LIFE, DEATH, AND ROI: THE INTERSECTIONAL MANDATE

Nov 24

Written By OBWX

By Barry Wade

TL;DR

Power Drives Disparity: Intersectionality analyzes overlapping identities (race, gender, class) not as additive variables but as interacting systems of power. This "multiplicative" framework explains why 54% of consumers report their culture is not reflected in advertising: algorithmic accuracy misses the lived experience of systemic barriers.
Healthcare Reveals Structure: Health equity research demonstrates that social determinants intersect to create compounded disadvantage. Intersectional identities experience disproportionate illness rates and premature death, requiring precision targeting that addresses systemic exclusion rather than surface demographics.
Hyper-Personalization Scale: Advanced AI enables targeting of complex identity profiles (Race X Gender X Class X Stress). Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) campaigns using personalized messaging achieve 94% higher click-through rates compared to generic approaches.
Economic Imperative: Multicultural audiences drive 100% of net growth in key CPG categories. Hispanic consumers control over $4 trillion in spending power. Brands that operationalize intersectional fairness metrics unlock a growth engine worth trillions, moving inclusion from an ethical choice to a survival strategy.

Context: The Theoretical Evolution From Social Justice to Market Strategy

The marketplace no longer tolerates reductive segmentation.

Intersectionality emerged in 1989 through legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's critique of single-axis discrimination frameworks. These frameworks failed to protect Black women, whose experiences were neither simply additive (racism plus sexism) nor captured by analyzing race or gender independently. Patricia Hill Collins established intersectionality as a framework for understanding interlocking systems of oppression. She argued that race, class, and gender are mutually constitutive rather than independent variables.

The migration from critical theory to commercial application reveals tension. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, psychology increasingly acknowledged that identities are fluid and complex. Interactions between identity factors are dynamic rather than static. Yet translation into practice remains incomplete. A systematic review of 707 articles from 1989 to 2020 found that 26.9% of applied research failed to define intersectionality. Furthermore, 17.5% included components not reflective of social power. This reveals that core theoretical tenets are often lost or misinterpreted when quantitative methods attempt to operationalize lived experience.

Healthcare provides the clearest proving ground for intersectional frameworks because biological outcomes make power structures visible. The CDC defines health equity as the state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health. Health inequities are influenced by many experiential factors. Failure to account for these factors and their interactions may jeopardize findings and lead to methods that unintentionally sustain or worsen targeted inequity.

When examining health outcomes through an intersectional lens, marginalized communities experience disproportionate rates of illness, disability, and premature death compared to privileged groups. Individuals from racial or ethnic minority groups face barriers such as discrimination, lack of access to quality healthcare, and socioeconomic disadvantage.

The commercial stakes are now measurable. Multicultural audiences wield trillions in buying power. 71% of consumers expect brands to promote diversity and inclusion in online advertising, and 59% are more loyal to brands that demonstrate this commitment. Recent research shows 36% of US and UK customers have boycotted a brand due to diversity and representation issues. As of spring 2023, 70% of adult Gen Z and 75% of millennials believe brands with large audiences should promote diversity and inclusion.

The demographic imperative compounds the commercial case. Census data show a 276% jump in Americans identifying with two or more races between 2010 and 2020, now representing about 10% of the population. Generation Z is the most racially and ethnically mixed cohort in U.S. history. About 6 million U.S. adults identify as Afro-Latino, making up 12% of the Hispanic adult population. Research finds that Afro-Latino identity is distinct. Life experiences are shaped by race, skin tone, and other factors in ways that differ from other Hispanics.

This report dismantles the failure of traditional segmentation. Caisimi explores the psychological mechanisms of invisibility. We validate the technological capability for precision targeting. We demonstrate how healthcare exposes power dynamics. Finally, we provide cross-sector evidence validating the commercial model.

Logic: Why Traditional Segmentation Fails at Scale

Traditional marketing operates on false premises.

The additive model treats social categories as independent variables summing to explain behavior. A Black woman's experience is modeled as Black plus woman. This generates predictions that miss the multiplicative reality. An intersectional approach argues these categories are not separable. A Black woman's experience is not the sum of "Black" and "woman" but a unique, indivisible construct.

Marketing research has historically utilized an intersectional perspective containing any of three components: awareness and acknowledgment of overlapping social categories, understanding of how lived experiences at intersections influence the marketplace, and recognition of how power shapes these consumer experiences. The strongest use of intersectionality encompasses all three conditions, which is currently less common.

The prototype problem exposes the mechanism. Dominant social ideologies including androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and heterocentrism create cognitive prototypes for social categories. The prototype for "Black" is cognitively represented as the Black man. The prototype for "woman" is cognitively represented as the White woman. Individuals with multiple subordinate-group identities are therefore non-prototypical members of their constituent groups. This renders them cognitively invisible to the social scientific gaze and, by extension, to legal, social, and political systems.

This invisibility creates paradox. Non-prototypical members are overlooked by systems of support. Anti-discrimination frameworks and social justice movements are built around prototypical members (White women in feminism, Black men in anti-racism), marginalizing intersectional members. Simultaneously, non-prototypical members may elude actively discriminatory practices and active forms of oppression directed at prototypical members.

Research on specific intersections confirms this pattern. A study using a stereotypical attribute awareness task supported a differentiation hypothesis: U.S. adults differentiate less between Black men and Black women than between White men and White women. This revealed two simultaneous psychological harms: erasure via masculinization (Black women are under-differentiated from Black men) and exclusion (Black women are over-distinguished from the superordinate category "women").

The 2023 study on Biracial emerging adults found that for all Biracial groups, identity-based challenges were significant predictors of greater psychological distress. However, the relationships between distress, identity challenges, discrimination, and Multiracial pride differed significantly across sub-groups. For Black-White Biracial individuals, Multiracial pride acted as a powerful protective buffer. This protective pathway functioned differently for Asian-White and Latinx-White sub-groups. Even resilience operates intersectionally.

The Afro-Latino case illuminates power's primacy. Despite having higher educational attainment and labor market participation than non-Black Latinos, Afro-Latino individuals experience worse economic outcomes including higher poverty rates and lower homeownership. Their economic outcomes align more closely with the non-Hispanic Black community. This demonstrates that structural-systemic oppression of anti-Blackness is a more powerful and determinant factor in their material and psychological reality than their ethnic-cultural identity (Latinidad). The resulting psychological experience is described as navigating a “triple consciousness”.

The failure mode extends beyond demographics to decision architecture. A useful concept is self-construal theory. This distinguishes between independent and interdependent views of the self. In individualistic cultures, people emphasize personal uniqueness, autonomy, and individual goals. By contrast, many non-Western cultures foster interdependent self-construal emphasizing relational identity, harmony, and group goals. An immigrant or bicultural person in the U.S. may navigate both modes. Studies show bicultural individuals engage in cultural frame-switching. They unconsciously shift behaviors or judgments depending on which cultural mindset is activated. This affects decision-making where the same person might prioritize personal preference in one context but family or community in another25.

Integration quality determines outcome. Research on bicultural identity integration (BII) finds that high BII individuals see their identities as complementary and themselves as part of a third culture that integrates elements of both. They exhibit better psychological adjustment including less stress and greater openness compared to those with low BII, who feel they must choose between cultures and report more anxiety or identity confusion.

The quantitative evidence validates urgency. Research indicates that 54% of consumers surveyed reported that their culture was not reflected in online advertising. This disconnect, where predictive accuracy (fidelity) does not translate to authentic representation (cultural reflection), suggests fundamental Operational Bias in Intersectional Dynamic Content Optimization systems.

Marketing's evolution mirrors psychology's struggle. Traditionally, marketing and advertising sliced audiences into broad demographic groups (the Hispanic market, female consumers, the 18-34 age segment), often focusing on one demographic dimension at a time. This siloed approach is increasingly seen as outdated because consumers don't live single-category lives. Individuals experience the marketplace at intersecting identity positions, and their needs and responses are shaped by that complexity.

The theoretical correction is clear. A recent Journal of Marketing article defines intersectionality in the marketplace context with three components: awareness of overlapping social categories in consumers (not each in a vacuum), understanding that these intersections create different lived experiences and consumer behaviors, and recognition of the role of power in shaping those experiences (how privilege and disadvantage at intersections affect access and treatment in the market).

Evidence: Technological Capability Enables Precision at Intersectional Depth

The infrastructure now exists to operationalize complexity.

Artificial Intelligence facilitates highly targeted engagement through deployment of recommendation systems, detailed user profiling, and dynamic content personalization. Utilizing advanced techniques such as reinforcement learning and sentiment analysis, these systems continuously optimize content distribution and prediction of user behavior to foster long-term engagement.

Three technologies converge to enable execution.

Identity Resolution Architecture

An identity graph aggregates identifiers from various sources including desktop cookies, mobile device IDs, connected TV logins, hashed emails, and loyalty IDs. It uses deterministic and probabilistic matching to link them to one individual or household. Identity resolution is the association of pseudonymized digital identifiers at the household and individual level for use cases like cross-device targeting, frequency capping, and journey mapping.

The Trade Desk's Identity Alliance clusters identifiers using a sophisticated ML model to ensure scale and precision in targeting audiences across devices and channels. This means a brand can reach a user with a consistent message on their smartphone, laptop, and smart TV. They can tailor content appropriately for each touchpoint but be informed by one holistic profile.

The capability extends beyond simple recognition. Identity graphs enrich what marketers know about each intersectional segment by incorporating offline data (store purchases, CRM records) with online behavior. By bridging data silos, identity solutions allow marketers to target specific segments like 30-something Asian-American tech professionals with relevant creative on streaming TV, then retarget the same group on social media, all while managing reach and avoiding overexposure.

Dynamic Creative Optimization at Scale

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) platforms automate the assembly and delivery of ads tailored to the viewer in real time. Instead of a single static ad, a DCO campaign consists of interchangeable creative components (headlines, images, calls-to-action, languages) and a decision engine that selects the optimal combination for each impression based on audience data or context.

Performance gains are measurable. A case study showed how consumer health brand Haleon used DCO to deploy 343 unique creative versions of an ad within an hour, matching each audience group with personalized messaging for a pain relief product. The campaign dynamically served video and display ads with tailored visuals and copy, yielding a 94% jump in click-through rate compared to benchmark.

Sequential sophistication multiplies impact. Facebook found that consumers exposed to a sequential ad series had 87% higher landing page visits and 56% higher subscription rates than those who saw non-sequenced ads. This underscores that dynamic storytelling aligned to personal context can dramatically boost engagement.

Hyper-Intersectional Profiling

Hyper-intersectionality as a marketing approach moves beyond simple demographic markers. It connects behavioral data with deep contextual information such as financial status, social classifications, identity dimensions, personality traits (OCEAN), or co-curricular activities. This provides a comprehensive user context and Ideal Customer Profile for Precision Targeting.

The technical boundary expands beyond bivariate models. Contemporary AI systems are capable of constructing and targeting highly complex, three-to-five-dimensional identity profiles (Race X Gender X Socioeconomic Status X Inferred Psychological State). This ability to target near-individualized profiles based on group characteristics places immense pressure on governance frameworks.

The capability creates liability. Models must account for the fundamental heterogeneity in user preferences and data. This demands inferring complex psychological features from unstructured data. Examples include a user's Vulnerability Status (chronic stress, inferred financial precarity) and the user's need for Identity Safety (cues that buffer the effects of perceived identity threat on a user's sense of belonging).

The ethical boundary defines constraint. The system's capability to identify the most financially promising intersectional groups for optimization means that Intersectional Dynamic Content Optimization can readily function as a tool for algorithmic opportunity hoarding if left unregulated. When an AI optimizes for commercial metrics like conversion or lifetime value, it will preferentially direct high-value, high-opportunity advertising toward highly advantaged intersections. This systematically results in disproportionate exclusion of disadvantaged groups from exposure to crucial opportunities.

The discrimination mechanism operates through two pathways. The Black Opticon describes the complex predicament of marginalized groups' vulnerabilities to varied forms of discrimination in the digital sphere. Intersectional Dynamic Content Optimization systems are directly implicated in enabling Discriminatory Exclusion (Ban-opticon), referring to targeted exclusion from differential access to opportunities, and Discriminatory Predation (Con-opticon), describing the use of digital systems for exploitative online financial fraud and deception.

Research confirms bias introduction points. Discrimination can be introduced at the data acquisition and audience generation phase. Using customer lists containing racially stereotypical names or ZIP codes as source data can generate highly biased lookalike audiences, resulting in overrepresentation of certain ethnic or racial groups (100% Asian audiences or overrepresented Hispanics). This foundational data bias critically undermines the fairness of the entire downstream campaign.

The solution requires architectural change. Effective Psychological Intersectionality models must account for two key mechanisms: Compounded Disadvantage (intersectional invisibility, where Black women's stereotyping is often statistically less impactful in regression models compared to Black men) and Compounded Advantage (cascading advantages that accelerate career progression faster for wealthy, attractive White males than for average-looking, middle-class White males).

Mitigating bias in Intersectional Dynamic Content Optimization requires intervention across the entire machine learning lifecycle: pre-processing intervention to address foundational data bias, in-processing intervention during model training using fairness-aware optimization techniques, and post-processing intervention applying techniques like multi-calibration or threshold adjustment.

The fairness definition must be precise. An Intersectional Fairness definition must meet three technical and ethical criteria: multiple attributes considered simultaneously, protection of all intersecting values of protected attributes (Black women as a distinct group), and minority group protection to ensure those disproportionately affected by discrimination are safeguarded.

Action: Healthcare Demonstrates Power Dynamics in Disparate Outcomes

Healthcare exposes what other sectors conceal.

Biological outcomes strip marketing pretense to reveal how power manifests in life-or-death stakes. Health equity exists when disparities in health-related outcomes are unable to be predicted by economic, environmental, or sociocultural conditions. Health equity is an intersectional concept since individuals simultaneously belong to a multitude of groups and may experience overlapping inequalities. This intersectionality has the potential to obscure existing inequities if research fails to account for relevant factors in analyses.

The magnitude of disparity quantifies systemic failure. When examining health outcomes through an intersectional lens, marginalized communities experience disproportionate rates of illness, disability, and premature death compared to privileged groups. Individuals from racial or ethnic minority groups face barriers including discrimination, lack of access to quality healthcare, and socioeconomic disadvantage, all of which contribute to health disparities.

Coverage patterns expose privilege structure. While the ACA's insurance expansions led to coverage gains across all racial and ethnic groups, coverage disparities remain. In nearly all states, uninsured rates continue to be higher for Black, Hispanic, and American Indian residents than for white and Asian American residents. Hispanic and Black Americans remain disproportionally represented in the 10 states that have not taken up the ACA's Medicaid expansion.

Intersectional identities compound exclusion. Some Hispanic and Asian American populations continue to face immigration-related barriers to getting subsidized coverage through Medicaid or the ACA marketplaces. American Indian people also face unique access concerns related to the underfunding and limited availability of Indian Health Service facilities as well as to socioeconomic factors and geographic barriers.

The workforce dimension mirrors patient outcomes. DEI programs often implicitly view different social identities (race, gender) as separate and mutually exclusive (the phrase "women and minorities") and measure outcomes based on single categories. This approach can lead to false equivalence of progress, where apparent advancement of an underrepresented group is limited to relatively privileged group members. While Black men experience racism and White women experience sexism, Black women experience a unique combination of gender- and race-based discrimination, including assumptions regarding societal roles, temperament, and communication styles, that can manifest as disrespect and marginalization in the workplace.

Marketing applications in healthcare require cultural competency integrated into strategy. In health and pharma marketing, intersectionality is crucial because factors like ethnicity, gender, and income often influence health behaviors and trust in healthcare. The key actionable strategy in health is to integrate cultural competency into creative and use data to place that creative precisely where the matching audience will see it.

The Haleon case demonstrates operational execution. In 2023, Haleon used dynamic creative optimization to promote Voltaren with highly personalized messaging. They built hundreds of ad variants targeting specific audience groups across multiple channels. For an older demographic segment, video ads emphasized relief for joint pain and showed older adults gardening. For fitness enthusiasts, ads highlighted muscle recovery with visuals of people in workout attire. Results were impressive: a 94% higher video CTR and more efficient ad spend.

Identity graphs enable secure cross-device reach. A hospital system might use an identity graph to recognize that a person who visited their maternity services webpage on a laptop is the same person opening the hospital's pregnancy newsletter emails on her phone, then use programmatic to serve her an ad on Instagram about prenatal checkups. Intersectional insights inform the content: if data suggests she's a first-time mother in an urban area, creative might highlight hospital birthing suite amenities and include a diverse nurse-doctor team to foster trust.

Public health campaigns demonstrate community-specific execution. During COVID-19 vaccination drives, outreach was segmented by community: different ads were created to address specific concerns of African American audiences (with Black doctors as spokespeople to improve credibility in the context of historical mistrust), ads for Latino communities that might appear on Spanish social channels and stress family health, and messages for rural white communities focusing on returning to work safely. These were deployed in a programmatic fashion using geo-targeting and ethnic affinity data.

The strategic principle transcends tactical execution. The key actionable strategy in health is to integrate cultural competency into creative and use data to place that creative precisely where the matching audience will see it. Marketers should consult demographic health data and consumer research to craft messages that align with each segment's health attitudes. By monitoring engagement and conversion by segment, they can optimize spend towards the best-performing creative-audience match.

Recognition quality determines trust. Ultimately, recognizing intersectionality in health marketing leads to more equitable and effective communication, ensuring all segments receive information in a way that resonates with their identity and experiences, which can have real impact on health outcomes alongside business outcomes.

Sector Applications: Beyond the Clinic

The pattern replicates across verticals. From finance to QSR, brands that operationalize intersectional depth outperform those treating identity as additive demographic slices.

Finance: Precision Targeting Builds Trust Through Recognition

The intersection of Wealth Gap X Cultural Values defines the new financial marketing paradigm.

The Wealth Gap Matrix

Money is historical. A generic "Retirement Planning" ad fails Black Millennials because it ignores the racial wealth gap.

Strategy: Acknowledge the deficit. Messaging for this segment focuses on "Building Generational Wealth" and "Breaking Cycles," validating the specific economic barrier.
Strategy: Conversely, for Asian American business owners, messaging pivots to "Family Legacy" and "Cross-Border Stability," acknowledging the immigrant trajectory and multigenerational support structures60.

Hyper-Personalization at Scale

A Midwest community bank moved to a "segment of one" model.

Insight: "You need to know who I am, not me as a Millennial or Boomer."
Execution: The bank used CRM data to deliver individualized product recommendations (first credit card for a recent grad vs. retirement planning for an entrepreneur) and personalized financial education content.
Impact: American Express applied similar logic with personalized video statements, generating a 3X increase in conversion rates and a 6X reduction in acquisition costs.

The Hispanic Economic Imperative

Hispanic consumers control over $4 trillion in spending power and will account for 70% of new homeownership growth through 2040.

Action: Banks like Wells Fargo and Chase launched targeted initiatives, from Spanish-language apps to ads celebrating Latino small business owners. The data is clear: if you are selling mortgages, you must reach this intersection.

CPG: Cultural Intelligence Becomes Growth Imperative

The intersection of Immigration X Product Innovation drives category expansion.

The Growth Engine

Immigrant and visible minority shoppers account for more than 100% of CPG growth in many key categories. Virtually all net growth comes from diverse segments.

Response: Leading CPG companies’ (P&G, Unilever, PepsiCo) dedicated multicultural marketing teams often produce separate campaigns tailored to different cultural groups. Unlike in decades past where these campaigns might live in silos, today's approach seeks to integrate them via programmatic and personalized delivery.

Contextual Affinity Targeting

Adtech platforms now identify cultural content affinity.

Execution: Mundial Media's technology analyzes online content to determine if a user is consuming Spanish-language or bicultural content. It then serves an ad version in Spanish or featuring Latin music. This goes deeper than demographics by acknowledging subcultures and linguistic nuance.

The Identity Graph Connection

Retail media networks bridge the online-offline gap.

Scenario: A cereal brand targets households that loyalty data shows buy international foods (a proxy for diverse tastes).
Action: Create a specific ad highlighting how the cereal fits into an Indian-inspired recipe. Target South Asian heritage households identified through spice purchase data.

Conclusion: The New Paradigm

We are standing at the precipice of a fundamental shift in the relationship between brand and consumer. The era of "Targeting" is over. Targeting implies a hunter and a prey. It is extractive. The new era is one of understanding.

Intersectionality provides the map for this territory. It forces us to acknowledge that our consumers are not flat, two-dimensional stereotypes. They are deep, complex, and often conflicted human beings navigating systems of power.

The technology is ready. AI, DCO, and Identity Graphs provide the infrastructure. The data is available. The barrier is no longer technical. It is philosophical. Marketers must abandon the lazy math of additive demographics. We must embrace the complexity of the matrix.

For the brand, the reward is growth. Multicultural audiences are responsible for 100% of the growth in many consumer categories. They are the engine. But they are discerning. They will punish brands that appropriate their culture without understanding their struggle. They will reward brands that see them. We must really see them in all their intersectional fidelity.

We must choose. We can continue to market to prototypes and watch our relevance fade. Or we can market to people in all their messy, multiplicative power. The choice is yours. The math is unforgiving. Adapt to the intersection, or fade into irrelevance.

About Caisimi

Caisimi is an identity intelligence platform and consultancy whose proprietary Psychodentity™ method combines personality science and identity construal to create predictive personas that beat demographic targeting. Its team applies advanced psychometrics and real-time digital intelligence to restore trust and deliver measurable growth in revenue, market share, and brand loyalty. Caisimi is launching a generative AI decisioning platform that turns these insights into real-time psychological targeting and brand experiences. For category-exclusive access or consulting, email [email protected].

OBWX https://www.caisimi.com