Episode #194: How to Really Celebrate Pride Month, with Katie Martell

It’s June, which means it’s pride month, which means we’re all being bombarded by rainbow-festooned corporate logos. But does that really help? Or is it just another example of “woke washing,” the brand pandering that occurs when marketing and social movements collide.

The amazing Katie Martell is back with some brilliant insights as we look at alternatives to rainbow logos — alternatives that could make a much bigger impact on individuals, corporations, and communities.

RESOURCES

More about Katie Martell
Woke Washing
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Grad 
So we’re here, this is new. This is kind of a whole new, a whole new sort of start to the Copernican shift podcast. And I think it’s the Katie and grad show, I guess now, right?

Katie Martell 
The Katie and grad experience. I mean, really? Buckle up my friend.

Grad 
That’s a bit bold. Maybe we’ll start with show and then experience is something someone suggest to us. Hey, it’s an experience watching the two of you.

Katie Martell 
Oh, let me say, well, it’s gonna be fun because I have a blast anytime we have a chance to chat. So thank you in advance for doing this with me and hello to everyone who’s stumbled accidentally upon us.

Grad 
We’re not going to drive any demand agenda to this? It’s all just gonna be stumbled upon?

Katie Martell 
Purely coincidence. Purely serendipity.

Grad 
All right, cool. All right.

Katie Martell 
The universe will dictate. But it’s exciting Grad. I’m always jazzed to sit down and talk to you. But the fact that we get to talk about things that I think the world needs to hear, it’s just it’s great. And oh,

Grad 
Yes, go ahead. Sorry. I jumped on top of you already. See, I’m already interrupting.

Katie Martell 
That’s what we do. You know. And that’s what this is. I just want to say Happy Pride Month. I mean, it is the happiest time of year as were recording this.

Grad 
You doing anything special this month?

Katie Martell 
This month is the gayest month of my life. My softball season has started. Which means we are in lesbian heaven. But no, we spent a week in Provincetown, my wife and I. Right at the tip of the cape here in Mass, and it’s a little gay heaven, which I think is the best way to celebrate Pride.

Grad 
Is that the town slogan?

Katie Martell 
It should be, they can hire me.

Grad 
That would be awesome. Like, what’s wrong with people? Let’s have some fun with it, man, just like go for it. Anyway, well, I actually I want to talk to you about pride month. As you may know, I’m just starting a new job. I’ve started winding down at Sprinklr. Still, obviously, associated with the company. I’m on the customer advisory board, working with a bunch of things, still connecting and talking to different customers. But I’ve started a new role as CMO at PROS. And PROS is a Houston-based company, and they invented price optimization software. So if you’ve ever bought a seat on a plane, and curse the fact that you didn’t buy it the day before when it was cheaper. That’s PROS.

Grad 
Damn you. Damn you. That’s cool stuff. That’s meaningful and very cool stuff. So you must touch a ton of industries must work with… yeah, that’s cool.

Grad 
Well, what’s interesting is PROS started there. And today, they’re processing about 1.2 trillion transactions a year. And so they’re moving into kind of a database travel experience management market on the travel side. And on the B2B side, they’ve got a CPQ product that because it uses their price optimization software is probably the most advanced CPQ product on the market, and the best way to get really significant value out of Dynamics. So it’s a very exciting company, all sorts of really… it’s a public company. It’s been around a long time, but it’s got all the aspects of a startup. Feels very young and fresh and new, very engineering lead. So all the stuff I love, so it’s been great.

Katie Martell 
It’s so you. It sounds scrappy, which is right up your alley, and a big, hairy problem to go solve. Good for you.

Grad 
I introduced myself in the first week, we had an all hands, and I mentioned that I might like LEGOs. And I might like Star Wars. Well, boy. Oh, boy, that’s been awesome. I have had more Star Wars collections shared with me. LEGO collections shared with me. And most importantly, Star Wars LEGO collections.

Grad 
The ultimate Venn diagram. People at PROS are super geeky, in a way I absolutely, I just love it. What I said to them a few times, and every time I say this people look at me a bit sideways, but it’s a very similar culture to the Satya-led Microsoft culture. Yeah, almost eerily so. Like, to the point where I’m just super comfortable. And it feels like I’ve just gone back to Microsoft four years later. It’s actually fascinating. So I’m great.

Katie Martell 
There we go.

Katie Martell 
I’m excited for you. Good luck, and don’t F it up. All right, we have a lot riding on this.

Grad 
Oh I will. I will F it up on a daily basis. The question’s not don’t F up too much things. I’m already making tons of mistakes. Fail, fail fail all the time. Until someone picks up on it. So speaking of failing, the reason I wanted to see you today, so I’m on the road. This is not a usual podcast. But I’m on the road. And I really wanted to talk to you because an issue came up at PROS, which was, Hey, we should change our logo to a rainbow this month. And, I was just about to say okie dokie. And I remembered your article on woke washing, which was, I think the way I first either met you or heard about you. Or was one of the very first things I read about you. And I just loved it so much. It is a wonderful blend of contrarian newness and social awareness. With a very credible spokesperson for it, that I thought, I really want to read that article again. So I did. And I ended up in a spot where I felt it was the wrong thing to do, to just randomly change the logo to a rainbow, because we’ve not done it for other things that I’ve heard recently and in the near past. But I wasn’t sure what to do. So guide me, Ms. Martell.

Katie Martell 
I have all the answers in the next 20 minutes. No, I think pausing to ask whether we should or shouldn’t do this already is a fantastic start. And on behalf of the entire LGBTQ+ community, thank you, thank you Grad for, for feeling a little bit like icky about it, you know. Thinking like, is this, is this good? Is this that? Are we doing anything if our graphic designers are having a rainbow treatment? Although I think to your point, every logo does look better with a rainbow. It’s just sexy. It’s just bright and colored….

Grad 
But I was wondering, are we just changing it because we like rainbows? Like, how far separated from reality is this becoming, right? And it feels like the struggle is still very real. And I just felt uncomfortable in a thousand different ways about what we’re really doing. The thing that I took away from your woke washing is paying lip service creates a very dangerous conversational matrix in a company, where what you do, and what you say, are separated and not consistent.

Katie Martell 
Right.

Grad 
And that creates hypocrisy. And nothing drives people away from a personality or a brand or another person or whatever, than hypocrisy. It’s like, almost everyone just can’t stand it. It’s very dangerous. And so the thing about the PROS culture that I love, is it’s not like that at all. It’s a very open, transparent, very non-hypocritical culture. Very non-political… very non-political culture. Just very focused on doing the right thing and getting the right thing done. And so I felt like this could be an area where marketing might accidentally be against the culture, right? Although it may seem like the right thing to do. So, educate… let’s educate everyone first on woke washing, I think that’s a really good thing to do. And then help me figure this out.

Katie Martell 
It’s a trend. Woke washing is a term, I did not create it. Although I do have a documentary and a book project right now where I’m trying to make sense of it. I’ve been working on it the past six or seven years. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a long time, because we’re kind of living through a moment in marketing history, but also corporations history, where companies are being asked to comment on things, stand for things, be part of the fabric of society in ways that they historically weren’t. And so this is part of a much broader trend, where it’s essentially… if you’re not familiar with the word “woke,” it’s kind of used as a pejorative term. But it means “awoke, awakened.” Kind of aware of the real plight of marginalized communities. So not just LGBTQ+ populations, but people of color, those who are disabled, right? Folks who navigate the world with a set of challenges that the majority does not. And so what’s happened is you start to see over the past, again, six or seven years, companies do a variety of things. Not just logo flipping, but Superbowl ads, and what looks like corporate social responsibility campaigns, or all kinds of marketing-driven, communications-driven efforts to signal their support for social issues. It’s come to a head here in June. It’s Pride Month across the country. And so for the past few years, we’ve had rainbow washing, where every logo you see is a rainbow. You see campaigns trying to hook into the zeitgeist of Pride Month.

Katie Martell 
Now, gay marriage here in the US was legalized federally in 2015. I got married in 2016, because we could. But it is a recent gain. And public support for it is at an all time high. So, you’ve got the zeitgeist, you’ve got a public, a general public, who wants businesses to take a stand, and you’ve got a very skeptical buying audience. It creates this condition for woke washing, where marketers look at this and go; We have an opportunity — and to your point Grad — we have a chance to earn trust, we have a chance to be part of the conversation. And we have a chance to signal that we are a supportive pro-[insert marginalized community  brand here]. It’s on the surface a very positive thing. But as you read my article, and as I think… I’ve talked to a lot of marketers. I have the opportunity to speak to teams, speak to conferences, and they all tell me the same thing. Everyone has the same reaction you do. Is this the right thing to be doing? Is our logo flipping, public-facing, superficial campaigns, is it helping? And I think as somebody in this community in particular… I’m also a woman, so I can talk about things during International Women’s Day, which is a fun time in March. You see a lot of pink. I can speak to it to say “no.” As somebody who lives the experience of being in a marginalized community, there’s so much more companies can do. And where I focus on my work is to help marketers understand there’s actually a really negative impact. If all we do as companies is flip logos, send out blog posts about how great of allies we are, maybe we highlight the gay executives in our company, it’s actually creating an illusion of progress. Where right now, in 2022, the actual experience of being part of this rainbow coalition, whatever alphabet soup you identify with, we’re facing a lot more challenges. Legally, rhetoric wise. We’re facing a lot of misinformation about what it means to be part of the community. So it’s taking a very serious matter and really trivializing it for marketing. And I think we just…

Grad 
Well, there’s talk even about the Supreme Court, maybe ending gay marriage.

Katie Martell 
There is talk. I mean, that is a real, real possibility. Can you believe that? It’s a recent win, right? Not that ancient history. But it’s one that is fragile and can be overturned. So you can see, now is not the time to be a performative ally. In other words, you’re putting on a show, right? Virtue signaling, instead of a real ally. It’s a beautiful opportunity for every organization to step up and say, what have we done to contribute to the problems facing this marginalized community? And therefore, how can we be part of the solution? Rather than asking should we flip the logo? It’s a different question. I think CMOs should ask, how can we be true allies by first looking internally to how our organization might have been perpetuating the current conditions. There’s a stat that if you’re LGBTQ, right? That means if you’re lesbian, bisexual, or gay, if you don’t know what the letters mean, each one represents a different kind of subset. And each one brings a new set of challenges. A lot of people in this community aren’t out at work. That means they can’t talk about what they did during the weekend without wondering if they’re going to out themselves and therefore be seen as different from their colleagues. If you’re trans at work, often misgendered. And colleagues will ask the most obnoxious questions. But really, more broadly, oftentimes, this community is more discriminated against in the hiring process. Like there’s actual companies that have no protection in place. Until June of 2020, did you know, you could legally be fired in many states simply because you were gay? Or because you were trans? Until June of 2020 that was not a federally protected status. These are workplace issues, that the employee experience, and therefore your colleagues in HR, really are looking at to say, how do we treat these employees better? Marketers are typically off in their own little world saying, how do we get part of the conversation? How do we make sure that people think that we’re allies. The work starts by looking within and I think every marketing leader, which is why I’m so grateful for you Grad, every marketing leader has to have that moment to go, Wait a minute, what are we actually doing by flipping this logo? Are we making the matter worse?

Grad 
Yeah, well, this performative idea is a really interesting one too. One thing I’ll note about PROS, and I’m not trying to make this a PROS ad, but we are in a brand new office building, in Houston’s. It’s headquartered in Houston, Texas. And there are three washrooms on every floor. The non-gendered washroom, and two gendered washers. And I saw that’s interesting. I recently saw a post about Microsoft. And Microsoft has just put in foot washing stations into their washrooms. Because if you need to pray and wash your feet, it’s very difficult to do in a typical North American washroom. And so they put those into many of the new office buildings. So, companies are starting to get it. And I think that’s to your point of actually try to do something that’s real, not try to do something that’s just fake. The thing that bothers me, I think, on the marketing front, is it it’s got the second sort of cut to it, which is it’s just lip service. And with the purpose of trying to sell stuff on the back of it.

Katie Martell 
Right, right.

Grad 
It’s almost like two insults. I don’t if you said this to me or  if I read it somewhere, but someone was talking about the fact there was like some kind of Pride Month special at a store. And the comment was, I’m gay all year. I don’t get why just this one month. And there is, I think, and this is where this is always a very challenging and controversial point. I used to argue about this a lot. But at a certain point, what we want is we don’t want to have to say it’s the month for that thing.

Katie Martell 
Wouldn’t it be lovely?

Grad 
It’s just, I’m a human being month all year round, right? And human beings, gosh, we’re all different in lots of different ways. But the argument against that is, we’re still very far away from that. And we have to over rotate to protect that. Here we go. Five years later, six years later, now people are talking about getting rid of the right to marry the person you love.

Katie Martell 
Right, right. I mean, I always think of MLK who I’m just going to casually quote like we’re buddies. But he says, “a riot is the language of the unheard,” right? And so if you look at a riot, if you look at a social movement, it’s calling for voices who are historically marginalized and unheard to be heard. That is literally what I think when I think of Pride Month, Black History Month, when I think of Women’s History Month, whatever minority of the month you want, right? That’s what I believe they’re for. They’re calling for a national conversation about the real issues that this community is facing. Simply asking folks that don’t live in these communities, to pay attention, maybe listen to the actual lived experiences. This is why I think rainbow capitalism and rainbow washing, especially marketers, right, we have had such a drowning out impact. And the question I always ask is whose voices are being centered in this? Taco Bell with their rainbow logo and their millions of dollars that they can spend on an ad, great. But whose voices are not being heard in this right? It’s really about the organizations that I think are just too willing to eager to say, look how great we are, look how allied we are. And they haven’t taken a moment to listen to what it’s like to be black, trans and disabled at that organization. Is that culture a place that’s actually affirming? Do the employees at that company respect this individual? Are they positioned to respond in a case of discrimination? Oftentimes, the answer is no.

Katie Martell 
You know, we think about simple basic stuff that people take for granted, who aren’t, you know, LGBTQ. For example, parental leave, right? Is that same parental leave extended to same-sex families, right, or families that have a different makeup than the traditional kind of 1950s? You know, man and woman and two and a half kids and, what is it, a white dog? And it’s, to me, this hilariously outdated model that we’ve built workplace structures around, coming to a head with the changing times. Communities want to be heard. And instead of listening to them, companies are splashing rainbows on stuff saying “Yas, Queen” for $19.99 at Target, and calling it a day.

Katie Martell 
By the way, there’s a fantastic newsletter that does a lot of investigative journalism. And what they do is they look at companies political donations through a variety of PACs. And it found, I’m gonna actually pull up the stat, they found that this year alone, 25 different rainbow flag-festooned companies donated over $13 million to politicians — since last year, recent times — that are pushing promoting and passing anti LGBTQ issues. I mean, it is not even covered in the HRC Corporate Equality Index, you know, which is meant to rank companies on their policies, it doesn’t look at political donations. So you start to wonder, What can a company do? And this is the question, I think, for you, Grad, as you engage with this topic. What is it that PROS can do for its internal employees, for the communities in which it does business and in which in which its communities live, to actually advance the kinds of values, the kind of of world that your customers and your employees want? And I’m sure it’s based on very non-political values, like equality and fairness and protection. And right now, we need that. We as member of this minority, we need the support of allies and people with leverage, because we are just marching down the street trying to be seen as humans who deserve basic respect at a time when we’re being villainized, scapegoated. Right? It’s more serious than I think a lot of marketers want to admit.

Grad 
Pretty crazy. Okay, so I think what I’m gonna do… this discussion is excellent. I still don’t know exactly what to do. But what I want to do right now is I want to stop this. Pause this conversation. I want to end with an interesting example that may seem a bit odd, but I’m gonna throw it in, it goes to the point of why marketers need to be very thoughtful. But I want to bring Nikki Brewer into this conversation. She’s the Chief People Officer at PROS. She’s amazing. Amazing. I mean, I’ve been very fortunate to work with two now incredible chief people officers in a row, Diane Adams at Sprinklr. Like, world class, and I never thought I’d meet anyone as good as Diane. Nikki is as good as Diane. Different in different ways. But she’s amazing. I think the three of us could have a really interesting conversation, because I’d like to be able to engage on what do we do. And I want to keep this going. And sounds like we’re gonna be doing a lot of work together in the future. So I’m looking forward to the next little bit.

Grad 
Let me end with a story that’s not LGBTQ+, but it’s more about thinking about people in non aggregate terms. Because we have this tendency to always think about people… you use the word majority. I don’t know if there is a majority. And by the way, white dog I don’t think it’s part of that. I think it’s a white picket fence. Yeah. And I think it’s a dog named spot. I think that’s the… but I’m not sure there’s a majority. Everyone’s got things, right? And I’ll use this very interesting example I’m experiencing right now, which is, my father died recently, five weeks ago, six weeks ago, now, five weeks ago, April 28.

Katie Martell 
Your tribute to him was incredible. And I encourage everyone to go read it. It was wonderful.

Grad 
Thank you. But Father’s Day is around the corner. It’s like, the end of this week, right? And, man, it’s hard. I am being, it feels almost like I’m being assaulted by all these marketers, with all these Father’s Day messages, send your dad a mug, and send your dad this… and I’m not sending my dad shit. There’s nothing for me to send my dad because he can’t get it. He’s in a box. And he’s a pile of ashes. I can’t send him anything. Okay. And it’s actually amazingly irritating, and incredibly frustrating. I’ve had this very interesting reaction to it. And I find myself being angry that these marketers aren’t smart enough to know that about me. I published it. And this is what we always used to say, at Sprinklr, you can know everything about a person, because people publish a lot about themselves. And there is no reason why with very little technology application, everybody who’s sending me messages could send me a different kind of message for Father’s Day this year, which would be like, remember your father, celebrate your father, it’s a tribute to your father. Very different tonality, and would have a very different reaction from me. Versus give your father, and I can’t give him anything. So that, to me is just another example of where people are different. I can fine slice any human being on the planet, they’re all different. They’re all different. So this idea, this majority, I don’t, I don’t think there’s a majority. Now, why we have these prejudices about who sleeps with who, I don’t know where that comes from, who cares? But people seem to really care a lot. And so we got to work through that. But there’s a lot of other things too. And so thinking about that, as marketers, and being sensitive to it, I think is really important. So let’s wrap this today, you did a wonderful job, by the way of introducing the topic of woke washing. I’m gonna grab Nikki when I’m in Houston, and we’ll kick this thing off and go from there.

Katie Martell 
I’d love to hear what she says about how they look at the employee experience. Again, I’m very sorry about your dad. And I think he would be extremely proud to know how pioneering you continue to be both in the industry, but also…

Grad 
I don’t think he would, actually. If you actually read that carefully, you would know, this would not be something he would be really excited about. But that’s okay. He’s still my dad.

Katie Martell 
And the legacy that you described about him is so well articulated. Again, if you haven’t read it on Grad’s page, please go read it. It’s just not only an amazing guy, but and amazing ad man, you know, it’s somebody we should all know. And thank you very much for sharing his story. But continuing your legacy as well. I mean, you picked up where he left off, and it’s wonderful. But I’m excited to do this with you. And thank you for touching on these hairy topics. We’ll do it with honesty. We’ll do it with some grace, probably not much. But we do hope it becomes a platform to talk about things that we need to talk about. There’s no easy black or white answer to what to do next about the rainbow logo. But I think together if we just are willing to talk about it we can move forward together.

Grad 
I’ve got some ideas already just having this conversation has helped me a lot so thank you. All right thank you Katie. See you next time.

Katie Martell 
Thank you, Grad.