Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The real measure of success


If any marketing folks out there come across this post, please chime in.

This comes from a client presentation I was party to a couple of months ago.

(This also comes from my notebook of posts I was planning to make this past summer.)

You work for "Company A" making widgets.

You are in competition against Companies B, C & D.

Is it a common measure of your brand's success and reputation in the marketplace by comparing the percentage of buyers that are "Caucasian" for each of the four brands?

So if 75% of Brand C's buyers are Caucasian and 50% of Brand A's buyers are Caucasian, Brand C is the stronger brand.

Is that normal?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

NO! H*LL no, this is not normal and it's unmitigated racism. I have never seen such a practice. It's almost as if they have gone out of there way to stress an entirely irrelevant point. A sell is a sell regardless of the color of the hand that put the dollar in yours. Unless they are selling tanning beds or tanning oil there is no real reason to stress this.

HighJive said...

technically, it does depend on what the widget really is. also, what are the market positions of each company? also, who is making the presentation and why? too many x factors.

Franklin said...

I see your point HJ.

For me, it just seemed like it was out of left field and unrelated to anything in the category or in the presentation.

Anonymous said...

I have sat through lengthy, insanely detailed dissections of the target by demographic, psychographic, postal code, zzzz...

never, ever, has skin colour been presented as a stat.

Having said that, I HAVE had clients reject models or stock photos because of race. Not because the client's racist, of course, but just because "it doesn't represent our core demographic."

You can imagine how surprised I was to learn that black people don't use telephones.