Beyond Urban Branding

Anyone who travels a lot may have heard these words "Flight ABC is overbooked. We are offering a $$$ for anyone willing to give up their flight and book on a later flight". Typically this announcement is done while we are all waiting to board our flight, usually people just either look at the ground and ignore the request or others look around at each other to see who is going to jump at the offer. Usually there is someone who can afford to miss their flight, but it is rare to see someone jump up and take the first offer. The airlines often have to sweeten the pot to get someone to accept being bumped and flying out later. So I guess my opening helps point out what the first mistake made by United Airlines was on the ill-fated day when a paying customer was beaten and drag off the plane . For those of you who do not know what happened, let me sum it up. The week of April 10th United Airlines employees assisted passengers as they boarded the plane. Passengers played the ove...

First off, let me just say, I know this Sony ad is old and people do not understand why so many people are talking about it now. But the reality is when Pepsi went and did that Kendal Jenner ad, it opened the flood gates for people to start reminding the world of other companies major ad flops that impact race relations. For those who may have forgotten the ad, here it is a European looking person grabbing the face of a Black person as if to dominate. The tag line clearly sends the message "Look out Black, White is Coming". So that leads me to say "WHAT THE *@$!" How can an ad like this be forgotten? If you know anything about advertisements, then you know that this ad had to get the green light from multiple people. That means that there are multiple people at Sony who need race relation training. Now because this ad is a bit old, I am not going to sit around and break down all that is clearly wrong with it. I just wanted to take a moment and answer the q...

Often people ask us "What exactly is an Urban Shopper? How do you define an Urban Shopper". Truth is, that is a great question with about a million different answers depending on who you ask, Sure we can go with the traditional marketing dictionary definition of an Urban Community being a city or town where the community is often crowded with buildings, houses and people. People are often living very close to each other, streets are busy and the community landscape varies depending on state & city. Again, you ask many leaders in the marketing, social media world and many of them will have a different view of what is an "Urban Shopper". But for the sake of this article, our Urban shopper happens to be African American. Many of you have heard that song - the CLEAN version of Trillville song where they lyrics go "I'll follow that thing in the mall"....For some, these lyrics are flattering, being followed in the mall by a good looking guy or gal who ...