16966: Drinking The Inclusivity Kool-Aid…?

MediaPost published a perspective titled: Inclusivity Is Business 101.

 

Okay, except the advertising business has mastered Exclusivity 101.

 

Plus, it’s odd that MediaPost illustrated the op-ed with the image depicted above featuring a Black man at a segregated water fountain—during Black History Month to boot.

 

Inclusivity Is Business 101

 

By J. Walker Smith, Op-Ed Contributor

 

From all my years in research and consulting, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing worth sharing. Enduring fundamentals, mostly—yet often overlooked. So, over the course of my biweekly column this year, I want to share some snippets for your consideration. I hope they’re helpful.

 

This week’s thought: Inclusivity is business 101.

 

Brands get bigger by selling to more people. The only way to add more people is to have an appeal that is inclusive of everybody. Inclusivity is the fundamental requirement of brand growth. Which makes inclusivity business 101.

 

Put another way, the biggest brands offer something that everybody wants to buy. By definition. That’s why they’re big. And because they sell to everybody, they are inherently inclusive. Everybody is included as a customer.

 

Universal appeal doesn’t necessarily mean a universal message or benefit, though. It just means that everyone can find a connection with a brand, one that is valuable to them. It need not be the same connection for everybody, but everybody needs a connection. The biggest brands have figured out how to make their franchises accessible and welcoming to a full panorama of consumers.

 

A big challenge in doing so is that inclusivity sits at the intersection of commercial and social priorities. Generally, the commercial imperative of inclusivity makes brands a leveling force of unity and integration, even if sometimes a reluctant one. But not always. During the Jim Crow era, for example, restaurants would sell to everybody with one entrance for white people and another for black people. So, while inclusivity as a commercial principle puts brands in a unique position relative to social priorities, it does not equate automatically with social justice.

 

Nevertheless, brands are attuned to social issues and, by and large, try to do what’s fair and respectful for everybody. Brands are motivated to get it right because when brands get it wrong, they find themselves in the crosshairs of controversy. And controversy is bad for brands.

 

Controversy risks conflict. Conflict will almost assuredly alienate part of a brand’s prospect and customer base, thereby choking off the growth potential of inclusivity. Growth is first and foremost for brands, so the profit motive is an engine of inclusivity.

 

This is why brands and politics are a bad match. The models don’t align. Politicians win with one more vote, so divide-and-conquer is a good strategy. Brands only win by selling to everybody. Brands must shy away from controversy, not invite it. It’s better commercially for brands to accommodate and conjoin differences than to discriminate, accuse, provoke or evangelize. Stitching diversity together in civil, uncontroversial ways is the superpower of big brands.

 

Every brand targets; most brands segment. Many brands have plenty of upside growth potential within a niche or specialty. But this doesn’t mean that inclusivity isn’t relevant. It points instead to the way that the best brands do their knitting. They deliver a compelling solution for a shared problem, whether niche or mass, thus bringing together diverse groups in need or want of the same benefit. Brands being better brands makes for inclusivity.

 

It’s okay for brands to deliver demographically or culturally or economically specific communications. Just not controversial communications. Of course, this moment in time has made it harder than ever to duck controversy, but that just calls for better insights, more testing, better tracking and more real-time response. It’s not easy, but it’s not outside the ken of what brands do in the ordinary course of business.

 

This may be a riskier moment, but there is never a moment for writing off potential customers, either by walking away from them or by estranging them. Brands must stay current and inventive in order to figure out fresh ways of being inclusive without getting punished by controversy, conflict or politics.

 

In today’s fraught atmosphere of political division and social discord, brands offer a counterpoint of inclusivity, a recipe to study and follow. Because inclusivity is business 101.

8168: Racism Is Alive And Well.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Racism is hardly a thing of the past

By Jesse Jackson

Is Jim Crow back? Are African Americans, particularly African-American men, once more suffering systematic discrimination on the basis of race—a discrimination that locks them out of equal rights and basic citizenship?

The question is incendiary—and seems unreal. This is the post-racial America, where an African American can be elected president. Overt expression of racism is no longer socially acceptable. So, how could anyone allege the revival of Jim Crow laws, the laws that locked blacks into a permanent underclass under segregation?

Listen to the hard logic offered by Michelle Alexander, a law professor and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness. Professor Alexander makes the following points:

• More African Americans are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

• More black men were disenfranchised in 2004 than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

• More than half of working-age African-American men in major urban areas—according to one report, as much as 80 percent in Chicago—have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination.

These staggering figures aren’t because African Americans are more prone to violence and crime. As Alexander points out, incarceration rates are not related to the rate of criminal activity. Crime is at a relatively low level in recent years, but incarceration has remained high.

The primary reason for our high rates of incarceration is the war on drugs. The courts have given police a virtual exemption from the Fourth Amendment in the war on drugs. This freedom to stop, search, seize and arrest clearly has discriminatory effects.

This drug war has been waged intensively almost completely in communities of color, even though studies show that drug use is remarkably similar across racial lines. The use of drugs isn’t much different, but young African-American men are stopped more often, searched more often, arrested more often and prosecuted more often.

This isn’t about drug-related violence or even about major traffickers. Alexander cites studies that in 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, while only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. Most of the increase in incarcerated drug offenders came from marijuana use, a drug widely available on campuses across America.

These are stunning facts. The U.S. has developed a prison-industrial complex—with private prison companies listed on the stock exchange—that, in Professor Alexander’s words, “locks an extraordinary percentage of our population—a group largely defined by race—into permanent, second-class status for life.”

Yet, this system is largely immune from constitutional challenge. The courts have decided that overwhelming evidence of the discriminatory effect of policies—the fact that African Americans are deprived of their rights for life in disproportionate numbers—is not sufficient. Proof of conscious, intentional racial bias in intent and action must be shown.

The result is shocking—yet is accepted largely in silence. The drug war, the court system, the privatized prison-industrial complex have provided the means of disenfranchising African Americans in large number.

This has implications in elections, in juries, and in school and poverty subsidies. Clearly it is time to end the silence—and confront the reality.

5762: Apologies In Da House.

From The Associated Press…

House formally apologizes to black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow era

By Jim Abrams | Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Tuesday issued an unprecedented apology to black Americans for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws.

“Today represents a milestone in our nation’s efforts to remedy the ills of our past,” said Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The resolution, passed by voice vote, was the work of Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, the only white lawmaker to represent a majority black district. Cohen faces a formidable black challenger in a primary face-off next week.

Congress has issued apologies before — to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II and to native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893. In 2005, the Senate apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching laws.

Five states have issued apologies for slavery, but past proposals in Congress have stalled, partly over concerns that an apology would lead to demands for reparations — payment for damages.

The Cohen resolution does not mention reparations. It does commit the House to rectifying “the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.”

It says that Africans forced into slavery “were brutalized, humiliated, dehumanized and subjected to the indignity of being stripped of their names and heritage” and that black Americans today continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws that fostered discrimination and segregation.

The House “apologizes to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow.”

“Slavery and Jim Crow are stains upon what is the greatest nation on the face of the earth,” Cohen said. Part of forming a more perfect union, he said, “is such a resolution as we have before us today where we face up to our mistakes and apologize as anyone should apologize for things that were done in the past that were wrong.”

Cohen became the first white to represent the 60 percent black district in Memphis in more than three decades when he captured a 2006 primary where a dozen black candidates split the vote. He has sought to reach out to his black constituents, and early in his term showed interest in joining the Congressional Black Caucus until learning that was against caucus rules.

Another of his first acts as a freshman congressman in early 2007 was to introduce the slavery apology resolution. His office said that the House resolution was brought to the floor only after learning that the Senate would be unable to join in a joint resolution.

More than a dozen of the 42 Congressional Black Caucus members in the House were original co-sponsors of the measure. The caucus has not endorsed either Cohen or his chief rival, attorney Nikki Tinker, in the Memphis primary, although Cohen is backed by several senior members, including Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. Tinker is the former campaign manager of Harold Ford, Jr., who held Cohen’s seat until he stepped down in an unsuccessful run for the Senate in 2006.