Essay 570

From the latest issue of Marketing y Medios…

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The Apartheid of American Marketing
May 01, 2006

[Suzanne Irizarry de López has studied Latino consumers for 15 years. Raised in Puerto Rico and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she works for Eastern Research Services in Dallas.]

WE ARE EXPERIENCING a demographic reinvention and movement toward a global community. Generations of transnational mobility, intermarriage and cultural give-and-takes have yielded new arrangements of people, identities and social practices that are challenging the definitions of self and the usefulness of racial categories for marketing purposes.

Not that America — the nation of immigrants — wasn’t diverse before, but before the Civil Rights movement, diversity was not a good thing. Assimilation (melting into the common pot) was the ultimate objective.

Prior to the mid-70s, people suffered for being different. Parents struggled to ensure their children assimilated into the masses, spoke English and rid themselves of “foreign signs,” such as speaking a language other than English.

Today, now that being unique is good, there is no need to shed and forget. And some are even looking back and digging into their ancestral trunks and reviving customs and identifications from their origins.

In the meantime, while we are working to recognize that diversity is good, some structures have not changed to match this trend. Take the segmentation system we habitually use and which simply divides people into color — aka racial categories.

Marketers, researchers, ad agencies and media often treat “Hispanics” as a separate group from whites, blacks and Asians, when “Hispanics” actually include people who also identify with one or more of the aforementioned racial groups.

Additionally, the term “Hispanic” often wrongly classifies people of 23 different nationalities spread out from Europe to the Caribbean, from North America to the South Pole, into a common pool, assuming they all share a language, cultural traits, consumer behavior or degree of foreign identity.

Language is not a racial category, but if a person speaks, understands or should speak Spanish, regardless of their race, he or she gets placed into the Hispanic or Latino category.

The U.S. government — the entity behind the 1980 invention of the term Hispanic — claims the purpose of dividing people into color segments as a necessary (evil?) to “identify and help minority groups.”

Labels, however, tend to bring a set of distinguishing characteristics, so once a person is labeled he or she is expected to be a certain way and behave accordingly to what is known of one of their kind.

The problem with selling a generic “Hispanic” identity is that it often results in overgeneralizing a population that is hardly alike.

And what does labeling people for socio-political advocacy purposes have to do with marketing anyway? Is it useful for a marketer in the 21st century, where micromarketing is the mantra, with a tendency toward segmentation by lifestyle, shopping patterns and media behavior? How useful can it be for a marketer to target a group of highly diverse “Hispanic” people who view different media, have different language preferences, upbringings, cultural backgrounds, socio-economic and educational attainment levels, nationalities, looks, religious beliefs, political views and lifestyles?

A racist outlook assumes that the human species can be meaningfully divided into races. If in marketing, we divide consumers by “race or ethnicity” — and typically ask consumers in survey questions like which of the following do you consider your race to be: white, black, Hispanic or Asian? — doesn’t that come dangerously close to this definition of racism?

Segmenting human beings by race (or ethnic group) has a purpose of dividing people into superior from inferior — majority from minority. This treads into the institutionalized purpose of racism: categorizing people for the purpose of social and economic gain.

While Latin American marketing research organizations are getting together to work toward a standardized consumer segmentation system that is based on socio-economic and consumer behavioral differences, what does that say about the U.S. color-race-based segmentation system?

If there are more consumer behavior and lifestyle similarities across racial and ethnic barriers, why the insistence on practicing a color-race-based system? Something is not right, and it is limiting our ability to reach marketing excellence.