Marketers have codified the pretense of a homogenous, melting-pot America in various advertising campaigns, many of which follow a set formula--a woman, man, black, Asian, Latino. The ads seem to say.
"We've included everybody. Buy from us."
But a new approach to marketing says that the seemingly inclusive ads are nonsense, almost as offensive as the advertising campaigns of old
that portrayed all wholesome families as white and all breadwinners as white men.
Global Advertising Strategies--a New York-based firm specializing in ethnic marketing and other highly
targeted marketing campaigns--calls the usual approach Multicultural Marketing 101. Most multicultural executions falsely assume "that all African Americans are alike, that all Spanish-speaking people
are alike, that we are all alike, which means that we're all mainstream," says Monique Tapie, communications director for Global, with "mainstream" still considered to be white.
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