What can marketers learn from the Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese basketball rivalry? Focus on intersectionality

FZJ" data-src="2aq" data-sub-html="Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain">

HEc" alt="women's basketball" title="Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain" width="800" height="530"/>

Researchers from University of Washington, Loyola Marymount University, and University of Texas-Austin have published a new study that provides a framework for how marketing research can better incorporate intersectional marketing practices.

The study, appearing in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers” and is authored by Esther Uduehi, Julian Saint Clair, and Rowena Crabbe.

The central narrative in the latest season of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) was the rivalry between the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark and the Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese. Many have debated how young, talented women like Clark and Reese will help grow the WNBA, but it is still unknown how race and gender can impact the marketing around their teams and the league. In other words, few scholars have explored intersectionality as a perspective to understand the dynamics of female sports.

This new study offers a framework for how marketing research can better incorporate intersectional marketing practices. The researchers provide a paradigm and step-by-step guidance for marketing to engage with intersectionality. By following their roadmap, the field of marketing will not only better understand situations like racial differences in the WNBA, and contrast it with the NBA, but also predict and thoughtfully navigate these occurrences.

Intersectionality highlights systems of privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, classism) and turns theoretical social categories into interconnected consumer lived experiences.

“As marketing tackles challenges such as emerging technology, political divergence, and data replicability, we argue that intersectionality offers a critical perspective and can shift how we view marketing and consumption,” says Uduehi.

Engaging with Intersectionality

The paper identifies three key components to engage with intersectionality: a definition, a framework, and a roadmap.

• Defining intersectionality includes considering overlapping identities simultaneously (e.g., race and gender) and examining how consumers living at these intersections uniquely experience advantage and disadvantage in the marketplace. Reese’s rise to fame as a Black woman is not the same as the experience of a white woman like Clark, for example. Their experiences as women are tied to their race and vice versa.

• Adopting an intersectional framework requires centering consumer experience of (dis)advantage as a critical factor in any situation. Marketplace interactions, shopping trips, or consumption situations are all informed by the societal context, both past and present. The conversation about Reese and Clark is deeply embedded in the history of gender disparity in sports. It is impossible to fully understand and navigate such situations without that context.

• The roadmap for engaging with intersectionality requires critical reflection at every stage of the process, whether it is marketing research, brand strategy, or policy making. What identities are focused on and whose experiences are being excluded? What role does power and advantage/disadvantage play for different groups of consumers in this context? How can marketers avoid over-generalizing across consumer groups?

Working through the prism of intersectionality has transformative implications for how managers operate and how consumers live. Saint Clair explains that “any brand involved in sports needs to be intentionally conscious of the history of gender and race in sports. Fashion and beauty brands need to be conscious of beauty standards and cultural appropriation. Food brands need to be conscious of food justice. Technology brands need to be conscious of the digital divide.”

Lessons for chief marketing officers

Consider the following questions when crafting marketing strategies and tactics:

• How might similarities and differences across intersections in norms and access to resources/power influence stakeholders’ lived experiences (and their behavior)?

• How might stakeholders with different overlapping identities (e.g., race, gender, class) be (dis)advantaged by specific policies and practices?

• Consider whether the strategic or tactical thesis behind a particular policy is based on data that is not representative of the affected stakeholders. Whose data is absent? Who is missing from the decision-making table?

The experience of advantage and disadvantage at different intersections of identity impacts the daily decisions of consumers. Denying this reality only alienates the very people who managers and policy makers are trying to serve. And given that the experience of disadvantage can come from so many different intersections of identities—age, gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and so on—it is actually the vast majority of people in the marketplace whose intersectional experiences go unseen. By engaging with intersectionality, marketing can better understand and serve understudied consumers.

As Crabbe says, “embracing intersectionality exposes the power structures within the marketplace and increases marketing’s benefit to society and its ability to reflect and address the complexities of real-world behavior.”

Currently, measures are often developed and validated from a dominant perspective to explain broad contexts, ignoring the possibility that people at various identity intersections may experience the world differently.

This intersectional marketing paradigm and intersectional marketing research design roadmap offer directions and recommendations for all researchers as a path toward new questions that can be applied across research domains. For marketing to be at the forefront of inclusive and useful solutions, it must truly embrace the intersectional world the marketplace occupies.