Questions of Pride: 3 Assumptions Holding Brands Back and 3 Questions that Can Drive Greater Impact
This year, a lot of brands went quiet on Pride in a continuation of the Pride hushing trend we’ve been watching build for a year or so. We wanted to understand it, so we explored it in our Ideas Lab, Atomic Soup.
Atomic Soup is grounded in a simple discipline: questioning the assumptions others may take for granted. That spirit of inquiry is also what helps break through the silence. Hushing happens when brands stop asking meaningful questions and default to the safest or most familiar response. When public conversations about a community become increasingly polarized, the answer is not to respond with greater polarization. It is to create space for greater nuance, understanding and complexity.
Three assumptions stood out, each worth pulling apart. What we actually mean by “family”. Whether LGBTQ+ is one audience or many. And whether allyship is a moment, or a habit you keep all year.
Three truths. Here’s each one.
1. Most families don’t have kids
Start small, with the straightforward word we all assume everyone gets. Family. Used in a brief or on a poster, it nearly always arrives with children attached: the family ticket, the family room, the family film, and most households simply don’t fit that picture. As one Souper pointed out, that isn’t a fringe complaint but a statistical one: 76.6% of EU households have no children at all.
As one participant put it, “A heterosexual couple without kids are still a family”. “Family is whatever you define it to be,” went another. “Kids, no kids, fur babies, hetero, LGBTQ+ - it all counts.” A couple on their own, a chosen family of grown adults, someone rebuilding a life far from the one they were born into. All families. All quietly told they don’t qualify.
And the fix the room landed on cost nothing. “Next time you’re in a briefing, building an audience, just ask: what do we actually mean by family?” Specificity is useful, but relying too quickly on familiar definitions may limit both relevance and reach, particularly when households without children represent such a significant share of the market.
2. We are not one acronym
Ask the same question of the community itself, and the easy answers come apart just as fast. From the outside, commercially, the whole of LGBTQ+ tends to get treated as a single audience: one acronym, one identity, one month, one message. From the inside, it is far messier, and far more interesting.
“Specificity is not exclusion. It’s the beginning of relevance.”
Flatten everyone into one message and you reach almost no one. As one Souper put it, “using LGBTQ+ in itself erases the other identities and marketing reflects that, because those identities aren’t ‘visual’.” Bisexual, asexual and intersex people described disappearing from the picture altogether; the one hard number that surfaced was that 48% of bisexual young people have seriously considered suicide, the weight of belonging nowhere.
But being specific isn’t a niche tax. It’s how you make work that travels. The example the room kept returning to was Gillette’s First Shave, a father teaching his son to shave for the first time after the son had transitioned. “By being specific, they told a universal story,” as one Souper said, “way stronger than ‘the best a man can get’ ever was.” Go narrow, and you reach further, which is really only accuracy by another name. Representation treated, as someone in the chat had it, “as accuracy, not activism.”
3. If you show up, stay
The last assumption is the one hiding in the calendar: that Pride is a moment you show up for, rather than a commitment you keep. Which takes us back to where we began, to silence and the flinch. But silence itself is not necessarily the problem. As one participant put it, “I’d rather a company stay silent than flinch.”
A brand does not need to launch a Pride campaign to demonstrate meaningful support. If it is doing the work behind the scenes: supporting its people, maintaining inclusive policies and investing in the community throughout the year. That commitment can speak for itself. But when a brand chooses to show up publicly, people reasonably expect it to remain present when that support is challenged.
One contributor described the test plainly: “Would you lift me up if I fell, or are you only an ally when we’re marching side by side waving flags?”
The real question is what happens when the pressure arrives. Do you remain grounded in the commitments you have made, or step back from them? The brands that retreated, discovered that, in responding to the loudest criticism, they risked losing sight of the employees, customers and communities they had originally intended to support. As one Souper observed, “All that fear, and they forgot about their actual audience.”
What if your Pride budget had to be spent in any month except June?
None of this asks brands to be braver. It is a call for them to be more thoughtful, more accurate and more consistent.
So when you’re considering allyship, consider the questions you might ask. Consider the prompts you might interject. Consider the quiet questions that are deeply provocative. Be the Socratic voice that questions, what do you mean by family? Which audience with the LGBTQI+ community do we want to stand with in particular? Dare to ask the questions that make work better and drive impact.
Atomic Soup is McCann London’s weekly Ideas Lab, powered by 100s of brains from across the network. Out of respect for a frank, safe conversation, we’ve kept everyone unnamed.
