Marketers, It's Time to Stop Stereotyping and Tell Better Stories

Editor’s note: This is part of Marcus Collins’ Check the Rhyme series, in which he extracts marketing insights from rap lyrics and explores the influence of hip-hop on the marketing world. My last four years in New York were spent in the Bronx. I had great pride in the borough because of its association with hip-hop and, more specifically, its connection to "The Blastmaster" KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, the influential hip-hop crew from the South Bronx. Of the many lessons KRS-One taught his listeners over the decades, there’s one that specifically caters to marketers. His 1988 classic, "My Philosophy," spells it out brilliantly: “Some MCs be talking and talking/ Trying to show how Black people are walking/ But I don't walk this way to portray or reinforce stereotypes of today/ Like all my brothers eat chicken and watermelon/ Talk broken English and drug selling.” In this scathing depiction of African American tropes, KRS-One challenges the conventional wisdom and frequent practices of marketing segmentation. Marketers Are Mistaking Information for Intimacy In 1956, Wendell R. Smith authored a groundbreaking article in the Journal of Marketing called Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies, where he introduced the idea of segmentation to the world. It’s been a mainstay ever since—from MBA classrooms to Fortune 500 boardrooms, segmentation is the exercise marketers undergo to shape a heterogeneous market, where everyone is uniquely different, into homogeneous-like clusters, where they’re more alike based on a particular context or criteria. And here's where KRS-One’s lyrics call out our standard methods of segmentation. Far too often, marketers based their segmentation efforts on demographics: age, race, gender, household income, education, geography and the like. These are the instruments we use to describe people—not because they’re accurate, but rather because they’re easy and easily observable. My age is my age, my gender is my gender, but these monikers do not accurately describe who I am. Take my demographics for instance. I'm 42 years old. I’m African American. I was born and raised in Detroit (What Up Doe!) and I attended public schools for the majority of my life. If a marketer saw my demographic makeup on a brief, they’d likely assign characteristics, behaviors and consumption habits that rival the same stereotypes that KRS-One calls out in his verse. But those stats don't reveal the fact that I grew up playing jazz as a kid thanks to a teacher's insistence. I swam competitively from age 6 throughout my high school years. I studied material science engineering as an undergraduate, and I’m the director of the youth choir at my church. These experiences and identity subscriptions frame how I see the world and, as a result, they influence how I behave in it. Demographics never get anywhere close to describing people with the level of intimacy that accurately depicts who we really are like the way we self-identify. Therefore, when we segment based on demographics, we find ourselves putting people in stereotypical boxes that make the world neat but not real. Rethinking the old ways What this means for marketers is that we need to develop a new Rosetta Stone for how we think about segmentation and how we describe people. While we ascribe titles to groups of people as a way to identify a segment, perhaps we’d be better off using the lexicon that people use to describe themselves as a part of a whole—as members of a collective. Their friends, families, classmates, co-workers, teammates, congregates, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, fandom and all the other many networks of people they use to demarcate who they are in the world and govern what people like them do. What informs our interests? What shapes our attitudes? I would argue it’s the cultural characteristics of the network of people with which we self-identity. Therefore, psychographics—what we like, what we’re into—would merely be a byproduct of our network subscription. This perspective is widely supported in a century’s worth of literature that tells us that our social groups serve to tell us who we are (McGuire and Padawer-Singer, 1976), what to think (Cantril, 1941) and how to behave (Sherif, 1936). In fact, the more we value our social groups, the more willing we are to be influenced by them—and who’s more valuable to use than people like us? Nike provides a great case study for this provocation. The brand targets a network of people who believe that every human body is an athlete, and it focuses its marketing communications on the collectives that make up this community. They may be football players, basketball players, gymnasts, runners or swimmers, but one thing’s for sure: They are not a demographic. Networks provide a more powerful means of describing people because it’s anchored in their identity and exercised through their culture, which is more influential than any other vehicle known to mankind. Demographics are the observable hardware of people, but the cultural characteristic of our networks serve as the operating system that governs our behavior. Seeing as the core function of marketing is to influence behavioral adoption, segmenting by networks proves to be a better means of predicting behavior. Not to mention, stereotypes are not merely offensive, they are also misrepresentative. They’re easy, due in part to the memory structures supported through the stories we tell. Our reliance on demographics to describe people and construct segments leads to ill-informed targeting and marketing communications that completely miss the mark. Furthermore, as storytellers, we have a responsibility to tell better stories, perhaps now more than ever before considering all the many outlets people have to express their identity and find community thanks to today’s hyperconnected world. As marketing practitioners, we just have to be curious enough to look beyond what’s on the surface. 3 Personalization Innovations to Expect From Digital Advertising