Interesting that of all the models available to MSNBC’s ad agency, they chose a black male model to represent the tag line “we are catalysts for your brand” and “MSNBC Change Makers.” This is fantastic to see.
Archive for April, 2009
MSNBC and Black Models
Sunday, April 26th, 2009Wealthy Blacks are Latest Target for NationsBank
Monday, April 20th, 2009
This is a reprint of a 1996 article featured in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on how one brand seized a targeted marketing opportunity. I felt that it was important reprint in order to express to marketers what is possible. It’s a brilliant example of how they acted on the opportunity, tracked the results and used every marketing platform from PR to event marketing to execute the plan. And this dates back to 1996. Just imagine the increased significance of the opportunity today.
NationsBank Corp. is pushing into Atlanta with an unusual strategy: The bank has singled out wealthy black professionals as its next round of target customers.
Many banks have pursued niches — such as professional athletes — in private banking. “But I just don’t know of anyone else targeting African-Americans that way,” said a spokesperson with the American Bankers Association in Washington.
NationsBank honed in on the group’s lucrative demographics about a year ago and started looking for ways to hook its members, said Shedrick L. Barber, the national coordinator for a unit the bank calls Professional African-American Market Development.
The market is huge. “We found that this group has an annual purchasing power of $427 billion, and it’s growing,” Barber said. There are more than 1 million black households in which one member makes at least $50,000 a year, and what matters even more to NationsBank, 75 percent of those are in the Southeast, according to its research.
“We found a new customer in our back yard,” he said.
His unit was designed to lure customers to NationsBank through what is increasingly known as “relationship banking.” Barber gathers a team of bankers in each market to work with prospective customers on their specific needs, pulling expertise from different parts of the company’s operations.
But the bank’s strategy has been to work from the top down, rather than starting one-on-one. Barber has gone after deals with larger groups to spread his message more quickly. In fact, one of the unit’s first loans brought the headquarters of Omega Psi Phi, a national black fraternity, to DeKalb County from Washington, D.C.
First Southern Bank, a minority-owned community bank based in Lithonia, actually heard about the deal first. But the $2.5 million loan needed by Omega Psi Phi exceeded the $46 million-asset bank’s legal lending limit, said First Southern CEO James E. Young. So the two banks wound up working together, closing the deal with the fraternity last December.
Since then, NationsBank has concentrated its efforts elsewhere, although it has found Atlanta customers at professional conventions in other cities, Barber said. “Most people assume we’ve been marketing heavily in Atlanta, but we bypassed it during the Olympics. Now, we’re coming back. If not in the fourth quarter, in the first quarter [1997].”
The unit could provide formidable competition. It has booked $148 million in 37 deals through September, and Barber said he has almost $500 million in business in his pipeline, including mortgage loans, franchise financing, securities and other products.
He has found much of that business by marketing the unit at national meetings of black professional associations — often held in Atlanta. In April, NationsBank was the title sponsor of the first Black Enterprise Magazine Entrepreneurs Conference, attended by more than 500 black business owners. The day Barber sent a team of executives into the crowd, he received 84 voice mail messages, he said.
And Barber has reached marketing agreements with several other groups, including the Black Automobile Dealers Association.
The bank has also worked out deals with groups to exchange services for access to potential customers. Its alliance with Meharry Medical College could lure business from alumni of the Nashville, Tenn., medical school — a top producer of black doctors. NationsBank’s private banking unit has offered workshops to alumni in financial planning, and the bank is developing an affinity credit card.
“The people I’m talking to could get their deals done anywhere,” Barber said. But they usually don’t tend to their finances as they should unless a banker seeks them out, he found from observing his and his wife’s friends. The Barbers are black professionals who live in Charlotte, N.C., and Dr. Mary Lindsay-Barber is a pediatrician.
Another part of his job is pure public relations, Shedrick Barber said. “We find we have a lot to overcome in terms of the bank’s reputation for serving African-Americans.” Barber worked in NationsBank’s community investment division, which focuses on low-income lending, before shifting market segments last year. He defends the bank’s new effort as an aggressive way to seek out customers who often are unfamiliar with NationsBank’s products, and he insists that it will not deter community reinvestment work.
Minority-owned banks, such as First Southern, acknowledge their most profitable customers fit the description now wanted by NationsBank. “We recognize that a 200-pound gorilla can sit anywhere he wants,” said First Southern’s Young
The Black Socialite TM: Kim Heirston featured in Town & County Magazine
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
“While flipping through the May edition of Town & County Magazine, I was pleasantly excited to see Black faces galore. There is a nice photo spread on The Studio Museum of Harlem’s Annual Gala and a lengthy story on the semi-elusive art dealer/socialite Kim Heirston (who allows T&C a view into her Bridgehampton home that she shares with hubby Richard Evans).”
Great to know that T&C is progressing the agenda.
Black Women and a Black Model, Increase Cosmetic Sales
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
“This is why Liya’s Kebede’s Estee Lauder contract was such a big deal and one cannily planned by her agency. We really pushed Liya as a beautiful woman, not a beautiful black woman,” says Bart. Meanwhile, Estee Lauder president Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne had been looking for a way to update and broaden the brand’s appeal, concerned that its image had become fusty and middle-aged. “The choice of Liya herself was first linked to her style and personality,” he says. “But she also makes the image of the brand hipper and more fashion forward. You can’t have a single white face express the diversity of the world today.” And certainly not the diversity of the U.S. by some estimates, black women account for 19% of all cosmetics sales in the country. Estee Lauder has expanded the range of makeup shades it offers, and Liya’s ads will appear not only in publications like Essence, targeted at black readers, but also in W and Vogue.
Kebede’s big break came when Tom Ford asked her for an exclusive contract for his Gucci Fall/Winter 2000 fashion show. Kebede’s popularity in the fashion industry sky-rocketed when she appeared on the cover of the May 2002 edition of Paris Vogue which dedicated the entire issue to her.
According to Keke Cargill, Assistant Store Manager, Elizabeth Arden NYC:
“Ethnic skin reigns in different hues from dark chocolate to milky white. With the realization of this unique quality most beauty empires have started to place ethnic models in ad campaigns. When Estee Lauder added Ethiopian model Liya Kebede they noticed an increase in their foundation shades and also expanded on darker palette of shades for all the affluent women of color that started swamping their beauty counters. Christian Dior, YSL Beaute, and others have taken notice and acted as well.
We at Elizabeth Arden understand that we have an underserved clientele that we intend on paying more attention to. Hosting and organizing a recent event for Diversity Affluence at our 691 5th Ave location with African American only guests was a huge success, and the first of many we are planning.”
This sort of progress is encouraging!
How One Black Model Increased Cosmetic Sales
Sunday, April 19th, 2009“This is why Liya’s Kebede’s Estee Lauder contract was such a big deal and one cannily planned by her agency. We really pushed Liya as a beautiful woman, not a beautiful black woman,” says Bart. Meanwhile, Estee Lauder president Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne had been looking for a way to update and broaden the brand’s appeal, concerned that its image had become fusty and middle-aged. “The choice of Liya herself was first linked to her style and personality,” he says. “But she also makes the image of the brand hipper and more fashion forward. You can’t have a single white face express the diversity of the world today.” And certainly not the diversity of the U.S. by some estimates, black women account for 19% of all cosmetics sales in the country. Estee Lauder has expanded the range of makeup shades it offers, and Liya’s ads will appear not only in publications like Essence, targeted at black readers, but also in W and Vogue.
Kebede’s big break came when Tom Ford asked her for an exclusive contract for his Gucci Fall/Winter 2000 fashion show. Kebede’s popularity in the fashion industry sky-rocketed when she appeared on the cover of the May 2002 edition of Paris Vogue which dedicated the entire issue to her.
According to Keke Cargill, Assistant Store Manager, Elizabeth Arden NYC:
“Ethnic skin reigns in different hues from dark chocolate to milky white. With the realization of this unique quality most beauty empires have started to place ethnic models in ad campaigns. When Estee Lauder added Ethiopian model Liya Kebede they noticed an increase in their foundation shades and also expanded on darker palette of shades for all the affluent women of color that started swamping their beauty counters. Christian Dior, YSL Beaute, and others have taken notice and acted as well.
We at Elizabeth Arden understand that we have an underserved clientele that we intend on paying more attention to. Hosting and organizing a recent event for Diversity Affluence at our 691 5th Ave location with African American only guests was a huge success, and the first of many we are planning.”
This sort of progress is encouraging!
Caribbean Nationals Represent $16.3 Billion in Buying Power
Friday, April 17th, 2009It is no secret that the power of the diverse markets in the U.S. has gained in recent years. The minority is fast becoming the majority but while the focus has been on the power of the Hispanic, black and Asian markets, lost in the mix is the ethnically diverse, economically viable, Caribbean American market or West Indians, as they’re dubbed by the U.S. governmental agencies.
So why is this diverse group ignored? Mainly because there is no self-identifying category on the U.S. Census form that allows them to truly count their numbers even though they have lived in the U.S. since slavery. Subsequently, most largely either ignore the form or are counted as African American or Asian American, given the preponderance of both blacks and Indo-Caribbean nationals from the English-speaking region, home to millions.
Of course, the Caribbean also includes people from the French, Dutch, Spanish and English-speaking Caribbean nations, including Haiti, Guadeloupe, Suriname, Aruba, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and even Belize, which is a member of the Caribbean Community. This includes of course the descendants of first generation migrants, with some studies putting the total population at over 20 million nationally.
While the U.S. Census agrees from its conservative estimates based largely on the American Community Survey, that this group of foreign-born are less than three million, despite the fact that millions alone show up at the Labor Day carnival on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, NY, there is no denying their rising affluence as part of the diverse marketplace, based on their income levels reported, education and surveys of their spending power.
The `West Indian American` or Caribbean American population now accounts for nearly one –third of the African American population in the U.S. Yet they remain culturally distinct and economically, are fast moving on up, with some studies even positing that this upward mobility is happening at a faster rate when compared to native-born African Americans.
The Black Diversity Study from the University at Albany, State University of New York states that Caribbean migrants are owning homes and sending their children to college at a higher rate than the African American population. The study also states that this group enthusiastically becoming a sizable portion of America’s middle-class voting population.
Even the U.S. Census 2000 shows the Caribbean American community is economically viable and growing at a faster rate than African Americans. Across the U.S., they number close to three million and are mainly women. Nationally, they can be found from Schenectady, in upstate New York to Seattle and even West Virginia. Caribbean Americans are flocking to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Chicago, California, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Florida cities, such as West Palm Beach, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Tampa, and Orlando. They represent 1,294,000 households in the U.S., with an average size of 3.01 versus 2.62 for U.S. born citizens.
In New York City alone, they account for approximately one –third of the city’s immigrants – that’s more than one –in – five of the foreign –born population in the city. The median age of the Caribbean born (41.0 years) reflected a slightly older population than the overall foreign-born population (37.5 years) in 2000.
AND THEY ARE SPENDING IN BILLIONS!
Some 40 percent of community alone is credited with contributing over $8 billion in remittances ANNUALLY to economies in the Caribbean region. And that’s including the over 600 million they spend in remittance fees as well.
Studies say since Caribbean nationals represent such a huge portion of the African American market alone, their buying power is close to $16.3 billion, making them a significant affluent diverse group.
A CaribWorldNews analysis of the latest foreclosure data from RealtyTrac staffers show that while there was an increase in foreclosure rates, Caribbean populated cities in states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, Philadelphia and Massachusetts are largely exempt from the crisis.
ABOUT HARD BEAT COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
Hard Beat Communications is the only US-based marketing agency that specializes in the Caribbean market place while also serving as a booking agency for the South Asian & Latin American markets. The Caribbean-owned, minority-certified company does this through full service advertising & PR campaigns that includes media buys, culturally sensitive creatives, grass roots & event promotions, digital marketing, event planning, & through its news & PR wire, CaribWorldNews & CaribPRWire.com, respectively. Visit Hardbeatcommunications.com
A very special thank you to Felicia Persaud of Hard Beat Communications for providing the above data.
Wealthy Ethnic Consumer: Purchasing Power Insight for Luxury Marketers
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
The United States will be experiencing a significant change in the racial and ethnic makeup of its citizens over the next 10 years. Economic experts have made these projections in the past, yet there seems to be a slow response in mainstream marketing to reach these groups with products and services that will target their income levels. The fact that there are wealthy minorities in the country is not a secret; the desire or will to target this consumer market has had a slow response. However, the company that is willing to begin targeting its products and/or services to this market segment will find that they have an advantage over their competitors.
One tool that will help companies focus their efforts on wealthy minorities is the Diversity Affluence 2009 Economist Report. This report provides research and data on population estimates, income levels and the purchasing power of minority groups such as African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans. Marketing departments can use this report as the ground work for developing a marketing plan. The affluent market is defined as those with a household annual income of $75,000 or more. A program developed to reach affluent customers must consider the different levels of wealth, and how to target each group. This is why clearly identifying each group and knowing how they think is important, and the Diversity Affluence 2009 Economist Report will assist your marketing department with this process.
The purchasing power of wealthy minorities is unbelievable, which makes it hard to imagine why they have been invisible to mainstream marketing for so long. From 1991 to 2000, the buying power for affluent African-Americans increased by 150 percent and 126 percent for Hispanics during the same period. Even though economists and marketers define affluence based on a person’s income level, many affluent consumers do not identify themselves as being rich. They consider their lives comfortable, and shop for value with a good price. Many affluent minorities will pay extra for convenience; however, they are happier if they can get a bargain.
Learning the size and scope of the market is part of the goal of the Diversity Affluence 2009 Economist Report. Marketers would be wise to purchase this report ($495) in order to start planning their 2010 strategies. Their numbers will continue to increase, even as the country is going through an economic downturn. This is the group that retailers want to see shopping more. Motivating these wealthy prospects will help sales to flourish again.
Wealthy African Americans
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Groundbreaking Strategic Insights Paper Now Available. 39 pages of insight for luxury brands and luxury retailers. Only $895 (includes 1 hour of complimentary phone consulting).
Marketing to Affluent African Americans - Strategic Insights for Reaching an Untapped Market. This groundbreaking Strategic Insights Paper is a collaborative effort between Diversity Affluence and UPTOWN Magazine. It serves to provide expert insight into how to market to the affluent African American consumer segment, also known as African American Royaltons™ (AARs). Its purpose is to educate and validate those who will benefit most from the information: luxury marketers and retailers; brand managers; agencies; and the media.
These insights give the reader a clear and authentic view into this powerful group of consumers’ attitudes and opinions, media and marketing preferences, and shopping and buying habits.
DMNews: Marketers look closer at black consumers and find segmentation opportunities within
Monday, April 6th, 2009President Obama is making his mark with large spending bills and a unique approach to leadership, but he’s also creating subtler effects in the world of marketing by bringing African-Americans into the spotlight as a consumer segment. Lexus, for example, has started targeting black women with ads for its luxury hybrids, and Amtrak recently launched an Acela Express campaign aimed at blacks and Latinos.
“Since the election of President Obama, there is more curiosity about the African American consumer and their behavior on behalf of marketers,” says Esther Franklin, EVP, director of cultural identities for Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG)’s multicultural unit, SMG Multicultural.
“The whole Obama phenomenon should make it easier for marketers to embrace multicultural and diversity in advertising,” adds Sonya Grier, associate professor of marketing at American University.
Of course, Obama can’t be held solely responsible for this renewed interest in marketing specifically to black consumers. The tight economy — which is driving marketers to target more tightly — combined with improvements in the data and analytics space also may be playing a role in this increased focus on a particular segment of the population.
“It is part of the trend towards segmented targeted marketing to all identifiable consumer groups,” explains Sid Liebenson, EVP, director of marketing, Draftfcb. “The African-American market is not a small or insignificant market in most product categories, so it behooves marketers to understand the marketplace better and look at more relevant ways to connect with the community.”
Even with more data coming in, getting to know African-Americans as a consumer group is a difficult process. The group, which makes up approximately 14% of the US population, is certainly not homogenous. To reach diverse groups within the community, marketers need to research carefully.
“One of the biggest things is to understand the consumer and make sure that the value proposition is relevant,” Grier points out. “Marketers may use stereotypes based on what they believe these consumers want, but it’s not a monolithic market. Segmenting within the group may prove to be more successful. Hip hop [might appeal to] a certain age group or psychographic group, but it’s not all African-Americans.”
In-depth segmentation of African-Americans is sprouting up, like with SMG’s Beyond Demographics initiative. Launched in 2007, Beyond Demographics has done extensive research into the black population, segmenting the group into 12 psychographic divisions with names like “buppies,” “nomads” and “activists.” Lattimer Communications, too, has created six psychographic profiles for black women, including “achievers,” “traditionals” and “cynics.”
However, Lattimer also released a study in February revealing that 86% of African-American women still feel that advertisers do not know how to speak to them.
“A majority of blacks fall within the middle class, and we often forget them, and they often feel that advertisers are not talking to them,” says Leylha Ahuile, senior multicultural expert for research company Mintel. “Targeting advertising to blacks is not about using black people in your ad, it’s about the cultural understanding. What is the message or trigger point?”
As African-American and other minority populations grow, it is essential for marketers to understand these cultural trigger points and build relationships with diverse consumer groups. Ahuile says that in 2050 about half the US population will be “multicultural,” and the buying power of African American consumers is projected to reach $1.2 trillion by the year 2012.
“There’s a lot more understanding that needs to happen,” Franklin said. “The power of the African American consumer dollar is only growing, and we all know our country is growing more multicultural as we speak. Multicultural influences have huge impacts on society in general, and for that reason it’s important for advertisers to have a more complete understanding of what the implications are for their brands and services.”
