MRS EDI Council: Is it uncomfortable? Then it could be allyship!
03 April 2025

I listened to a great podcast the other day called The Persuasion Game which is produced by the Forge (thanks Danielle Todd for the recommendation) where the hosts interviewed Julian Gomez about his time as CMO for Unilever's beauty and personal care brands. Two phrases stayed with me.

• Make time for EDI
• Un-stereotype your customer in order to grow

These two phrases came back to me when thinking about the Ally Workshop at the MRS Annual Conference. 

So often people worry about doing the wrong thing when it comes to EDI that they feel unable to take action. The pressure to avoid the wrong thing and do the right thing leads to inaction. This doesn't move things forward and by default, can lead to things going backwards if unchallenged.

Making time for EDI felt like a breath of fresh air. Not a pressure cooker, just space. 

In this article you will hear that Hakeen S. Allen and Tom Holliss said the unsayable - that EDI is challenging and it's hard.

You will also read how market research must keep EDI on top of the agenda - and that is definitely the work of the MRS EDI Council which I chair. Our work is to make our industry as welcoming as possible and to make our work represent the world we seek to understand. Just as Unilever saw growth when they stopped focusing on their one target consumer and welcomed everyone to be a customer of their brands, we need to recognise the growth EDI can deliver to our clients by better understanding their current and potential customers.

Josephine Hansom, Chair of MRS EDI Council

From Understanding to Advocacy: The truth behind allyship

By Judith Staig

It might feel like we’re in a difficult time for EDI and allyship. But events in the US and the subsequent rolling back of EDI commitments by big corporates just make it even more important to increase our efforts and our focus. The workshop on allyship at the recent MRS conference, Shaping Our Future, showed us how to do just that. It was joyful, inspiring and not always comfortable. But, as workshop presenter Hakeem S. Allen says, “If allyship doesn’t feel uncomfortable, it’s not allyship. It’s just performative.”

Top takeouts

• Be uncomfortable. Take yourself out of your echo chamber, stretch your experience and challenge your biases.
• EDI is more than just a moral imperative – it keeps your business relevant and future-proofed.
• Think about who is being represented in your research, what the barriers might be and what you can do to break them down.
• View everything through the lens of allyship. If people in your organisation push back on words like ‘diversity’, create psychological safety by reframing the conversation around understanding people and doing better business.

The workshop

The session, facilitated by Hakeem who is Founder of The Anti-Racist Social Club, and Tom Holliss, Chief People Officer at Zappi, explored what we can learn from anti-racism that can help us make better organisations. We looked at this question from the perspective of the brands that employ or commission us; from the perspective of researchers seeking to better represent consumers in our work; and from each of our own personal perspectives as a human.

Hakeem and Tom handed out worksheets and asked us to write down a business challenge we are working on, together with some reflections about the audiences and stakeholders impacted and the barriers we might be facing.  Then they had us cross our arms in the opposite way from usual. The discomfort we felt was a metaphor for the necessary discomfort of unlearning biases and adopting new approaches. If our research practices feel too comfortable, we may not be challenging ourselves enough.

What was most useful about the session was that it offered some practical tools to help think about what it means to be an ally and how we can bring change to our organisations. And, as Tom told us, change is more than just a moral imperative; it keeps brands relevant and future proofed - and he had the stats to prove it:

• The Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 found that 71% of consumers want brands to take a stand on social issues.
• Research by Deloitte has shown that companies with strong EDI engagement have 2.3x higher cashflow.
• Data from the UK government estimates that the spending power of the disabled community is worth£ 274 billion to the UK economy.

From understanding to allyship

Hakeem presented a proprietary framework developed by The Club which showed allyship resting on the pillars of understanding that come from awareness and authentic connection:

• Awareness: this starts with the self - understanding our own biases and the structures that shape them and actively working to unlearn these biases is the foundation of effective allyship.
• Authentic connection: using that awareness to build authentic relationships with communities that we seek to learn more about, appreciating the beauty of intersectionality and recognising that the people we engage with in research are complex.

He gave us some practical suggestions for how we might go about stepping outside of our cultural comfort zone, such as engaging with a topic that you typically dismiss, trying food from a different culture or going to see art or exhibitions that challenge your norms. Our goal should be empathy through compassion, not comprehension as it is not possible to fully understand everybody’s lived experience.

Tom referenced a model from The International Association of Public Participation which outlines different levels of community involvement, from informing people through bringing them into the process to fully empowering them to lead research decision making. He gave the example of a research project conducted by charity Camden Giving, of which he is a trustee, that got funding to examine systemic racism. They trained local people to be community researchers and conduct walking ethnographies with people in their networks; the community researchers then made recommendations which were explored further at a citizens’ assembly together with politicians and local businesspeople. Tom said, “professional researchers wouldn’t have got close to the level of insight that this surfaced… and we’re now driving those recommendations forward in Camden.”

From ally to action

The pair defined allyship as the process in which people with privilege and/or power work to develop empathy toward and advance the interests of an oppressed, underrepresented, or marginalised group. They stressed how it requires both learning – and more importantly unlearning – and reevaluating the institutions and power structures that have become the status quo. Put another way: if Structural Inequality =  (Power + Privilege) + Prejudice, then Allyship = (Power + Privilege) + Commitment to Change

Ultimately, both Tom and Hakeem stressed that allyship must lead to action. Hakeem said, “If you’re not reanalysing, redoing, rethinking how you work or how you operate in the world, it’s not allyship. In your research, if your understanding isn’t paired with action then you are perpetuating the systems that need to be changed.”

With this in mind, we went back to our worksheets and got into groups. Tom and Hakeem asked us to think about our business challenge in a way that brought in diversity. The twist was that we had to pass our own challenge around the group and have everybody offer an idea that put an allyship lens on the issue. And we only had one minute for each challenge. The creativity in the room was palpable and we all got some new perspectives to take back into our working lives.

They left us with this call to action. “Challenge bias. Amplify marginalised voices. Shift power dynamics. Commit to systemic change.” 

Our industry has a unique role to play. As researchers, we seek to represent all people so we must take on the challenge of keeping EDI at the top of the agenda and of ensuring that marginalised voices are heard. It’s time to get uncomfortable. 

Thank you to The Anti-Racist Social Club and Zappi for their expertise and collaboration and to Judith Staig for her write up of the session.

Allyship is about action with the right intention. Look out for more allyship content from the EDI Council and join us at the MRS Equality Summit on 15 May 2025 where we will show why every EDI action that organisations take must be 100% authentic and demonstrate more impact than ever.