Yesterday’s post asked “what are you scared of” in terms of putting your name on your campaigns for customers & prospects to see?
A good friend raised an excellent point on the issue in terms of “what if your name itself could lower response rates or raise stereotypical associations”? What if your name is (these are made up names for demonstration purposes) Gilles Martineau and your audience may put all French sounding people into the same bucket? What if your name is Horowitz or Goldberg and your target audience thinks along similar lines as Borat?
What if a post 911 world reacts to your name being Mohammed or Rafiq? How about Chin or Wan? Stimopolous or Aristopolous? Martinez or Hernandez? The list goes on and on.
It is easy for me to write yesterday’s post because I have never encountered bias or suspicion in terms of my name. It is neutral – like Smith or Jones. There’s nothing wrong with a good old anglo-saxon handle – even if my family changed our original name a few generations ago for reasons that resemble my friends point.
I’ll close this topic off (for now) by saying that I would hope we are getting better at the xenophobia thing as a society (although sometimes I fear we are not and it is a shame).
North of the 49th we are not a melting pot. We retain our cultural and ethnic diversity for all to see. That is the greatest part of our mosaic (not to mention the awesome restaurants that come with the territory). As we move to include more diverse images and language in our marketing efforts to reflect our increasingly diverse landscape, we establish more linkage to the fact that our society is not exclusively white-bread in terms of who is sitting at corporate headquarters and orchestrating these marketing efforts.
Perhaps the time is ripe for us who are direct/database marketers to test this in some manner.
But I see this persons point and it is well taken. I apologize for the oversight or lack of sensitivity. However, my ramblings about accountability, accessibility and responsiveness still stand. We need to provide a path to ourselves in whatever way we can engineer and feel comfortable about – but more importantly, make our customers feel comfortable about.
Oversight – update on Accessibility, Accountability and Responsiveness
22 Wednesday Nov 2006