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We Don't Know What to Do with You
The elephant in the room is how marketers are blowing it with women outside the young, white mom demographic. This issue bubbled to the top during BlogHer 07's State of the Momosphere panel. When a couple of MommyBloggers of color voiced their dismay at feeling alternately pandered to and ignored by companies who are currently crawling the blogosphere, a marketer in the room actually uttered the now-famous words that comprise the title of this session.
We have Jory Des Jardins, the moderator of that Momosphere session back to moderate again. And we have one of the bloggers who stood up to be counted back at BlogHer '07 on hand to elaborate on her perception of marketing and advertising in the blogosphere, Stefania Pomponi Butler from CityMama and Kimchi Mamas.
The differences Stefania sees between how she is approached on those two blogs alone...one that identifies her ethnicity right in the blog name and one that does not...is part of the story. Kimberly Coleman joins the discussion with her own perspective on what tends to go right, and what opportunities tend to get missed. Finally, Laura Martinez is a journalist, editor and AdAge blogger who specializes in advertising and marketing, with a focus on reaching the Hispanic market. She joins them to talk about how marketers traditionally have carved up the diversity pie.
With the blogosphere being more racially diverse than the Internet as a whole (according to Pew), we'll be asking the same question asked in Friday morning's keynote: Do the old rules apply in the blogosphere?
Jory: Women are the purchasers. We know this. Women online purchase more than women who are not online. Bloggers purchase 30% more online than other women. Blogosphere is the most culturally diverse group online. 60% of bloggers are white. 74% of Internet users are white. 84% of marketers think multicultural marketing is important, but they're not organized to handle multicultural marketers. Why is that?
A: Multicultural marketing is seen as a separate siloed department, not part of the standard department.
Laura: I think it is treated as a separate thing or an afterthought. When there's a crisis, they tend to cut that marketing first. Also there's pressure to have a multicultural force, even though companies don't know what that means. I wish people wouldn't hire people because they're a woman, or because they're Latina. There are a lot of misperceptions about what multicultural is all about.
Jory: Where are the missed opportunities? Where are marketers getting it wrong?
Stefania: With KimchiMamas, it's a huge missed opportunity. Korean families tend to be very family focused, and while our content is very cultural, it's also only talking about family issues.
Jory: Would you rather be singled out because you're Korean?
Stefania: It would be nice to be included, to be on the list, though I don't want to get pitches for just cabbages and chili pepper.
Jory: Kimberly, you're not trying to be an African-American momblogger, but just as a mommyblogger.
Kimberly: African-American is put into the nanny category or the career woman category. Parents of preschoolers have so much more in common with others at that life stage than just other black women. If you would've asked me to identify myself before I had a kid. Christian, then black, then woman. Now, Christian, mother, black, woman. Every other blog post I don't say "oh, I'm Christian." It's who I am. And I'm also black. The parenting aspects of African-Americans aren't focused on by marketing other than clothing. Yes, we dress our kids cute, but we care about other things, too. We like strollers. We like children's programming or educational resources.
Laura: One out of four babies born in this country is going to be Hispanic very soon. I believe most Latino moms aren't as connected as other minorities might be. That's a huge opportunity that is going to grow very soon and marketers should get thinking about that.
Kimberly: Before we talked about this session, I never thought about blacks in social media. I was just trying to raise my kids. A lot of my friends aren't as willing to give out their personal information, so they're a little cautious of social media. There are a huge amount of blogs
