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The contrition peddlers | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Account planners at Chisholm-Mingo say the casting was no accident. "[Denny's] did have an African-American campaign, but it wasn't working," explains Pepper Miller, chief strategist on the Denny's account. "It showed a bunch of black people bopping their heads and dancing. To really draw black people to Denny's, to make them feel better about Denny's, we needed to play to the emotions." In focus groups, Miller says, "it became clear that people did not feel Denny's had apologized enough. People were saying, 'We need to see ourselves at Denny's. We need to see white people waiting on us.' So that became one element of the execution. We wanted people to say, 'Well, dang, they are doing a little bit better.'" Miller says early indicators show the plan is working. "People are responding positively," she says. "That's the good news about African-Americans. We are a believing people, and a forgiving people -- as long as a company makes an effort to say, 'We're sorry.'" It's this sensitivity to the nuances of contrition that endears Chisholm-Mingo to its roster of traumatized clients. The 28-year-old agency, with annual billings of $80 million, has long specialized in advertising and marketing campaigns aimed at black consumers. But these days, as CEOs tie themselves in knots over the fine points of managing diversity, the agency has become known for its brisk sideline in what it calls "minority crisis management." "The plain truth is that a crisis with regard to minorities can hit anyone, anywhere, any time," Sam Chisholm tells me in a recent interview in his midtown office. A lean, tense, handsome man in his mid-50s, he is clad in a blue open-neck shirt and neatly pressed trousers (casual Friday, he explains). The good news, he adds, is that "there is no crisis we cannot plan for to mitigate the damage." Image-maker, hand-holder and all-purpose moral prop, he is a calming presence at the side of his absolution-seeking clients as they pass through the stations of the cross. "At first, many of them don't define it as a crisis," he says. "They define it as 'this minority situation.' They think, 'Maybe if I just send some cash over there, it will all go away.'" True healing, Chisholm says, comes only when clients move beyond denial and acknowledge the true horror of their predicament. "They have to realize that they can put a lid on the fire, but the fire will continue to burn," he explains. "I mean, this is not stubbing your toe. This is severing a leg." Even after clients find salvation, joyously proclaiming their embrace of diversity as a way of life, "There's no way [they] can come out of this whole," Chisholm warns. He says he must admonish them against the dangers of premature self-congratulation. "You have folks who pat themselves on the back, saying, 'Hey, I cleaned up the ocean,'" he chuckles. "Well, no. It doesn't work that way. I mean -- you cleaned up the ocean because you screwed it up." In the annals of mass-marketing history, of course, the spinning of racial iniquity is nothing new. More than 60 years ago, the Quaker Oats Company, owner of the Aunt Jemima flour mills, deduced that their pop-eyed spokesmodel might have a tiny bit of an image problem among American blacks. In 1936, as Marilyn Kern-Foxworthy writes in her illuminating book, "Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" (Greenwood, 1994) the company went so far as to convene focus groups to assess blacks' reaction to the sight of this grinning mammy in head rag, apron and billowing housedress. The response, Kern-Foxworthy writes, was not exactly what Quaker Oats had hoped for. According to notes taken by the presumably unhappy marketing executive, "common and semi-skilled laborers" from the city of Nashville, Tenn., registered the following reactions: The image fared no better among professional African-Americans in Richmond, Va.:
While Quaker Oats, over the years, has wisely upgraded Jemima's image, transforming her from a caricature of a black mammy to a savvy Creole cooking instructor -- complete with earrings and gray-streaked bob -- some brand icons have proven sadly impervious to these sort of overhauls. Just ask the former owners of the now-defunct Sambo's restaurant chain. Opened in the '50s, the chain of home-style diners developed a marketing campaign around the then-popular book "Little Black Sambo." By the '70s, of course, the name "Sambo" had come to be viewed as an insult by African-Americans nationwide. Columnist William Raspberry inveighed against the chain in newspaper columns; new franchises were greeted by pickets and protests. The distraught owners took out a series of plaintive ads in Ebony, explaining that back when they founded the company, they never envisioned that "Sambo" would become synonymous with anything but rollicking good fun. But to no avail; the protests continued unabated, and Sambo's restaurants disappeared forever.
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