Multicultural Marketing
By Margaret Snyder (02/05/04)
On a Spanish-language talk radio show, the host related something he had seen on Oprah recently. Oprah was interviewing fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger and giving him an opportunity to deny allegations that he had said he did not want “minorities” to buy his clothes. To the amazement of this talk show host, Hilfiger confirmed this position, saying he was not designing for blacks, latinos and Asians.
Well. I think I will not be inviting Mr. Hilfiger to tea any time soon and I doubt I will buy any more of his clothes, if in fact I have ever bought any.
But, truth be told, I am not shocked. No one should be shocked. Furthermore, we can expect to hear similar thoughts emanating from more merchandisers in the future. It is the natural extension of the divisive policies and rhetoric of recent decades.
Multiculturalism has for years been pushing its message of cultural division. Multiculturalism stresses how different all our various ethnicities are and that we must not only acknowledge but embrace our differences.
This concept has implications for marketing. One place we see it is in the trend toward local Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, for example. They are founded on the idea that Hispanic-owned businesses do best by aiming their appeal to their own community.
This is a defeatist idea. Consider: these businesses are limiting their markets to a group that is by definition a minority of the population. They lack the vision of Paul Williams, a young black architect starting out in the 1920s in California. His friends told him he was a fool to have pursued architecture: there was not enough call for architects in the black community to support him. He replied that he did not intend to limit his clientele to blacks and, defying the received wisdom and the undeniable racism of his era, went on to become a huge success.
He was an example of the wisdom of the much-derided-by-the-left Booker T. Washington, who believed that society would have the best it could get and wouldn’t care what color package it came in.
But we have not listened to the wisdom of Booker T. Washington. We have listened instead to the multiculturalists, who believe that the path to success for members of racial minorities is to celebrate, elevate, and aggressively affirm cultural differences. Having drawn lines of demarcation between groups, it would then seem natural for latinos to market to latinos and blacks to blacks (and Asians to Asians). No one should be surprised then that some whites will choose to market to whites.
After all, if the idea is to sell to lots of people and if all these groups are so culturally different, wouldn’t it make sense to market to the group that comprises half the population instead of one that comprises 13% or 6% of the population?
What could be more in keeping with multiculturalism? Ah, but there’s the rub. In multiculturalism, blacks are supposed to feel proud to be black, latinos are supposed to feel proud to be latinos and whites are supposed to feel…guilt.
Yes, those forces which we can refer to collectively as “the Jesse Jacksons of the world” need white guilt. Their whole game plan is to exploit white guilt. . (No one has developed this idea or its corollary, that white guilt cripples black advancement, better than Shelby Steele in his books “The Content of Our Character” and “A Dream Deferred.”)
But what happens if some white persons don’t feel guilty? Well, if some white people decline to get on the guilt bandwagon, they are apt to take their white identity elsewhere and apparently Tommy Hilfiger has taken his to merchandising.
It was never a good idea to celebrate our differences. Those who encouraged it should have realized that ultimately you can’t have black pride and latino pride without also having white pride. Ethnic pride that occurs spontaneously is one thing, but when the state enters the picture, making distinctions among citizens along ethnic or racial lines and favoring some groups over others, other institutions (commercial and educational, for example) will follow. The results will not be what anyone (except for those who stand to gain from perpetuating conflict) wanted.
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