By Robert Quashie
Go to a market in any West African country, including my father’s Ghana, and there’s a good chance you will hear someone call out the phrase, dead white man’s clothes!
Used clothing from the developed world is big business in emerging cities like Lagos, Accra and Monrovia. Africans rarely throw away their clothes. Recycling and reusing textiles is an everyday thing. Only a crazy fool would throw away perfectly wearable jeans because they were out of style. Make them into something else or give them to someone who can. This ethos forces the entrepreneur trying sell slightly a slightly dingy t-shirt to come up with a story such that they have somehow come into possession of the grand estate of an extravagantly rich and incredibility dead white man from New York, Paris or maybe London. Like our own yarns about improbable things like Swiss chocolate or cheap oil, this ad pitch about dead white men has gone from cutline to cultural meme.
Of course the dead guy has to be white because to most Black Africans, it’s unthinkable that Black people anywhere, in any situation could afford to be that wasteful. The invective to use what you’ve got till you get what you need runs deep. Indeed, my American grandfather, grandson of slaves himself, was a shoemaker. When we wore out a pair of shoes he fixed them. When we outgrew them, he cut off the toes and heels and made sandals.
But as a Black American and advertising professional I have to own up to the part that I and my colleagues have played in the distortion of our version of the American Dream. I also have to recognize our contribution to the confusion with regards to marketing and investment in emerging Black markets here and abroad. It is critical that we start to take an honest look at what we’ve done to the opportunity costs extracted from our communities world wide as a result.
In the 1960s for all intents and purposes, national advertising to Black Americans did not exist. Ads to black people were local and were created to capitalize on the wants, needs and desires of local black communities. Black media, like The Amsterdam News, The Chicago Defender or The Kansas City Call (what my maternal family read) and countless local radio stations thrived on real and relevant community news and local advertising.
Things changed in the early 1970s when the ad industry caught wind of the rising buying power of Black Americans and concocted a model of target marketing. The industry storyline went that because of the decimating effects of slavery and segregation, Black Americans lacked a real culture and were in a breakneck race to fill the void with new items and icons from mainstream culture that connoted status. Smart consumer brands, food, cigarette, car, beverage or clothing labels, stepping into that gap with the right look and the right spokespersons stood to prosper. Now whether this model was based in fact or not – like saying that the world is flat, until somebody proved otherwise – it worked well enough for everybody involved; black and white ad agencies, pro athletes, and rappers. Concurrently, you began to see the rise of national black media such as Essence, BET, Black Enterprise and a thicker Ebony Magazine.
Unfortunately we all believed the hype. We even fostered the notion among out children that overconsumption is a substitute for creativity and intelligence. As a marketing professional I have to own up to my role and challenge my colleagues to do likewise. Ironically as the general consumer market trends toward sustainability, do-it-yourself and less-is-more, our community seems to be caught in a holding pattern as to how we should behave as both consumers and producers in a recessionary economy. It’s like we still want to believe that bigger cars and more new clothes will make us better people.
But something else happened though in the 1970s that was missed by Madison Avenue and Corporate America. As colonialism fell, Black African, Afro-Latino and Black Caribbean people began to emerge on the scene in new force as nation builders, transnational migrants and yes, consumers. But they presented a different model of Black consumption. It’s not one that is foreign, at least it shouldn’t be to us. Those of us fortunate enough to have known our grandparents’ generation would recognize it. And here is an opportunity that can help guide and reshape our destiny in the U.S. and abroad.
Everyone wants things and is entitled to goods and services. Commerce is not inherently evil. We can have and eat our cake. Let’s take telecom as an example. Under the model of overconsumption perfected by the target marketing and advertising industry of yesterday, advertising is designed to goad African Americans into chasing the latest device as a symbol of status and fashion, a replacement for culture – and we buy it. By comparison in emerging markets, behaving as what I will call adaptive consumers, Black people are using phone cards as transferrable currency, cell phones to lift villages out of poverty, lap tops to organize trade and grow fortunes. Telecom suppliers have paid attention to adaptive consumers in Africa and Latin America responding with lower price points, more flexible plans and often better, more advanced technical solutions. Companies are being rewarded with unheard of profits, demonstrating that adaptive consumption is compatible with capitalism.
There are more examples but the point here is that as a marketing professional, I have to own what my profession has done to help move our community away from the habits of adaptability and creativity toward waste and overconsumption. I have to own that it is not good business in the long run and hurts our community.
In the new global economy, marketers have an opportunity to create more sustainable and profitable models for selling products and services to all people, including us, based in large part on adaptive consumption.
Of course in order to sell this idea it to our people and corporate America, Black ad agencies might have to come up with a story about a dead white man.
Robert Quashie, Founder of RQi Marketing, is a senior consultant with more than 20 years experience in marketing, advertising, public relations and corporate communications.
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