EDI Is a Growth Strategy. Brands That Treat It as Defence Are Already Losing.
By Barry Alexander, Chief Marketing and Diversity Officer
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has been positioned inside organizations as something to manage, mitigate, or contain. It lives in HR policies, compliance frameworks, or as a communications filter designed to reduce reputational risk. In other words, many brands treat EDI as defence.
That approach is not only outdated, but also actively constraining business performance.
The organizations outperforming their peers today do not view EDI as a reputational shield, they treat it as a growth strategy. And it is. McKinsey found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams are 39 percent more likely to outperform peers financially. Boston Consulting Group research found that organizations with diverse leadership see 19 percent higher innovation revenues.
The gap between companies that play offence with EDI and those that remain stuck on defence continues to widen, and it is showing up clearly in performance, innovation and market relevance.
Why Defensive EDI Fails
When EDI is treated as a compliance exercise or a PR safeguard, the underlying question driving decision-making becomes: “How does this reduce our exposure to criticism?” That mindset misses the real potential, narrows ambition, limits creativity and prioritizes risk avoidance over value creation.
Defensive EDI does not unlock new markets or generate better ideas. It does not build stronger organizations. At best, it attempts to keep companies out of trouble. At worst, it often fails.
While leadership teams debate language, policies and optics, competitors that approach EDI strategically are doing something far more valuable: reaching customers others cannot, identifying unmet needs others do not see and building capabilities others lack.
In competitive markets, defence is not neutral. It is a losing strategy.
The Business Case for Playing Offence
Organizations that embed diversity into leadership, strategy, and decision-making consistently outperform those that do not. The performance gap between defensive and strategic approaches to EDI is measurable. According to data from the Canadian Marketing Association’s 2025 EDI in Canadian Marketing Report, employees of companies with diverse leadership teams identify an improvement in innovation and creativity as the most identifiable benefit of EDI in their organization, in addition to achieving 93 per cent inclusion, compared to 39 per cent in organizations without diverse leadership.
Employee disengagement also drops to 28 per cent, versus 68 per cent in non-diverse workplace. At the same time, collaboration improves, retention strengthens and psychological safety increases, which is one of the most important conditions for innovation.
These outcomes are not cultural “nice-to-haves”, they are business performance indicators. Engagement drives productivity, inclusion drives innovation and diverse leadership drives better, and more growth oriented, decisions. Organizations that continue to dismiss EDI as “soft” are ignoring hard evidence.
Playing Offence Means Using Inclusion to Drive Insight
The organizations gaining ground today ask a fundamentally different question. Not, “How does EDI protect us?” but “How does EDI help us grow?”
This shift changes how organizations operate. EDI moves from quotas to expanding the idea pipeline. It moves from risk management to education and capability building.
Marketing and business leaders understand that insight is the foundation of growth. Yet homogeneous leadership teams, especially in a country as diverse as Canada, are structurally incapable of seeing the full market. Organizations cannot design for experiences they do not understand or audiences they do not include. EDI, when used offensively, addresses this weakness by expanding perspective and improving decision quality.
The Merit Myth Is Holding Companies Back
No serious discussion of EDI can ignore the most common counterargument: merit.
The idea that EDI undermines merit is not supported by evidence, or results. EDI does not lower standards; it expands access to talent that already exists.
In a diverse country, persistent homogeneous leadership is not proof of meritocracy. In fact, quite the opposite. It is proof of systemic barriers to diverse input. Those barriers not only harm individuals, but they also restrict growth by limiting perspectives, suppressing ideas and narrowing strategic vision.
True merit optimization requires diversity of thought, experience and background. Anything else is inefficiency disguised as tradition.
Market Reality Creates Competitive Pressure
Canada continues to diversify and consumer expectations around relevance and authenticity are rising. Representation delivers only table steaks moving forward. Brands that reflect lived realities, and products that get to consumers with relevant solutions, build trust faster and connect more deeply with customers. Those that do not are already losing share, sometimes quietly, sometimes publicly.
Recent brand reckonings have made one thing clear: defensive EDI strategies fail under pressure. Organizations that embed inclusion into how they operate demonstrate greater resilience and clarity and stronger results. The difference was not messaging. It was strategy.
The Choice Is Clear
Organizations now face a straightforward decision: they can continue to treat EDI as an HR compliance function and a communications filter and watch competitors outpace them. Or they can treat EDI as a strategic investment, alongside AI, data and technology infrastructure, and unlock sustainable competitive advantage and growth.
The data is clear. The market has moved. The only question left is whether your organization is prepared to stop playing defence and start competing for the future.
