This article was first published by the International Parking & Mobility Institute in the March 2025 edition of Parking & Mobility magazine. To read the original article, click here.
The Power of Equitable Storytelling
As a marketer, one thing that I love to tell people about my discipline is that marketing is fundamentally about connection.
Good storytelling engages, inspires, and humanizes companies, which transforms faceless, unrelatable entities into values-driven communities of human beings.
This applies, of course, to the promotion of products and services.
But looking at this through the lens of allyship and equity, we can say that marketers in the parking industry – by the interconnected, cross-functional, collaborative nature of what we do – have the power to better our workplaces through narrative.
We can foster equity by showcasing the people behind the products, especially those in non-executive roles who work behind the scenes.
The result of surfacing these stories is two-fold: we drive business value and also help build a more inclusive, equitable, supportive culture and industry overall.
Examples of Equity in Marketing
The “Employee Spotlight” campaign is a popular example of equitable storytelling.
This is a simple campaign built around a blog post, video, or interview of an employee discussing their experiences and contributions as related to their employer.
If you want to get something like this off the ground, how do you start?
First off, marketers should conduct an internal content audit to review the types of individuals being represented in campaigns today.
It’s not uncommon to find a heavy focus on high-level leadership or on specific “front of the house” departments, like Sales or Client Success, because executive visibility is a powerful lever for marketers to pull and founder stories are compelling.
The goal is this audit is not to replace executive thought leadership marketing but rather to supplement the overarching marketing strategy with more people-first tactics that focus on historically underrepresented cohorts.
Next up, it’s time to build the actual campaign.
This means making decisions about how often you’re publishing, what platforms you’re using, and what results and feedback to gather.
It’s key to create a mechanism through which employees can volunteer themselves or nominate teammates to be featured in the campaign.
Don’t make it overly complicated to do so, but do recognize that instilling some rigor around submissions will make it easier for marketing to fill and manage the content pipeline.
In good human-centric corporate content, the individual’s contributions are supported and endorsed by the company’s broader objectives.
For example, I once wrote an “origin story” piece about my colleague, Leo Connelly, who has worn many hats (all of which have Boston sports logos on them) since his days as a founding member of Ocra.
He originally came to one of our co-founders wanting to be a UX Designer.
Our co-founder said, well, we don’t have a need for that at the moment, but we do need parking attendants – to which Leo replied, “Absolutely. Count me in.”
Today, he’s a key member of our engineering team who has shaped the product immensely over its multiple iterations.
Leo’s “find out what needs to get done and do it” spirit exemplifies one of our company’s core values: sacrifice is an investment.
Spotlighting this one extraordinary person in a marketing campaign afforded me the opportunity to tell the bigger story of how our people go above and beyond for our partners and each other.
Challenges In Equitable Storytelling
Let’s take a moment to talk about a few challenges associated with equitable storytelling.
“Marketing tokenism” is the superficial inclusion of underrepresented groups to give the appearance of allyship and equity without actually integrating diverse perspectives and experiences into the marketing campaign.
Equitable storytelling empowers; it doesn’t exploit.
Marketers conducting employee interviews for the purpose of spotlighting them in campaigns need to make sure that their guiding questions focus on the individual’s experiences, contributions, and aspirations, rather than solely their identity.
Here are some recommendations for questions that clear the bar:
- Can you share a bit about your journey at [company]?
- What motivates you to excel at [company]?
- What accomplishments or projects are you especially proud of at [company]?
- How does your background shape your approach to work at [company]?
- What skills or experiences have been most valuable in your role at [company], and how have you developed them?
- Are there ways in which [company] has supported your growth?
Another challenge to flag: it can be difficult for marketers to convince leadership that investing in equity-based brand and content marketing makes good business sense.
To secure stakeholder buy-in, marketers will have to identify ways they can track and measure the impact of narrative campaigns and tie them to company goals.
They can root their pitch in three “W”s: web traffic, word of mouth, and workforce.
Here’s an informal way that I’d tee up the conversation:
“Our company wants to be known for creating good, useful content, because creating good, useful content reinforces that we’re a credible, trustworthy partner.”
Following up with some points along the lines of:
- By the numbers, our human-centric storytelling content performs better than other types of content in social media and email campaigns. It drives more web traffic and increases metrics like pages-per-visit, time-on-site, content downloads, email sign-ups, and meetings booked with our salespeople.
- Pages and sites that are frequently updated are more likely to rank well, so we should post fresh blog content 2-4x/month. “Employee Spotlight” blog posts that focus on an individual’s experience with our company and industry are, by nature, dense with parking-specific keywords that will give us a leg up on the search engine results page.
- Our goal is to continue to grow our business through word of mouth and social proof rather than razzle-dazzle marketing campaigns that our potential partners aren’t interested in. What our partners are interested in is the actual value that we deliver. Our company is able to deliver unique value because of the people who work here.
Equitable storytelling helps enrich our workforce by attracting talent with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and identities.
Creating and promoting authentic content about team members from all corners of our community will result in an increase in applications from diverse candidates as well as higher employee retention rates.
Wrapping Up
Successful marketing is a super-connector.
In parking, a sector so reliant on back-end operations, equitable storytelling bolsters the expertise and accomplishments of people in lower-visibility roles whose work is essential to keeping our industry’s motor running.
Marketers are in a unique position to create multiple positive business outcomes: higher traffic, stronger competitive differentiation, and a more supportive and inclusive workplace.
Sarah Becherer is the VP of Marketing at Ocra and co-founder of The Parketing Collective. She is a member of the International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Allyship & Equity Advisory Committee, Women In Parking Advisory Committee, and National Parking Association’s 40 Under 40 Class of 2018. To connect, add her on LinkedIn or send her an email at sarah@getocra.com.
