truthful.

Culture Is Bigger Than Its Most Recognisable Symbols

Advertising often relies on cultural shorthand because it works quickly.

A piece of clothing establishes identity.

A particular meal establishes tradition.

A landmark establishes location.

A celebration establishes occasion.

These details can be meaningful. They can carry history, pride and emotional weight.

The problem appears when they carry the entire character.

A person should still feel culturally grounded after the obvious symbols are removed.

Their identity might emerge through the way they address a parent, challenge a colleague or respond to an uncomfortable question.

It might appear in the language they use at work compared with the language they use among friends.

It might appear in expectations around family, status, hospitality, ambition, independence or respect.

These details require more observation than selecting the correct wardrobe.

They are also more likely to create a believable world.

The strongest cultural details rarely announce themselves. They simply make the audience feel that the people behind the campaign understood the life being portrayed.

Representation Should Not Disappear After the Festival

Festivals and cultural celebrations give advertisers rich visual material.

They contain colour, ritual, food, family relationships and emotional tension. They offer natural opportunities to tell stories about memory, generosity, conflict and reunion.

There is no reason for brands to stop making these campaigns.

The problem is what happens during the rest of the year.

Some communities are highly visible during major celebrations and almost absent from mainstream advertising afterwards.

When they do appear, they may repeatedly occupy the same kinds of stories. They gather around tables, preserve traditions, explain their heritage or teach a lesson about harmony.

But people do not spend their entire lives demonstrating their culture to an audience.

They build businesses. Leave jobs. Miss flights. Raise difficult children. Make questionable purchases. Lead teams. Fall in love. Change their minds. Develop strange hobbies. Tell terrible jokes.

Those stories contain culture too.

A brand does not need to make every campaign explicitly about identity. Sometimes the more meaningful choice is allowing different people to exist naturally inside stories about work, money, relationships, ambition, health or ordinary life.

Five Questions That Expose Shallow Representation

Brands do not need a complicated cultural scoring system.

They need to ask sharper questions before the campaign becomes expensive to change.

1. Would the Character Survive Without the Costume?

Remove the traditional clothing, recognisable food, music, festival decorations and famous locations.

What remains?

Does the character still have a clear personality?

Do they want something?

Do they make decisions?

Do their relationships feel specific?

Could the audience understand something about their world from how they speak and behave?

This does not mean cultural symbols should be removed.

It means they should support the character rather than replace one.

A person wearing traditional clothing should still be allowed to have a sense of humour, an unusual opinion, a personal frustration and a reason for being in the story.

2. Does the Character Have Any Power?

Representation is not only about visibility.

It is also about agency.

Who identifies the problem?

Who provides the knowledge?

Who makes the important decision?

Who changes the direction of the story?

Who leads, creates, approves or challenges?

Who stands in the background and reacts?

A campaign can appear diverse while giving every meaningful action to the same familiar type of character.

International advertising standards increasingly recognise the risks created by stereotyping and objectification. The International Chamber of Commerce’s global advertising code calls on marketers to respect human dignity, remain mindful of diversity and avoid communications that encourage discrimination. The code serves as a foundation for self-regulatory systems in many markets.

The issue is not that every character must hold equal authority in every scene.

The issue is whether a brand repeatedly associates authority, intelligence, care, humour or dependence with the same kinds of people.

One campaign may look harmless.

A pattern can say much more.

3. Is the Character Specific or Merely Recognisable?

Stereotypes are efficient because they require little explanation.

The strict parent.

The confused older person.

The naturally gifted Asian student.

The loud friend.

The helpless husband.

The endlessly patient mother.

The inspirational person with a disability.

The audience understands the role immediately because they have seen it many times before.

That speed is exactly what makes stereotypes creatively tempting.

Specific characters require more work. They need motivations, contradictions and details that belong to them rather than to an entire group.

A strict parent might also be secretly helping their child pursue a career the wider family disapproves of.

An older person may struggle with one piece of technology while running a successful business that depends on another.

A confident leader may be excellent at making decisions and terrible at expressing affection.

Specificity gives the audience something new to notice.

Stereotypes give them something they already expect.

4. Would Someone From This Community Recognise the Behaviour?

A campaign may contain the correct clothing, setting and objects while getting the behaviour completely wrong.

This often happens when culture is researched visually but not socially.

The room looks convincing, but the relationships do not.

The words are translated correctly, but nobody would naturally speak that way.

The humour is technically understandable, but it feels imported.

The family structure is plausible, but the emotional dynamics feel staged.

Cultural credibility often depends on small choices:

• who speaks openly and who speaks indirectly;

• how disagreement is expressed;

• when humour is appropriate;

• how affection is shown;

• which language appears in which relationship;

• what people avoid saying;

• who is expected to take responsibility;

• how status changes behaviour.

  
  

These decisions are difficult to invent from a mood board.

When a team lacks direct knowledge of the life being portrayed, relevant perspectives should be involved while the concept, script and casting can still change.

A cultural review conducted after production is not thoughtful inclusion.

It is a very expensive spellcheck.

5. What Pattern Is the Brand Building Over Time?

One advertisement cannot represent every kind of person.

Trying to do so usually creates a crowded cast with very little depth.

The more useful question is what the brand communicates across many campaigns.

Are older people always shown as dependent or resistant to change?

Are women regularly responsible for domestic care while men handle money?

Are certain ethnic groups repeatedly associated with the same occupations?

Do people with disabilities appear only in stories about determination?

Are darker-skinned people present but rarely positioned as desirable, affluent or authoritative?

Are queer characters included only when identity is the subject of the campaign?

A single portrayal may have a reasonable explanation.

A repeated pattern becomes part of the brand’s worldview.

This is why representation should be reviewed across a campaign history, not only one asset at a time.

Put a year of work next to each other.

The patterns may become obvious very quickly.

A Scenario Worth Considering

Imagine a global brand developing one campaign for several countries.

The central story remains unchanged in every market.

The same person leads the meeting.

The same person provides care.

The same person creates the problem.

The same person approves the solution.

To localise the campaign, the brand changes the cast, clothing, food and background.

Every market now looks different.

But the roles, power and assumptions remain exactly the same.

Has the campaign truly been adapted?

Or has the brand simply changed the costume?

This is the question many international campaigns avoid.

Visual localisation can make a campaign look culturally relevant without changing the worldview beneath it.

Real adaptation may require the relationships, humour, conflict and distribution of authority to change too.

Global consistency should protect the central brand idea.

It should not force every culture to perform the same story in different clothes.

Allow People to Be Complicated

Brands often become cautious when portraying communities that have historically been underrepresented or misrepresented.

That caution is understandable.

It can also produce characters who are painfully perfect.

They are kind, respectable, competent and emotionally controlled. They have no unusual habits, difficult opinions or personal flaws.

The brand is trying so hard to avoid a negative portrayal that it removes everything human.

A flawed character is not automatically a harmful character.

The context matters.

The wider pattern matters.

The way the story treats them matters.

People can be ambitious and insecure. Traditional and rebellious. Generous and impatient. Highly capable in one part of life and completely lost in another.

Contradiction creates character.

The solution is not to make every person an ideal representative of their community.

It is to create enough variety that no single character has to carry the reputation of millions of people.

Inclusion Should Strengthen the Idea

Representation should not be added to a campaign because the brand feels that an inclusive cast is expected.

When people are inserted without a clear role, their presence feels decorative.

The stronger question is how the character’s perspective, experience or relationship improves the story.

Do they create a more interesting tension?

Do they make the product’s relevance clearer?

Do they bring credibility to the situation?

Do they challenge an assumption?

Do they help the audience see the problem differently?

Inclusive advertising does not need to turn identity into the main subject every time.

It does need to give people a meaningful reason to be present.

A 2024 study from the Unstereotype Alliance, developed with researchers from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, examined data involving 392 brands across 58 countries. It reported positive relationships between inclusive advertising and measures including sales, preference, loyalty and brand value.

That does not mean diverse casting automatically produces better commercial results.

It suggests that positive, authentic and non-stereotypical representation can contribute to stronger brand outcomes when it is part of effective advertising.

Authenticity still has to be earned.

The Better Creative Review

Before approving a culturally sensitive campaign, ask:

Would the characters still feel real without the most obvious cultural symbols?

Do they have motivations, opinions and influence?

Are they helping shape the story, or merely completing the frame?

Does the behaviour feel as credible as the setting?

Has the campaign confused recognition with truth?

Does the portrayal repeat a pattern found elsewhere in the brand’s work?

Were relevant perspectives involved early enough to improve the idea?

These questions are more useful than asking whether the campaign is diverse enough.

“Enough” usually produces a headcount.

Honest representation requires curiosity, observation and creative discipline.

Representation Is Built One Story at a Time

No single advertisement can represent an entire country, culture or community.

It should not try.

Brands build a more honest picture through range.

Some stories can be celebratory. Others can be funny, romantic, ambitious, uncomfortable or completely ordinary.

Some can examine cultural identity directly.

Others can let identity exist naturally while the characters get on with the rest of their lives.

That is how representation becomes richer.

Not by removing culture, but by allowing people to be more than its most recognisable symbols.

Culture does not need to be turned into costume before audiences can understand it.

The people, relationships and choices already carry the story.

Brands simply need to look more closely.

For more practical thinking on representation, creative strategy and culturally credible campaigns, follow Ara Iruda’s blog and social channels.