It’s not hype. It’s structural pressure. The profound change in cultural and consumption habits is already forcing companies to review products, investments and positioning. Around the world, the influence economy has gone from being a trend to becoming a financial engine: the sector is on track to generate almost half a trillion dollars by 2027, and is already redefining strategic priorities for brands and investors. Within this scenario, Brazil positions itself as a trendsetter, but it also makes clear that diversity is not philanthropy or a reputational agenda: it is measurable profit.
Before talking about financial return, it is necessary to observe what happens in the symbolic fieldthis space where identities, belonging and power are organized because it is there that decides who consumes, who influences and who is authorized to circulate in certain social territories. This phenomenon is not peripheral: it is the new mainstream.
But what are the dimensions of inequality in the influence ecosystem? How much is peripheral consumption worth when it competes for space with other markets? Is the representation crisis a market inefficiency or a reproduction of the structures that communicate spaces by race, class, gender, sexual orientation and territory?
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As you point out Sueli Carneiroinequalities are not accidents: they are historical constructions that shape access to the imaginary and symbolic capital.
The search TODX (Heads + UN Women) shows that the gap between demography and representation is not a social failure, but conscious market failure and this distortion has a direct financial impact.
Crossing territories reveals previously invisible markets
Recently, we have seen situations that generated intense debates not because of the person involved, but because of the tense encounter between different social territories. In three specific episodes, it became clear that the focus was not on the individual. These were the structures, expectations and inequalities that are revealed whenever these groups meet in the same space. A premium brand positioned, side by side, a black political leader, from the LGBTQ+ community, of peripheral origin and a typical figure of aspirational luxury. A mass consumer company brought together a popular influencer with a creator associated with high-end lifestyle. A collaboration between a democratic brand and an international brand created a hybrid product: affordable price, but exclusive symbolic access.
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The estrangement did not arise from the casting, but from the friction between distinct social fields. How do you explain Cida Bentoin his book “The Pact of Whiteness”, there is a silent effort to preserve those who occupy certain symbolic spaces. When this order is tensioned, reactions arise and tensions are warnings of change and opportunity.
Diversity is not a cost: it is an economic multiplier
The Brazilian Creator Economy moved R$21 billion in 2024and the segments that grow the most are precisely those previously invisible: black creators, women 50+, LGBTQIA+, indigenous people, PWDs and peripheral profiles.
The reason is simple: Brazil is socially unequal but digitally distributed.
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The data confirms:
- Companies with DE&I strategies have 36% more chance of surpassing competitors in profitability (McKinsey).
- Representative content even generates 83% more purchase intention nas classes C e D.
- Diverse creators deliver 3x more engagement per dollar invested.
- Even so, they receive 32% less average salaryhighlighting gaps in financial redistribution.
In other words: the return exists, but it is not equitable.The creator ecosystem is today a powerful thermometer of social and economic changes. And the intersection between consumption, technology and identity transformed the creator economy into a mirror of sociocultural contradictions. When a brand brings together profiles seen as belonging to antagonistic universes: politics x luxury, periphery x high income, mass x exclusive, it breaks traditional boundaries between cultural, economic, digital and symbolic capital
Breaking down barriers as a competitive differentiator
Brazil is experiencing a sociological phenomenon accelerated by the digital: crisis of symbolic borders. Cultural codes mix and previously rigid belongings become more flexible. What once seemed like a threat (“mixing worlds”) became a strategy. Digital exposed repertoires, expanded aesthetics and made it impossible to sustain homogeneous ideas of belonging. There are still forces of standardization, but they lose steam in the face of a multiple, plural and economically relevant Brazil.
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Diversity is not a trend, it is value generation matrix in the contemporary market, especially in the era of creators. The brands that will prosper are precisely those capable of understanding Brazilian social tensions instead of softening them, expanding investment and not just symbolic presence and creating intersections between social territories with the awareness that discomfort is an inevitable part of innovation processes.
They are also those that recognize diverse creators as strategic assets, and not as decorative or circumstantial presences. Because, in the end, those who lead the future are those who understand that the new economy does not grow at the edges, but at the encounter; and that the real Brazil, multiple and powerful, stopped asking for permission to exist. It already exists, it already moves billions and it already redefines the rules of the game.
The Play9 Content Group will launch two important movements: the largest survey on influence in Brazil, in partnership with Dark Influence and the UN Brazil Global Compact and the Horizon Projectwhich will be the largest Afro-centered innovation platform focused on equity and inclusion.
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The question is no longer with diversity generates profit.
The question is: Who is prepared to profit from a Brazil that has changed and that does not want to and will not leave anyone behind?
