Last week we introduced you to the young minds behind Europe’s first student-led ethical STEM movement, BEAST to highlight the importance of taking business ethics into account when it comes to developing technologically advanced products. In this week’s #ResponsibleTechInsights we’re focusing on the second pillar of our Responsible Technology Assessment: socio-cultural understanding.
We’ll take a look at what benefits being aware of stakeholders’ demographics and culture brings and touch upon the slippery slope of social washing with a public relations professional from the tech industry before introducing you to three companies who are doing a lot of things right when it comes to socio-cultural understanding and representation. Let’s get started with the basics first though.
What is socio-cultural understanding?
Ever received a targeted ad that wasn’t relevant or didn’t feel authentic? Did you listen to somebody’s sales pitch and think that it seemingly had nothing to do with your business’ needs? In both cases, it’s most likely because of a lack of socio-cultural understanding.
Socio-cultural understanding refers to a business’ thorough knowledge of its stakeholders’ social factors and cultural contexts. Most startups define their target audience at a very early stage, but understanding customers doesn’t just refer to coming up with specific traits for personas. It’s about truly grasping and representing the individuals you’re creating your product or service for. Asking yourself what the life experiences of your customers are instead of only considering where they live would go a long way in this case.
Why is it important for tech startups?
In the first step, you can’t design technology if you don’t have a clear idea of whose problem you’re solving. Your product might seem like the perfect fit at first glance, but if your understanding doesn’t go beyond demographic cohorts, the chances of missing crucial details that could profoundly influence your end result are high.
In the second step, it influences all aspects of your communication, from your initial positioning to your marketing strategy and continuous dialogue with existing users, prospective employees and potential investors alike.
Insights about demographics such as age, gender or location are just as important as understanding customers’ language (which includes tone of voice and regional dialects) and making sure your startup actually effectively speaks to its entire target audience. Really knocking the socio-cultural background of your stakeholders leads to more effective customer retention and acquisition and helps you build your winning team!
What role does representation have to play?
A lot of times it can be hard to see things from your stakeholders’ perspective without first-hand knowledge. For tech2impact, representation has two dimensions: customers and employees.
On one hand, creating a product or service that adds value to your customer’s life is incredibly difficult if you don’t know what their jobs-to-be-done are. Often startups emerge from a lack of representation of a specific customer segment and it’s difficult to come up with an effective solution for, let’s say sexual harassment prevention if the founding team doesn’t have in-depth knowledge or personal experiences with it.
If you want to attract diverse talent, on the other hand, you need to make sure employees can see themselves as part of your team. If the job description for the software developer position that is being advertised is full of gendered language and stereotypes it will probably discourage a considerable number of very capable candidates from applying.
Startups have an advantage compared to more established companies in this regard, as company structure is still very agile and unconscious biases haven’t been reinforced for decades. Representation is also directly linked with your startup’s authenticity and reputation, which leads us to a very important topic in this context: social washing.
You can only rally for a cause authentically if it’s actually something your business stands for.
Nanna-Josephine Roloff
What is social washing?
In essence, social washing means that a company is purposefully trying to appear more socially responsible than they actually are. We spoke with Nanna-Josephine Roloff, activist and Campaign Executive at Oseon, a public relations agency for purpose-driven tech companies about where to draw the line:
“The point is that it depends on your business’ context. You can only rally for a cause authentically if it’s actually something your business stands for. If you look at the history of a startup like Pink Tampon for example, it becomes pretty clear that their main purpose probably isn’t #FemaleEmpowerment but making a quit exit”, says Roloff, referring to a tampon start-up that launched its company on a feminist platform but recently gained backlash for reinforcing harmful stereotypes about periods in its online advertisements.
“They have three male founders and it’s obvious that this is how they believe women, their target audience, feels about their periods and that’s the angle they decided to use for marketing. At this point even if there are women on their team to give them input, their whole concept just isn’t right from the start and it shows. I suppose they didn’t think twice before publishing it, because they genuinely didn’t think anyone would notice or care. But in 2020, marketing like this is simply not ok anymore.”
How does it look like when socio-cultural understanding and representation are done right?
There are a lot of startups that are already doing things right, which is why we want to introduce you to three startups from our ecosystem to give you an idea of three different areas of socio-cultural understanding:
- Demographics
SheKab is Pakistan’s first ever subscription based monthly carpool service for working women, girls and children. They provide women with a transportation solution which is safe, affordable and reliable and adapts to their customers’ specific needs by ensuring all drivers are thoroughly vetted and verified to ensure a safer and seamless experience.
SheKab’s founder, Hira Batool Rizvi who is originally from Islamabad, created a solution that addresses a specific problem for its customers. While private vehicle ownership in Pakistan has experienced rapid growth in the last decade, commuting by car still constitutes an entry barrier to the job market for many women, as. wanted to create a solution that addressed women’s needs by providing an affordable carpool service.
- Language
Develop Diverse is the world’s first software tool that automatically analyses stereotypic content for gender, age and ethnicity in texts and proposes non-stereotypic alternatives. Thus, allowing HR and communication managers making their recruitment and communication content inclusive and thus helping them reach a wider and more diverse talent pool that also shares their company’s vision and values.
The startup’s CEO and Founder, Jenifer Clausell-Tormos holds a PhD in Chemistry and Technology Development and has over 8 years of experience as project leader in industry. And after 10 years of working on developing tech platforms for high-throughput of biomedical applications her drive for gender balance and diversity expanded her interest to cognitive gender and stylistics and thus Develop Diverse was born.
- Inclusivity
a thousand colibris is an early stage start-up in digital health and wellbeing, launched in Barcelona and open to the world. They are focused on providing holistic AI-based solutions to maximise the health and wellbeing of parents and children during their parenthood journey.
They are currently in the process of launching a product for women transitioning into motherhood. Veronica Montesinos, the co-founder and CEO, regognised that COVID-19 was enhancing the challenges pregnang women and mothers face, which led them to pivot their business idea accordingly. Their diverse and multicultural team bring unique personal and professional perspectives to the table, which means they’re well prepared for all types of challenges the startups journey will throw their way.
If you want to find out more about your startup’ status quo when it comes to social-cultural understanding and other topics such as business ethics or health risks, take the Responsible Technology Assessment here – it only takes 15 minutes!