How to Really Celebrate Pride Month, with Katie Martell

Speaker A: So we're.

Speaker B: We're here. This is new. This is kind of a whole new. A whole new sort of start to the Copernican Schiff podcast. And, uh, I think it's the Katie and Grad Show, I guess, now, Right?

Speaker A: The Katie and Grad experience. I mean, really Buckle up, my friend. Buckle up.

Speaker B: Uh, a bit bold, maybe. Maybe we'll start with show and then experience through something someone suggests to us. Hey, it's an experience watching the two of you.

Speaker A: Oh, amazing. Uh, well, it's going to be fun because I have a. I have a blast anytime we have a chance to chat. So, uh, thank you in advance for doing this with me and hello to everyone who's stumbled, uh, accidentally upon us.

Speaker B: We're not going to drive like any demand gen to this. It's just going to be all stumbled.

Speaker A: Coincidence. Purely serendipity.

Speaker B: All right, cool. All right.

Speaker A: The universe will dictate. No, but it's exciting. Grad. I really. 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, well. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes, go ahead. Sorry I jumped on top of you there already. See, I'm already interrupting. Oh, my God.

Speaker A: 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 we're recording this.

Speaker B: You doing anything special this month?

Speaker A: This month is the gayest month of my life. My softball season has started, which means we are in lesbian heaven. But, um, 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, um, which I think is the best way to celebrate Pride.

Speaker B: Is that the town slogan?

Speaker A: It should be. They can hire me.

Speaker B: That'd be awesome. What's wrong with people? Have some fun with it, man. Just like, go for it. Anyway, um, well, I actually, I want to talk to you about Pride Month. And so as you may know, I'm just starting a new job and, uh, sort of. Sort of winding down at sprinklr. Still obviously associated with the company. I'm, um, on the customer advisory board, sort of working with a bunch of things, still connecting and talking to different customers. But I've started a new role as CMO at Prosecutor and Pros is a Houston based company and invented price optimization software. Hey, 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.

Speaker A: Damn you. Damn you. That's cool stuff. That's meaningful and very cool stuff. So you must, you must touch a ton of industries. It must work with the uh, cool.

Speaker B: Well, what's interesting is pros started there and, and today they actually they're uh, processing about 1.2 trillion transactions a year. And so they're, they're moving into kind of a database travel experience management market on the travel side and on the, on the sort of B2B side they've got a CPQ product that because it uses their price optimization software is by the most advanced CPQ product on the market and by the best way to get really um, significant value out of Dynamics. So it's a very exciting company also all sorts of really like it's a public company, it's been around a long time but it's got all the aspects of a startup. Uh, feels very young and fresh and new, very engineering led. So all the stuff I love. So it's been great.

Speaker A: It's so you. It's so you. It sounds scrappy which is right up your alley and a big hairy problem to go solve. Good for you.

Speaker B: Well, it was. 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, oh boy, oh boy, that's been awesome. I've had more Star wars collections shared with me, LEGO collections shared with me and most importantly Star Wars LEGO collection.

Speaker A: There we go.

Speaker B: Shared with the ultimate Venn diagram. Um, well, yeah, people, um, people at Pros are super geeky in a way. I absolutely, I just love it and it's what I said to them a few times and they every time I say this people look at me a bit sideways. But it's very similar culture to the Satya led Microsoft culture.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah, almost eerily so. Like to the point where I'm like just super comfortable. Uh, and it just feels like I've just gone back to Microsoft four years later. It's actually fascinating. So it's been m. Great.

Speaker A: I'm excited for you. Good luck and uh, don't f it up. All right. We are a lot riding on this.

Speaker B: Oh, I will eff it up on a daily basis. Uh, the questions, it's not don't f up too much. I think it's the only. But yeah, I'm already making tons of mistakes.

Speaker A: Good.

Speaker B: Uh, forward, blah, blah, blah Fail, fail, fail all the time until someone picks up on it. So, uh, speaking of failing, um, so the reason I wanted to see you today. So I'm on the road. This is kind of a little bit of a not usual, uh, podcast, but I'm on the road and I really wanted to talk to you because an issue came up at Prose, which was, hey, we should change our logo to a rainbow this month. And I was just about to, like, just 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. It was one of the very first things I read about you. And I was just. I just loved it so much. It is a wonderful blend of contrariness and social awareness with, uh, a very credible sort of spokesperson for it that I just 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'd not done it for other things that have occurred recently and in the near past. Um, but I wasn't sure what to do. So guide me.

Speaker A: Pausing. I have all the answers in the next 20 minutes. 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 feeling a little, bit, like, icky about it, you know, thinking like, is this good? Is this bad? Are we doing anything if we're just, you know, uh, our graphic designers are having a rainbow treatment. Although I think to your point, every logo does look better with the rainbow. It's just sexy. It's just bright and color. It pops.

Speaker B: But I was wondering, like, are we just changing it because we like rainbows? How far separated from reality is this becoming? Right? And it just feels like the struggle is still very real. And, um, I don't know, I just felt uncomfortable in a thousand different ways about what we're really doing. And so that's. I want to. So the thing that I took away from your woke washing is, um, paying lip service. Mhm. Creates a very dangerous, um, conversational matrix in a company where what you do and what you say are separated and not consistent. Right? And that creates a 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, um, the Thing about the prose culture that I love is it's not like that at all. It's a very open, transparent, um, very non hypocritical culture. Very non political, Very, very non political culture. Uh, 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.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: 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, like, help me figure this out.

Speaker A: 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, but working on it the past six or seven years. I'm not going to 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, um, 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. Um, folks who just navigate the world with a set of challenges, um, that the majority does not. And so what's happened is you start to see over the past, again, six or seven years, um, companies do a variety of things, not just logo flipping, but super bowl ads. Right. 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 right across the country. Um, and so for the past few years, we've had rainbow washing, where every logo you see is a rainbow you see, uh, campaigns trying to kind of hook into the zeitgeist of Pride Month. Now, gay marriage here in the US was legalized federally in 2015. I got married in 2016 because we could. Hey. Um, but it is a kind of a recent gain, um, and public support for it, right. Is at an all time high. So you've got a 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, Gret, 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, you know, brand here, it's on the surface a very positive thing. But as you read in my article and as I think I've, I've talked to a lot of marketers, I get, 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 kind of 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. You know, I can speak to it to say no. You know, 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, uh, out blog posts about how great of allies we are, maybe we highlight the gate 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, right, whatever Alphabet and the 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, it's taking a very serious matter and really trivializing it for marketing.

Speaker B: And I think there's talk even about the Supreme Court maybe ending gay marriage.

Speaker A: I mean it is talk. I mean that is a real, real possibility. Can you believe that too? 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, virtue signaling instead of a real ally. It's a beautiful opportunity for every organization to step up and say, um, 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 CMO should ask, how can we be true allies by first, looking internally to how our organization might have been perpetuating the conditions. You know, there's a stat that, you know, if you're lgbtq, right? That means if you're lesbian, bisexual, gay, if you don't know what the letters mean, each one represents a different kind of subset. And, um, 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, you know, know, different from their colleagues. Um, 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, you know, companies that do 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 till June of 2020, that was not a federally protected, um, status. And so these are like workplace issues, um, that the employee experience, and therefore your colleagues in hr, you know, 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, uh, 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 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?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, uh, this performative idea is a really interesting one too. One thing I'll note about pros, I'm not trying to make this a prose ad, but I did. They're in a brand new office building, uh, in Houston. It's headquartered in Houston, Texas. And, uh, there are three washrooms on every floor. The non gendered washroom and two gendered washrooms. Uh, and I thought that's interesting. I recently saw a post, um, about Microsoft, and Microsoft has just put in, uh, foot washing stations into their washrooms.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: 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. And so companies are starting to get it. Um, and I think that's to your point of like, actually try to 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. Mhm. And with the purpose of trying to sell stuff on the back of it.

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker B: Which is almost like two insults. Like, I don't know, I don't know 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.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Right. And, and the comment was, I'm gay all year. Why? I don't get like, why is it just this one month? You know, and, and it's, 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. Um, but the. At a certain point what we want is, we don't want to have to say it's the month for that thing.

Speaker A: Wouldn't that be lovely? You know?

Speaker B: Totally. It's just, it's just I'm a human being month all year round. Right. Um, and human beings like, gosh, like we're all different in lots of different ways. And so, you know, that, that, but we're, but the argument against that is we're still very far away from that.

Speaker A: And that's.

Speaker B: We have to over rotate to protect because, you know, 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.

Speaker A: Right, right. I mean, I always think of MLK M 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, uh, 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, the actual lived experiences. This is why I think rainbow capitalism and rainbow washing, especially marketers, 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? It's really about the organizations, um, that I think are just too willing, too 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. You know, we think about, um, simple, basic stuff that people take for granted who aren't, you know, lgbtq. For example, uh, parental leave. Right. Is that same parental leave extended to same sex families? Right. Or families, uh, that have a different makeup than the traditional kind of 1950s, you know, man and woman and two and a half kids at a, what is it, a white dog and a picket fence? It's, to me, this hilariously outdated model that we've built workplace structures around. Right. 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, uh, at target and calling it a day. 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 packs and. Right. You, uh, know where I'm going with

Speaker B: I love that kind of stuff.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. And it found. I'm gonna actually pull up the stat. They found that this year alone, uh, 25 different rainbow flag bastooned companies donated over $13 million to politicians since last year. Recent times that are pushing, promoting and passing anti, um, 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, uh, engage this topic. What is it that pros can do for its internal employees, for the communities in which it does business and in which its communities live to actually advance the kind of values, the kind of world. Right. That your customers and your employees, um, want. And I'm sure it's based on very non political values like equality and fairness and protection. Um, 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, it's more serious than, uh, I think a lot of marketers want to admit, pretty crazy.

Speaker B: Okay. So I think what I'm going to do. This discussion's 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 m. Bit odd, but I'm going to throw it in. Just goes to the point of why marketers need to be very thoughtful. Um, but I want to bring Nikki Brewer into this conversation. She's a chief people officer at prose. She's amazing. Amazing. I mean, I've been very fortunate to work with people 2 now incredible chief people officers in a row. Diane, uh, Adams at Sprinkler. Like world class. And I never thought I'd have met 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 sort of engage on what do we do? Uh, and I want to like, let's just keep this going. It sounds like we're going to be doing a lot of work together in the future, so I'm looking forward to the next little bit. Uh, let me end with a story that's like, not lgbtq, but it's more, um, just about thinking about people in non aggregate terms because we have this tendency to always think about people. You use the word majority.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: I don't know if there's a majority. And by the way, white dog I don't think is part of that. I think it's a white picket fence. Yeah. And I think it's a dog named Spot.

Speaker A: Oh, there it is.

Speaker B: I think that's the. But. But it's. I'm not sure there is a majority. Everyone's got sort of things. Right. And I'll use this very interesting example I'm experiencing right now, which is, uh, my father died recently. Uh, five weeks ago. And uh, six weeks ago. No, five weeks ago, April 28th.

Speaker A: So yeah, to him was incredible. And I encourage everyone to go read it. It was wonderful.

Speaker B: Thank you. But the. So Father's Day is around the corner. It's like the end of this week. Right. And uh, man, it's hard. Like I am being like. It feels almost like I'm being assaulted.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: By all these marketers with all these father's day messages and send your dad a mug and send your dad this. And like, I'm not sending my dad shit. Like, 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. Like I can't send him anything. Okay. And it's actually amazingly irritating and incredibly frustrating. And uh, it was very. 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. You would think 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. Mhm. And there is no reason why with very little technology application, everybody sending me messages could send me a different kind of message for Father's Day this year, which would be like, remember your father.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Celebrate your father.

Speaker A: Hm.

Speaker B: Like, you know, it's tribute to your father. Like, like very different tonality and would have a very different reaction from me. And boys all give your father and I can't give him anything. So. So that to me is just another example of where people are different and I can find slice any human being on the planet. They're all different. They're all different.

Speaker A: We're all.

Speaker B: So this idea there's majority. 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.

Speaker A: I'd love to hear what she says about, uh, how they look at the employee experience. Um, 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,

Speaker B: but also I don't think he would actually. If you actually read that carefully, you would know this would not be something you would be really excited about. But that's okay.

Speaker A: And the legacy that you described about him is so well articulated. Again, if you haven't read it on Grad's, uh, page, please go read it. It's just that it's not only an amazing guy, but amazing ad man. It's somebody we should all know. And thank you very much for sharing his story. Um, but continuing your legacy as well. I mean, you've 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. Uh, we'll do it with honesty. We'll do it with some grace. Probably not much, but, um, we do hope it becomes a platform just 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. Um, but I think together, if we just are willing to talk about it, we can move forward together.

Speaker B: 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.

Speaker A: Thank you, graduate.