13637: Probing Pepsi’s Problems.

Campaign published another perspective by a pseudo-thought leader taking advantage of the Pepsi-Kendall Jenner debacle to leverage personal agendas. In this case, Reframe The Brand Founder and CEO Jeffrey L. Bowman opined the disaster resulted from a “monocultural workplace” that presumably led to cultural cluelessness. Bowman actually makes a few interesting points, including “Women have become the new black”—which is essentially recognizing the rise of diverted diversity in the industry. Plus, Bowman nicely notes that diversifying a staff isn’t enough; in fact, the benefits of diversification can be negated if the workplace environment remains dominated by a singular culture. That is, slowly seeding racial and ethnic minorities into White World isn’t really achieving the true goal. Regardless, it’s tough to agree that Pepsi’s current advertising problems are rooted in failed diversity. After all, some of the brand’s greatest campaigns with the broadest appeal were created decades ago by White advertising agency BBDO. And blaming things on the in-house model is too easy. Maybe there’s a simpler explanation. It seems like the dilemma started with the 2008 birth of the globe logo and escalated to global lameness. In short, Pepsi has become a shitty client.

When black and brown is not enough

By Jeffrey L. Bowman

Pepsi’s epic failure is emblematic of the problems of a monocultural workplace, writes the founder and CEO of Reframe The Brand.

PepsiCo has a long history that demonstrates the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion efforts. Most recently, the company won the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Award. The Kendall Jenner spot, however, was both a failure of epic proportions and completely avoidable. That’s been reviewed ad nauseum. The larger question is how did this event happen? And how did it happen to a brand like Pepsi with a legacy of getting commercial advertising right?

It’s simple. Women have become the new black.

Women are the new sought after target. Supporting feminism is the new message to be aligned with. As women move on up so too does corporate spending and marketing attention.

My hypothesis is that Pepsi thought that swapping a gender issue (demonstrated in Kendall dropping her artificial look) for a black one (the Black Lives Matter movement) was OK. Women? Blacks? They’re all underserved right?

The real issue isn’t Pepsi. It’s that it’s actually easy to see how they came to that conclusion. When you dissect it, Pepsi was again very much operating in “the marketing norm.”

So how did we get here? Over the past 30 years, we’ve put a lot of great minds and effort towards getting it right. The major shift birthed from the economic results of trade agreements with foreign governments in the 1980’s led to a boom in titles like chief diversity and inclusion officers with various reporting structures for most Fortune 500 companies. This sounds like a great thing, but there was one major oversight. Even though the workplace population was shifting and growing a multicultural candidate pool, diverse candidates were entering a monocultural workplace.

What’s a monocultural workplace? It is a business environment dominated by a singular culture. Which means that even if the faces of the organization have become more diverse, its practices and culture stay largely the same. Individuals are encouraged to participate but when push comes to shove, everyone is expected to fall into single file. That singularity is the mono of the monocultural workplace.

Last month, the findings of our “State of the Total Market Industry Vertical Report” revealed big brands and agencies within the workplace are two generations culturally removed from the marketplace. This means marketing practices are still very much a product of the 1960s as well as the workplace. Back then, the sought-after target was the upwardly mobile blacks, 20 years later the growing Hispanic population, and so on. Today the minority du jour is women. The mission is feminism and thus we see a lot of “separate but equal” budgets once reserved for people of color directed at women, primarily white women. This should be a good thing, but in reality, it’s not because the real underlying issue remains.

Black or female in 2017, we now have specialized hiring practices and specialized practitioners. But those “specialized practitioners” wind up isolated, underfunded, and misunderstood. They are viewed as necessities and so they exist, but the hands of the specialized practitioners are often cuffed by the monocultural operations of the place where they work. This means the employees of these groups wind up short when it comes to the tools and resources they really need to understand the new marketplace. Again, Pepsi is not immune.

I believe the team at Pepsi produced this commercial with the best of intentions with targeting, however, they simply lacked the cultural insights needed to get it right.

According to industry sources, PepsiCo shifted away from the idea of cultural fluency structural support, education and tools when Javier Farfan left PepsiCo in 2014. They did not see the immediate volumetric gains and dismantled their cultural fluency group. In doing so, they also lost key senior leaders who had their pulse on culture and the idea of developing a culturally-maturing organization from the inside-out diminished. They lost their insights and soon after the Pepsi marketing team too became a victim of the lens of their own monocultural workplace. They tried, and I believe tried hard, to get it right. But they didn’t have the leadership for what they needed to succeed.

The result? The internet is calling for the removal of Kendall Jenner’s head. We are looking for a responsible party, someone to blame. Pepsi is faceless; Kendall is not. But the real guilty party is our own workplace. Everyone needs to ask, is the company we work for diverse but monocultural?

If you’re not sure, you’re not alone. From Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street, every practitioner within the talent and diversity space is asking, “How do we avoid being Pepsi?”

There has to be a major rethink and disruptive ideation to modernizing brands and agencies from the inside-out. There’s a lot of work to be done.

—Jeffrey L. Bowman is an author, founder and CEO of Reframe The Brand.

13572: Total Market, Total Failure…?

Campaign published a perspective and sales pitch from Jeffrey L. Bowman, who is still trying to peddle what was once dubbed Cross-Cultural Marketing and later renamed Total Market. Pepper Miller delivered detailed dissections of the direction, and White advertising agencies ultimately hijacked the notion to seize total control of marketing budgets. Meanwhile, Bowman is selling a report on Total Market that will likely be totally ignored by the total industry.

Close the gap: The state of the ‘total market’ industry

By Jeffrey L. Bowman

If we do not get the total market topic right, businesses could lose the next 50 years of market share, writes author and founder of Reframe: The Brand.

We should have gotten it right by now, but we haven’t. We’ve had the data, the tools, the observation skills and the creativity to recognize a bad plan, and yet little has changed in almost 60 years.

That bad plan could be called “Separate But Equal Marketing,” and it was introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. It was inappropriate at the time and has been ineffective since then—and with good reason. McKinsey introduced the topic of “Total Market” in the mid-1960s. At the time corporations were not paying attention to the upward and mobile black consumer. Companies started creating ethnic marketing departments to target blacks and diversity compliance initiatives for their employees in the 1960s. The marketing and communications industry created two different ways of buying services known as “general market” to focus on the “mass” consumer audience and “ethnic marketing,” which later became “multicultural marketing,” to focus on blacks, Hispanics and Asian consumers. Over the last 50 years, nothing changed.

In 2010, the topic of general market and multicultural marketing was revisited at great length and reinvented through the innovation of total market. However the topic was more relevant and it was defined as a new way of buying services from suppliers whose offerings reflected the new America. The innovation, definition and approach were met with resistance and pushback from general market, ethnic and some industry associations. Why? This required structural changes for buying services within the $350 billion marketing and communications industry. As a result, we’re still pursuing a direction that proves inefficient and ineffective. But there is a clear and better way forward.

After five years of weathering the total market topic storm, my team and I sought to uncover why there is resistance to innovation and provide clarity on the topic, while committing resources to providing educational leadership. To identify industry best practices, we conducted over 50 interviews and observations with leading brands, agencies and collected data at conferences and through many hours of desk research. With our inaugural “State of the Total Market Industry Vertical Report,” our goal was to help others truly understand and apply the principles needed for their best employee and consumer outcomes.

If we do not get the total market topic right, businesses could lose the next 50 years of buying consumption. Why? Statistics show that the entire human race is going to flip generationally, racially, ethnically, religiously and in terms of gender, creating a new marketplace and workplace. Therefore we should stop using dated service models, and companies should have new ways of creating value in the new workplace and marketplace.

What’s wrong with the way things are now? Today, a business chooses to buy marketing and communications services based on a segregated model in which general market is separate from multicultural. If you are talent or a business owner within the marketing and communications industry, your ideas and services are likely chosen or purchased based on this model and often multicultural service providers get the short end of the stick even though the multicultural consumers have the highest growth demographically.

Based on our report findings, employees within major brands are two generations culturally removed from consumers. Most big companies culturally reflect a monocultural society or a homogeneity, whereas, culturally in America, there is the debate about moving away from multicultural society to either cross-cultural or poly-cultural society.

Because of the macro cultural and population shift, accept that this is just as much of an employee (workplace) outcome as a consumer (marketplace) outcome. In order for this to work, it has to start internally and then impact externally. You have to have the talent within the organization to fully comprehend and execute the total market approach for the new marketplace and the total market enterprise approach for the new workplace. This starts with education.

This is not a quick sales lift action. If you are attempting to use the total market approach for marketplace results, focus first on strategy, then execution. Many in advertising and marketing have tried using this approach without any strategic planning or outside help. There is now a graveyard of brands that rushed into this only to have discovered their organization was not mature enough. They’ve reverted back to the old and ineffective models. You don’t have too.

Expect some structural changes. For more than 60 years, brands and their service providers have allocated resources and funding under the model of “separate but equal,” meaning mass and multicultural audiences are equal. As multicultural audiences are increasingly the mass audience, this presents a fundamental opportunity about how to restructure budgets, partnerships and departments to accelerate growth within this new marketplace and workplace.

Be honest with yourself and your organization to drive structural change and transformation. Organizations first have to identify and accept where the gaps exist in understanding and acting within the new marketplace and workplace. This requires you to assess your organization.

We are committed to transforming the work and marketplace and are partnering with Campaign US to share our findings over the next several months. Our ambition is to make a difference for the future of the work and marketplace and redirect the industry towards a better way forward. Please join us and #CLOSETHEGAP.

—Jeffrey L. Bowman is an author, and president and CEO of Reframe: The [Brand] – A Business Acceleration Platform.

12874: Playing Poker Or Solitaire…?

Advertising Age published a perspective by Reframe: The Brand Founder and Chairman Jeffrey Bowman, where the author attempts to rename “multiculturalism” as the “New Majority.” Um, the last time Bowman examined this specific topic, wasn’t he promoting the label of cross-cultural marketing while leading the segregated OgilvyCULTURE department? Whatever. Unfortunately, Bowman continues to clutter the conversation with fresh terms that no one really distinguishes from the stale terms—and no one really cares about. Hell, Bowman inadvertently underscores a key issue with his opening statements:

Let’s get a few of things out of the way. Yes, the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color. Yes, race relations are strained right now. Yes, immigration is a huge issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. And yes, Silicon Valley is still way too white. Do we all agree? Great. We’ve now all anted up in this particular game of poker.

The problem is, we do not all agree. The Current Majority on Madison Avenue—i.e., the confederacy of White folks—does not believe “the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color.” There is plenty of recurring evidence to support this fact. Plus, White people are holding all the cards in this “particular game of poker.”

As a result, Bowman’s “three big bets” likely won’t result in winning more credibility or crumbs.

How Brands and Agencies Can Win at Multiculturalism

Three Big Bets Companies Need to Place for New Majority Success

By Jeffrey Bowman

Let’s get a few of things out of the way. Yes, the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color. Yes, race relations are strained right now. Yes, immigration is a huge issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. And yes, Silicon Valley is still way too white. Do we all agree? Great. We’ve now all anted up in this particular game of poker.

None of this is news to brands and agencies. But something is changing fast—the complexion of America. The general market isn’t white anymore. In just a few years, the majority of people under 18 will be from minority populations. In a couple of decades, the majority of the nation will be minorities. And did you hear this? The millennial generation has come up with a new, better word for multiculturalism. They call it normal.

Winning this game is going to take a lot more than showing up and throwing a few pennies in the pot. Here are three big bets businesses need to place. Those that do will be guaranteed a winning hand.

1. Repudiate separate-but-equal marketing. Back in the 1960s, black-owned agencies were finally let into the club of major brand engagements. Now, Hispanic and Asian agencies are part of the mix, but the system is still a simple expansion of the 1960s quota system that first brought minority culture into advertising. We still have two “separate-but-equal” systems.

Procurement departments go out to secure external vendors and allocate a percentage of spend to what is called supplier-diversity programs. Internally, brands use diversity-and-inclusion initiatives to justify hiring and retaining diverse talent. That sounds good, but practically speaking, it’s just as flawed as the pre-Brown vs. Board of Education educational system was. As a result, brands are dramatically underinvesting in the fastest-growing parts of the marketplace. Nimble, authentic new brands are going to eat their lunch.

2. Change from the inside out. Today’s diversity-and-inclusion and supplier-diversity models falter in part because of the language used inside companies. Brands still speak of diversity as being an exercise in compliance. If they go beyond the strictures of the law, it’s a nice thing to do for society, but brands don’t yet act as if their future competitiveness depends on diversity—which it does.

The steady growth of diversity-and-inclusion and supplier-diversity systems has built up a large industry of training, education and organizational consulting. This industry is based on the belief that it is a civil right to have a diverse and inclusive work environment. The workplace that has been built adheres to that right and is compliant with the law. That’s table-stakes thinking again.

To succeed, companies need to drop the idea and nomenclature brought to them by compliance with external forces. Instead, brands need to see diversity as a crucial factor in being market-ready. In an era of unprecedented transparency and respect for authenticity, no company can fake diversity.

3. Put your money where your mouth is. Google recently created a new holding company called Alphabet, which got all kinds of press attention and anguished business hot-takes. In 2012, Walmart announced that 100% of its sales growth would come from multicultural segments. No one paid the slightest bit of attention. The former is a largely meaningless corporate reorganization, while the latter reflects a recognition of a massive cultural realignment by one of the world’s largest companies. Why no love for that?

Rebuilding companies from the inside-out to reflect the New Majority may not make the news yet, but it is going to shake up the way funds are allocated. Gone will be the days when, as I personally have experienced, shifting spending to the fast-growing Hispanic market means cutting marketing directed at blacks.

Once you place these bets, your brand or business will be open for New Majority customers. That means that, for the first time since the heyday of America’s white majority, your business will be ready to sell to every one of your potential customers. You will be targeting the real, total addressable market, not some artificial fraction thereof. And if you are among the first to figure this out, consumers and talent will seek you out.

Jeffrey Bowman is founder and chairman of Reframe: The Brand, a consulting firm that helps businesses prepare for the New Majority. Mr. Bowman was previously senior partner-managing director at Ogilvy & Mather New York.