Understanding and Growing Market Share With a DEI Perspective — Tanya Stewart Blackmon
Every business aims to grow its market share, but many need to understand their share through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This results in underserving specific populations and leaving potential markets untapped. To understand your market through DEI, you should look at your customer journey and satisfaction for various demographics and see in which groups your company has growth and which groups are satisfied with your company.
A systems thinker and servant leader who’s been instrumental in leveraging DEI strategy for crucial business acquisitions, Tanya Stewart Blackmon, is a solution-focused leader with a record of organizational revenue growth and performance improvement throughout her experience in executive positions in healthcare and on several boards.
One of your greatest strengths is growing businesses while keeping their workforce engaged, Tanya. Talk to us about how you helped a business grow its market share and how the use of DEI encouraged this growth.
It’s really easy for a business to say, ‘Oh, we have 90% customer satisfaction!’ but if you don’t understand who those customers are in terms of DEI, you don’t know who is satisfied nor which groups you may be leaving out — you’ll also forego ways to grow your market share. At Novant Health, we wanted to know the demographics of who was satisfied and dissatisfied with our care by race, ethnicity, age, language, gender, disability, payer source/insurance, whether they’re a veteran, sexual orientation, and more. We looked at the data for our customers and found that Hispanic and Latino patients were one of our fast-growing populations, so we wanted to understand them. With the help of employee resource groups, we conducted focus groups of the Hispanic community to see how we could better serve them.
We learned that the most pressing issue was that we only had an English website, but not one in Spanish. Instead of translating the site into Spanish, we asked the group, ‘What would this website look like if we trans-created it for you?’ What we meant by trans-create was that we wanted to change the site’s content and fit the Hispanic community’s needs better, not just translate its language.
The first thing we did to improve the site was to address their feedback that the website was cluttered and too busy with words; in response, we added graphics, pictures, and videos in Spanish featuring Latino physicians. They also said that family is vital to their culture, so we included a ‘Letter to the Family’ from our CEO to the Latino community, asking them to bring their families that we want to care for them. By listening to the voices of the community, implementing these adjustments, and providing more educational material in Spanish and (as always) excellent healthcare, we grew our market share for the Latino community into double digits.
This demonstrates the significant impact that considering DEI when looking at your market share and potential for growth can have. Because we saw that our population of Latino patients and community was rapidly growing, we understood and delivered what the Hispanic and Latino communities needed that we weren’t providing. As a result, we were able to provide excellent healthcare to more people while growing the business as a whole. This additional revenue allowed us to benefit through the bottom line, improving the company and holistically growing the business.
Tanya Stewart Blackmon is a nationally recognized DEI executive with an exceptional record of leadership, cultural change, performance improvement, and revenue growth. She has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity, Inclusion & Equity Officer and President and Chief Operating Officer at an award-winning integrated healthcare system along with several Boards.
Connect with Tanya on LinkedIn.
