Kering’s first chief diversity, inclusion and talent officer, Kalpana Bagamane, recently gave a rare interview in Vogue Business. Speaking out at a time where social justice movements have become forefront in the global consciousness, the move to give an interview is a sign in itself of Kering’s willingness to put issues of diversity and inclusion at the forefront of the luxury brand’s strategy. This is an honourable goal, and one that reaps benefits for the company on an internal and external level. Hopefully placing the luxury brand as a leader in the D&I space, and creating a more equitable and inclusive work environment.
In our article analysis of the Vogue Business piece, it’s interesting to note that despite an objectively positive theme to the article, demonstrated by a strong positive media sentiment for the article’s headline, the content of the article does not exactly match this sentiment. In fact in our entity word cloud, Kering is front and center, demonstrating it is the most frequently mentioned entity in the piece, but it is coded as neutral. This result shows that while the interview with Bagamane has promoted Kering through frequency of mention, what was likely meant to boost the brand’s image through its D&I strategy did not occur. However, key members of the organization did appear as positive entities, including Kering’s CEO François-Henri Pinault and several of Kering’s fashion houses. Small positive appearances in the entity cloud are made by the terms D&I, and mistakes, a likely reference to Bagamane’s push to destigmatize making mistakes in the diversity realm so as to not limit growth and independence.
What does this all mean? With a strong presence of risk language and a medium risk score, it hints at a lack of results in the D&I arena. There is mention of certain diversity statistics in the piece, but the rest of the article speaks in the abstract, and mentions key failures by the luxury brand; all of the creative directors for its fashion houses, save one, are white. Key players under the Kering umbrella come out well for their push in the diversity space, but Kering itself doesn’t get to bask in that same glow.
See our full article analysis here.
Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash
