Responsibilities of businesses in supporting online activism against white privilege

These days I have been overwhelmed by the two names: Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I heard about them on the TV, I read their stories on the Internet. What I wanna talk about today is white privilege and online activism. Activism is known as intentional action to bring about social and political changes which is similar to advocacy or speaking on behalf of groups usually in relation to legislative changes. The kind of activism associated with social media today is known as online activism, which are totally different from the “traditional” activism. While the “traditional” activism is built on strong relationship among activists, online activism is dependent on weak ties. Doing activism online “seldom leads to high-risk activism”. (Gladwell, 2010). It does not require people to take “financial or personal risk”, and you also don’t have to “confront socially entrenched norms and practices”, so it might involve a larger number of people. 

The topic of racism in general and white privilege in particular has been ignored for a time because of the belief in the existence of post racial society (To remind you, that is the time when people of color no longer have to face the obstacle of race. The inequality in the society now is thought to exist because of the economic or political reasons, and does not base on ethnicity anymore. Privilege is defined as particular advantages, permissions, rights or benefits that just an individual, class or caste could afford. This means that when the white has privilege, they have access to many things that people of other skin colors don’t). However, because the real problem has not been solved, activists once again raise the awareness of people about the existing issue. 
But this time, “the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism”.(Gladwell, 2010), they used another tools, that is social media in general and in this case, Twitter in particular.  Twitter seems to be a more effective channel to do the online activism because it has unique advantages of speed, the short reporting structure, the ease of use and egalitarianism (Marfo, 2014) On Twitter, there are some typical hashtags might be considered resistant to the the racism and white privilege:
#Fegurson: The hashtag is used to express people’s anger to the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson. The hashtags shows the opposition of people to the white privilege and the inequality justice system which allows white police officer to do such action with black people. It calls for change in polices in particular and the equality for the black in general.

#Iftheygunnedmedown : The hashtags is used to criticize the biased media portrayal of Michael Brown in particular and the black in general. In the case of Michael Brown, the boy was portrayed with the image as a “gang sign” instead of his true image in everyday life as a “gentle giant” or with any photo of him in daily activities.

#CrimingWhileWhite are created when grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer who put 43-year-old Eric Garner into a chokehold, killing the black man in New York City in July for selling untaxed cigarettes.

White privilege is why the black see the society with anger and struggle for justice and curse our unfair society, which drives them to create such hashtags to create a larger conversation. But why do companies should care about this? Companies should recognize the multiculturalism, diversity (awareness and appreciation of difference) and social justice (examine how systems impact individual) existing to not only support their business to have cultural competence (skill development for work across cultural lines) but also join the multicultural conversation as a part of the society. It is impossible for enterprises to join the conversation with hashtags on Twitter as an individual, but this does not mean that they have no other way to join it. In many of my blog posts, I have analyzed many cases of companies which fails to join the conversation by making mistakes in their ads or media products. For example, the biased portrayal of black people in the Suits series of Universal Cable Productions or in the Huffington Post, or the reinforce of white privilege when using most of white models in the ads of Triumph International Vietnam fanpage in particular and many other businesses  in general. What businesses could do is solving the problem of white privilege by their own power such as avoiding the reinforce of white privilege in their ads and supporting the multiculturalism in their organization like increasing the diversity of their staff.

Triumph International Vietnam on social network

When I want to buy a new bra for my mom, I decided to visit the Facebook fan page of Triumph to choose one whose name is “Triumph international Vietnam”. As many other businesses, Triumph run their fan page as one of the most effective channel to reach the customers. Many special events and promotion campaign are created on this social network only to attract customers to follow their fan page. However, there is a huge number of followers does not mean that you could make them keep buying your products.

The first impression of me is the cover of the page:

Every day on TV or magazines, I have seen a tons of photos of perfect model girls with long legs, sexy curves, and especially big busts. Of course such images are really charming and attractive that make customers want to buy the products. However, as an Asian girl, I don’t really expect and want to see that photos when I really need some “real” image to find a suitable products for myself. You know, bra is a “secret accessorize” of women which needs to fit perfectly to its owner. If I am finding my own bra, the illustration for such product is some kind of “biased” because the size of busts of white women and Asian women is much different. Looking at it, I don’t even realize that whether the product has the push-up part or not, or how its thickness is. I do believe that many Vietnamese will have some disappointment when they try a bra because what the products bring are not the same with what they really expected. But the point here is that you might feel it is acceptable to find such kind of image in an international web pages used for all customers over the world, but that should not be the case of the page of “Triumph international Vietnam”. The first problem here is that the target customers will not find much common thing between the model and themselves, which discourage them to buy the product. Secondly, the customers might find this kind of marketing like “cheating” them when they realize the differences between what is advertised and what is selling. The biggest problem in this case is that if the company still use the same images of white model for all markets they sell the products, they are wasting partly their effort in creating and managing different pages with the same content.

The second issue is that it is really hard for me to choose a suitable bra for my mom, not because they don’t have any, but because all the models are young. I don’t know what is exactly the type of bra that both young and older women could use when I look at those images. In this case I could see that the hegemonic standard of beauty is being reinforced greatly thanks to the development of the internet. Beauty is when you are white, you are young, you are thin and you have big busts! As a company providing products that makes the most sexy part of women become more attractive, Triumph should bear in mind that women in different ages with different shapes have their true value of beauty. By using such images, the company are eliminating a large number of customers with different ages and shapes.

People might think that Triumph aims to target young customers only when they use that image on Facebook fan page because young girls have more access and skills to the internet and especially social network. However, that is not true that people without access to the page should not be concerned because in fact people in marginalized group (in this case, that’s older women) still have capacity if they have the access. Do you want to lose a part of your customers when you still have suitable products for them but you have marginalized them from your advertisements? What if I never visit the page again to find bra for my mom just because I find no images of the product I am finding even when you still have it?

Facebook is a social network that allows you to have detailed demographic information of a part of your customers which helps you to do the specific segmentation. In some case it helps you know what exactly your customers love and what they are finding. The solution for Triumph, of course, is that if they want to take advantage of social network to create a network for specialized group, they should also think about taking advantage of such valuable sources of information. Triumph should turn their concerned of customer demand as said on the cover picture into not only products but also how they manage their advertisement on the page in particular and the whole page in general. By doing that they also could maximize their benefits when creating a specific fan page for each group of customers. Moreover, Triumph should find the purpose of using Facebook of customers in each market to know what they really want on such social network. If Facebook is used much for relationships only, the company might want to shift their effort to do marketing on other pages to save time and money. If Facebook is a site that people also want to buy things, they should know how to update their pages in a good frequency to attract the customers effectively. 

Heineken, you could do better than this !!!

Heineken is one of my favorite brand, though I am not their target customers and also do not drink beer at all. Each year, especially the time near holidays, I am excited to watch their advertisement on TV. I really love the combination between the creative content they create and the music they use in each TV commercial. It is really attractive and also impressive. However, Heineken still made mistake in their “seems-to-be-perfect” TV commercial. The typical example is one of their latest advertisings that I watched when I was in Vietnam.

We could find that drinkers in the ads come from different countries and are portrayed with different typical characteristics. The campaign shows that the company has seen the increase in multicultural buying power and what Heineken did here is trying to take advantage of multicultural opportunities which remain underleveraged and underfinanced in targeted and total market platform. That could be seen when they target customers from diffirent cultures including marginalized group such as Asian in their ads. In their casting, we also could see their attempts to bring the image of people from some specific countries into their commercial to make their TVC becomes familiar with some such group of customers. Moreover, they also show that they realize the importance of insight in making TVC to align better with the values, culture and the tradition of population they trying to reach. This could be seen in the way they emphasize the legend of all their drinkers in the ads. Another success of Heineken is that they have eliminated their limitation in sending their media messages to customers from different groups by not using any specific languages in the ads. However, people could easily realize that the images of characters here is a typical example of stereotypes.

In this post, I want to take a deeper look at the part of the TVC with the image of a kung fu assassin. I think that in this part, the target population of Heineken is the Asian in general, not the Chinese only. However, what they portrayed in the TVC is the legend of Chinese which is not really familiar with people from many Asian countries. As an Asian audience, I could bear no resemblance to this part. I find that Heineken failed to address the cultural awareness in this part because they did not corporate the values of their target customers (the Asian culture in this case) in their ads. The root cause might come from their unawareness of the Asian cultural value. Additionally, I have met a lot of people who think that Asian people are mainly as the same as Chinese which comes from the stereotype of people about Asian people. That might be the reason why Heineken only use the legend of Chinese in this ads, which eliminates a large number of their target population as Asian people. By doing this, the effectiveness of their TVC in reaching Asian customers reduces significantly.

Heineken seems to have no choice in correcting their mistakes in this ads right now. But what is more important is that they should never make this kind of mistake again if they do not want to lose their position as one of the most popular beer producer in the world. How could they maintain that position when they keep eliminating a large part of their customers? It is necessary to know and understand about your customers, but it is much more essential to understand deeply about them when you aim to specialize your advertisement to a specific group of consumers and maximizing the effectiveness of the ads. If Heineken want to address the message of "Open your world" as what they use in their slogan, the understanding of the real different worlds of customers is the first thing the company should keep in mind. Moreover, it is impossible for the them to target many groups of customers in one TVC. They might think about producing seperate TVC for specific group of people so that they could avoid both stereotypes of a big group and the wrong portrayal of their customers group. By doing that, the connections between the company and the underrepresented group will be strengthened which might create more brand loyalty. 
Nowadays, we have much more opportunities to approach different kind of customers and make profits from that. We are living in a multicultural society and I think that you don’t want to lose your own chance just because of the basic mistake: being unaware of the culture of your target customers.

Romanticize the stalking

Facebook is one of the most popular social networks we use every day because it could help us to know what our friends are doing and feeling. It is also famous for the understanding of customers when keep improving and adding many functions for users to optimize their benefit when using it. One of the special functions of Facebook is the Close friend list, which helps you to keep track of what those in the list are doing on other Facebook pages, from a "like" to any comment of them to public posts. This act of keeping track may be considered as a kind of showing care to your beloved people when you do it with a good purpose, but let imagine if whatever you do on Facebook now is known by your haters or anyone with bad purposes, you might fell annoyed, hostile or scary of what could hapen to you, right? In this case, Facebook is helping people to do such things called “Stalking” which is a pattern of repeated and unwanted attention, harassment, contact or any other course of conduct directed at a specific person.

Actually pop music has used the troupe of stalking in a long time and marked this action as “romance”. But there is a fact that pople who are “followed” by stalkers do not see that action as sweet and feeling good about it at all. Recently,  Robin Thicke has been criticized for his new video as a kind of stalking to his ex-wife (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/06/25/robin_thicke_s_get_her_back_video_why_the_blurred_lines_singer_looks_like.html). However, the action of stalking is still considered not a dangerous thing in many movies and such actions even usually are "romanticized" in films. One of the typical example is “Wall-E” cartoon of Pixar Animation.

From the first time Wall-e and Eve met each other, audience could see Wall-e fell in love with Eve, and what he does after the first-met is exactly “stalking”. Let’s take a look at the script of the film:

LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S "LA VIE EN ROSE" PLAYS

         

          Eve scans through the market.

          Wall-E follows from a safe distance.

          A stray puppy-dog.

          (…)           

         

          EXT. BNL REFINERY - NIGHT

         

          Wall-E perched on the roof.

          Patiently watches Eve fly.

          She scans the ground below her, like a searchlight.

         

          Eve comes in for a landing below.

          Shuts down for the night.

          Wall-E waits.

          Quietly sneaks down the refinery fire escape.

          Accidentally trips. Tumbles to the ground.

          Eve doesn't wake.

          Wall-E creeps up to her.

          Opens his arms wide...

          ...and measures her.

(…)

                                                              

         

          EXT. BNL REFINERY - NEXT MORNING

         

          Eve powers up again.

          Does a double take.

          A TRASH SCULPTURE OF EVE stands in front of her.

          She hovers away, unimpressed.

          Doesn't notice Wall-E hiding behind a PILE OF PIPES.

          (….)

         

Pixar Animation has created the scenes of Wall- E’s stalking as a romantic one when using the “Lavie en rose” songs and make the audience see how embarrassed Wall E is when he does not dare to approach Eve. The problem here is that by “romanticizing ” the stalking action, Pixar Animation are now reinforcing the norms that people engaging this behaviors are admirable, desirable, romantic, persistent or excusing for that action as just falling in love. Additionally, this male the seduction and abuse become indistinguishable. With the accumulation of acceptance of "stalking"through films overtime, the action might become acceptable in some ways in real life. When making a cartoon film, Pixar Animation of course know that a main part of their audiences is children in general and girl in particular, which are still naïve and know little about the world. However, in real life, seduction and abuse is really popular and could become a danger to any girl, and the action of promoting such kind of conduct implicitly like that is not really good at all. 
What if any abuse or seduction happened to any girl who is the watcher of the film because she does not notice that the action of anyone following her in real life is dangerous, due to what she has seen in cartoon movies like “Wall- E” ? If that happens, will Pixar Animation and their fame be “safe” when parents realize the negative impact of the film to their kids? While parents suppose the producer to make a movie with meaningful and good lessons of life for their kids, what Pixar Animation did here is in an opposite way: they portrayed a dangerous action in real life as a sweet expression of love in their movie. This could makes parents dissatisfied with that film in particular and many Pixar Animation in general so that Pixar Animation sales could be reduced by losing their current customers when parents do not want to let their children to watch Pixar Animation films. 

Now Pixar could do nothing to change the “Wall E” film, but they could take action to avoid “Stalking” in next cartoons. This sounds difficult because love is always the best theme for films and the image of a man try to approach his girl is really popular which seems to be unavoidable. The suggestion for Pixar now is that they could change the scene of “stalking” to other ways of showing love such as the image of the men thinking about his crush, or coming to talk to her. The point here is to promote the idea that love could still be sweet when emotion is expressed and people all know about it. True love is not just when "being- in- silence". The  long-term solution to Walt Disney is that they should make a good balance between what is in reality and what should be “romanticized” to be used in any product. Once again, the problem of portraying the truth in media should be carefully taken into account.