Beyond Tokenism: Why Disability Inclusion in Advertising Is Becoming a Business Advantage

For years, advertising executives have treated disability inclusion as a reputational minefield. Feature disabled models too prominently, critics warn, and brands risk accusations of tokenism. Ignore disability altogether, and they perpetuate one of the advertising industry’s most glaring blind spots. Caught between fear of backlash and pressure for inclusivity, many companies have simply chosen avoidance.

But new research suggests that caution may be costing brands far more than they realize. A large international study published in the Journal of Marketing has found that consumers respond overwhelmingly positively to advertising that includes people with disabilities, provided the representation feels genuine rather than exploitative. The findings challenge long-held assumptions inside marketing departments and offer one of the clearest roadmaps yet for how brands can approach disability inclusion successfully.

The study, "Beyond Visibility: The Disability Inclusion Effect in Advertising", was co-authored by Joachim Vosgerau, (Department of Marketing, Bocconi), alongside Martina Cossu of the University of Amsterdam and Zachary Estes of Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London. Across six major experiments involving more than 2,300 participants — and nine studies overall — the researchers found that disability-inclusive advertising consistently improved attitudes toward brands, products, and campaigns.

Their conclusion is both commercially significant and culturally revealing: consumers are not merely tolerating disability inclusion, they actively reward it.

“People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising.”

The invisible minority in advertising

The numbers alone reveal the contradiction at the heart of modern advertising. Roughly one in seven people worldwide lives with some form of disability. Yet disabled individuals appear in only 1.6% of advertising commercials, according to the study.

This absence has consequences far beyond representation. Disability scholars have long argued that invisibility in media reinforces stereotypes, deepens social exclusion, and perpetuates the idea that disability is unusual or incompatible with everyday life. The study notes that people with disabilities are frequently portrayed in ways that emphasize dependence, vulnerability, or pity. Those portrayals may generate sympathy, but they rarely communicate equality.

And consumers notice the difference.

“The question is not whether to include disabilities in advertising, but rather, how to do so effectively.”

That distinction — between visibility and meaningful inclusion — became the foundation of the researchers’ work.

Consumers choose inclusive brands

To test whether disability inclusion actually affects consumer behavior, the researchers designed a series of experiments across product categories ranging from shower gels and energy drinks to banking services, restaurants, perfumes, and streaming platforms.

In one experiment, participants chose between nearly identical shower gel brands. The only meaningful difference was that one product was advertised using a model with a limb difference. Consumers significantly preferred that product. Another study moved beyond hypothetical choices into the real world. At a university gym, participants were offered free energy drinks associated with different advertising posters. One featured an athlete with a disability; the other did not. Consumers again favored the disability-inclusive brand.

Crucially, the effect persisted even when participants selected products anonymously and privately, without observers present. That detail matters because it undermines a common explanation for inclusive consumer behavior: social signaling. Consumers were not simply trying to appear morally progressive in front of others. They genuinely preferred brands perceived as more inclusive.

Why Some Campaigns Fail Spectacularly

Yet not all disability-inclusive campaigns succeed. The researchers point to several notorious advertising missteps. Vogue Brazil faced criticism after digitally adding prosthetics to able-bodied models rather than hiring disabled athletes. Victoria’s Secret was accused of exploitation after prominently marketing Sofia Jirau as its “first model with Down syndrome.” Those examples reveal the central paradox explored in the paper: consumers reward inclusion when it feels authentic, but recoil when disability appears instrumentalized for corporate image-making.

The study identifies two major pitfalls. The first is portraying disabled individuals primarily through vulnerability or hardship. In one experiment involving a fictional television series, participants reacted much more positively when a disabled protagonist was described as “strong and social” rather than “vulnerable and lonely.”

The second mistake is what the researchers call “conspicuous communication”, that is explicitly highlighting a model’s disability within the ad itself. In another experiment, participants viewed a perfume campaign featuring a model on the autism spectrum. When the disability was introduced subtly through external context, consumers reacted positively. But when the advertisement itself prominently labeled the model as autistic, the positive effect disappeared entirely. The issue, the authors argue, is that overt labeling can make disability appear tokenized or performative rather than normalized.

“Conspicuous communication can transform disability into an identity label, reinforcing the stigma and separation from non-disabled people.”

In other words, consumers reward brands for integrating disability into ordinary social life, not for turning it into a marketing spectacle.

A new theory of inclusion

One of the paper’s most important contributions is its rejection of a previous explanation for disability-inclusive advertising. Earlier research suggested consumers liked such campaigns because brands appeared “warm” or “cool.” But Vosgerau and his co-authors argue that those concepts are too superficial to explain the effect.

Instead, they introduce the idea of “effective inclusivity.” Consumers respond positively, the authors argue, when advertising signals that a brand genuinely supports the integration of people with disabilities. This perception of authentic inclusion — rather than simple diversity optics — becomes the real driver of consumer attitudes.

That framework also explains one of the study’s most surprising findings: consumers still react positively even when brands include disabled models because of mandatory diversity regulations.

In one experiment, participants learned that a fictional restaurant chain featured a wheelchair user in its campaign partly to comply with new European inclusivity standards. Rather than punishing the company for “box-ticking,” consumers viewed the brand as just as inclusive as companies acting voluntarily. For marketers nervous about regulatory diversity requirements, the finding carries major implications: consumers care less about why inclusion happens than whether the inclusion itself feels meaningful.

The business case for disability inclusion is getting harder to ignore

Perhaps the study’s most remarkable statistic concerns the sheer breadth of support. According to the researchers, more than 80% of participants responded positively to disability inclusion across the studies. That level of consensus is rare in today’s fractured consumer environment, where brands increasingly fear cultural backlash over social issues. In other words, any consumer backlash for including models with a disability is not only unfounded, but commercially naïve.

Consumers, then, appear ready — and perhaps eager — for advertising that treats disability not as exceptional, inspirational, or tragic, but simply as part of ordinary human life.