| 000 |
The Melting Blog
Where Marketing Meets Culture
"What's A Blog?"
Friday, November 14, 2003
Battle of the Sexes
OK, peep this. Dodge is set to launch a series of racy ads
for Durango with the line: "Yeah, Size Does Matter" to be selectivey
aired on late-night TV and posted in sport joints across the country.
From today's Wall
Street Journal:
Ms. Roehm isn't worried that the racy poster ad will be
a turnoff for women, although it has scored somewhat more
negatively with women than with men in market testing. "There's
nothing in here that indicates it's not a home-run advertisement,"
Ms. Roehm says.
But Dodge has another set of ads for the Durango, aimed
at women. In a series of five ads from Omnicom Group's BBDO
Detroit, Chrysler's lead agency, Dodge uses a suburban couple
to emphasize that the vehicle has the comfort and convenience
women want.
Notably, the racy ads were developed by Global Hue, a
multicultural advertising agency. Hmm... can this be another example
of "crossover
creative"?
Posted by Thomas Tseng,
5:30 pm
Border Codes vs. Market Values
Now this is fascinating. I've been kinda, sorta following how
new security measures required by the Patriot Act would impact
U.S.-Mexico border issues. Not surprisingly, I suppose, the new
precautionary procedures have been frequently used as justification
to impede the tide of illegal immigration coming from Mexico.
So what have been the results? Well, according to this
Associated Press investigation, tighter border restrictions
imposed by the federal government since 9/11 have wreaked chaos
for trade and tourism alike. An additional $400 million federal
infusion and thousands of new border patrol officers and customs
agents later, results suggest they have hardly made a difference.
While the Border Patrol says the fewer apprehensions indicate
slowing migration, the number of illegal migrants in the United
States doesn't appear to be dropping.
Victor Clark, a Tijuana anthropologist who studies migration,
said that if illegal migrants weren't getting in, there would
be a severe labor shortage in farms along the U.S. West Coast,
where Mexican migrants make up much of the labor force. There
isn't.
In fact, some figures indicate the number of illegal immigrants
may be rising. The money Mexicans send home from the United
States, often used as an indicator of Mexican migration to
the north, reached a record $12 billion this year, compared
with $10 billion last year.
On
a related note, the billions being pumped from Mexican immigrants
back home is hardly chump change and mainstream financial institutions
are taking notice. Since Wells Fargo announced they would accept
identification cards issued by Mexican consulates back in November
2001, they
have opened more than a quarter million new accounts. Many
other banking institutions have followed suit, including, notably,
Bank of America and Citibank---both of whom have acquired major
stakes in Mexican banks to capture the lucrative cross-border
remittances flow.
In
fact, this past summer, the U.S. banking industry furiously lobbied
the U.S. Treasury Department to allow them to continue accepting
matricula consular cards as a valid form of ID---allowing otherwise
undocumented Mexican immigrants the ability to open up bank accounts
and operate legitimate financial transactions. All this, despite
the heightened security atmosphere. From the Wall
Street Journal (9/18/03):
Banking groups insist the consular ID, by creating a paper
trail of financial transactions by Mexican workers, ultimately
ensures more security, not less.
"You never know with politics, but the facts are clear:
If the federal government wants us to know our customer, the
only way to do that is the matricula card," said Steve Bartlett,
president of the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington-based
organization that represents some of the U.S.'s largest financial
groups.
U.S. financial institutions are plowing ahead, not by compromising
national security, but simply out of recognition of legitimate
market opportunity. By doing so, they are bridging access to mainstream
financial services to a burgeoning new generation of consumers.
We will continue to track how this gradually enhances their economic
choices.
Posted by Thomas Tseng,
5:05 pm
Tuesday, November 10, 2003
Crossover Creative
Interesting article from last
week's Miami Herald about the push from companies to make
their ethnic advertising work for their general marketing campaigns.
Relevant grafs:
From Volkswagen to Procter & Gamble to McDonald's,
major advertisers are increasingly looking to use their ethnic
advertising to reach the mainstream market as the lines among
consumer groups are starting to blur, experts said Monday.
---
Examples of crossover creative
range from Procter & Gamble's airing a Spanish-language
commercial on prime-time network television to Subway restaurants
reworking a Hispanic ad for the general market. McDonald's
expanded the use of a radio ad featuring a black comedian
to the mainstream market.
Bonita Coleman-Stewart, director
of Chrysler brand communications for DaimlerChrysler, said
her company was reviewing all advertising to determine whether
any spots can work for other consumer demographics.
"As a marketer, we're looking
for good ideas," she said. "It does create a lot of angst
for the agencies, but it drives them to creative excellence."
Angst indeed. It will be worthwhile to observe whether this
drives a broader trend that creates increasing competition between
ethnic and general advertising agencies.
Posted by Thomas Tseng,
3:54 pm
Monday, November 9, 2003
Clutterlines: Hispanic, Black, White, or What?
Among the most frequent questions I get after presenting at
conferences and discussing the U.S. Hispanic consumer market are
of the nature: "Why do you make a distinction between Hispanics
and non-Hispanic whites?" "You mean Hispanics are not considered
a race?" "How can Hispanics be considered an ethnicity but not
a race?"
More often than not, I probably go into far too much detail
trying to explicate the complex nature of Hispanic identity and
culture--too much detail for marketers seeking a simple solution
to their marketing strategies anyway. So, I'm happy to report
that yesterday's
front page story in the New York Times provides a more than
adequate explanation for how America's largest ethnic group identify
themselves--and their fluid notions of racial self-identification.
Here's a sampling:
Like many Hispanic Americans, Ms. Rodriguez does not think
of herself as black or white. "I acknowledge I have both black
and white ancestry in me, but I choose to label myself in
nonracial terms: Latina. Hispanic. Puerto Rican. Nuyorican,"
Ms. Rodriguez, 31, said. "I feel that being Latina implies
mixed racial heritage, and I wish more people knew that. Why
should I have to choose?
---
Now members of the United States' largest minority group,
the nation's 38.8 million Hispanics, nearly half of them immigrants,
harbor notions of race that are as varied as their Spanish
and that often clash with the more bipolar views of many other
Americans.
White? Black? Try "moreno," "trigueno" or "indio," terms
that indicate skin shades and ancestry and accommodate several
hues.
The article delves into the imperfect nature of U.S. Census
classifications in categorizing a group of people who, though
they may share cultural and linguistic affinities, are otherwise
not bound by the existing racial taxonomy.
This heterogeneity has stumped the Census Bureau. In its
2000 count, almost half the Hispanic respondents refused to
identify themselves by any of the five standard racial categories
on the census forms: white, black, Asian, American Indian
or Alaska native and a category that includes natives of Hawaii
and the Pacific Islands. The agency has since been surveying
Hispanics to find a way to pinpoint them racially.
This account clearly demonstrates the conundrum challenging
the Census Bureau. But I don't think it will ever clear up the
imperfections of racial classifications anytime soon. By definition,
the Hispanic population is one that is the most dynamic and continually
evolving among all U.S. ethnic groups. For this reason, Hispanics
will continue to redefine and jumble America's racial lexicon---which
will have a shifting influence in how companies market to them
as a consumer segment.
Lastly, the Times article goes even a little further by
peering into what the next generation of young Hispanics might
look like. Here, these sensibilities echo the "post-ethnic" themes
explored in my
article earlier this summer.
In Los Angeles, where Hispanics are the largest ethnic
group, Ms. Arza-Goderich said she and her husband, who is
also Cuban, have never discussed with their three sons "whether
they are white, or moreno or what," she said.
"Race takes a back seat to what they listen to on their
CD players, what movies they see," she said. "One is into
Japanese anime. Another is immersed in rap. Basically it's
the ghetto culture, but ghetto doesn't mean poor or deprived,
but hip."
Her 16-year-old, Ray, has adopted a hip-hop persona and
hangs out with Vietnamese, Indian, Chicano, white and black
friends. Ms. Arza-Goderich said most of them had Asian girlfriends.
Read the whole article here
(registration required, but it's free). How does this impact ethnic
marketing, you ask? Stay tuned, more to come…
Posted by Thomas Tseng,
10:15 am
|
|
