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One car brand refuses to let go of its DEI policies, says race-based marketing drives sales

March 5, 2025 | | Print Article

The South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai has chosen to double down on so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), prompting many car drivers to vow to never drive a Hyundai again.

Not only is Hyundai reportedly choosing to stick to its widely panned DEI policies, but it’s even launching a so-called “multicultural marketing” campaign, according to Hyundai’s “experiential and multicultural marketing” director Erik Thomas.

And not surprisingly, this so-called “multicultural” DEI campaign appears to be all about appeasing black people over everybody else.

“Last month, Hyundai put out its latest multicultural marketing campaign, ‘Play for the Car,’ aimed at Black shoppers with paid media across diverse media, including entertainment channels like BET, TV One and Bounce, and publications like Blavity and Ebony Magazine,” according to Digiday.

The campaign was produced by Culture Brands, which Digiday describes as “the independent, minority and female-owned agency Hyundai selected as its African American marketing agency of record back in 2021.”

Speaking with Digiday, Thomas noted that he believes this sort of race-focused marketing drives sales.

“In terms of the creative that we’re doing and the work that we’re doing with Culture Brands, it’s born from a recognition that it drives sales, drives the bottom line for the company,” he said.

But he wouldn’t specify how much money Hyundai has invested into this marketing scheme. And he also stressed that there’s only so much money available to spend on marketing.

“There’s still finite dollars,” was all he said. “You can have sales, you can have the best year ever, but there’s still finite dollars to spend, whether it be on build, whether it be manufacturing, engineering, design, and also the marketing of the vehicles.”

But in fairness to Thomas, it’s true that Hyundai’s annual revenue increased by 7.7 during the last quarter of 2024, so clearly the company is making some sort of headway.

Not enough, however, to stop critics from vowing to never drive a Hyundai again over its commitment to DEI:

Meanwhile, Paramount Global is facing backlash for the opposite reason — for rolling back its own DEI initiatives.

“As employees of Paramount Global, we are extremely disappointed — but not surprised — by the senior leadership team’s decision to roll back our commitments to DEI,” a letter written by some of the company’s employees, all of them speaking anonymously, reads.

“This capitulation reflects the profound hypocrisy in extracting labor from diverse communities, creating content from and for diverse communities, targeting the dollars of diverse communities… while committing to the erasure and exclusion of those very same diverse communities,” the letter continues.

The petition comes a few days after Paramount co-CEOs Brian Robbins, George Cheeks and Chris McCarthy released a memo announcing that the company would stop making hiring decisions based on race, gender, and sexuality.

But instead of attributing the decision to the fact that DEI is racist, backward, and just plain wrong, the CEOs pinned the “blame” for the rollback on President Donald Trump.

“The CEOs said that the changes were necessary due to the Trump administration’s executive orders abolishing DEI in the federal government and targeting the policies among federal contractors, which the memo states ‘require changes in the way the company [Paramount] approaches inclusion moving forward,'” according to FBN.

Vivek Saxena
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