Multicultural Insight: Why McD's Is Lovin' It -- and You Should Too

Everyone Should Study Golden's Speech at the ANA Conference

Posted by Rochelle Newman-Carrasco on 11.11.09 @ 01:21 PM

Rochelle Newman-Carrasco

The next morning, Bob Liodice, ANA's CEO, shared the tenets of a new Marketers' Constitution. In doing so, he referenced Point 7, which touched on diversity. Nice. But not new. We all know diversity often makes the list of Corporate America's priorities and then gets filed under Hopeful Resolutions rather than Quantifiable Results. Still, always good to know it's there.

After a few strong but expected presentations from Walmart and others, McDonald's CMO Neil Golden took the stage. In 30 or so minutes, he restored my faith in corporate-kind. In front of an audience of his peers, he made a powerful and pointed presentation in which every single Power Point slide focused sharply on his over-arching premise: "Leading with Ethnic Insights."

Clarion Pictures

Neil Golden at the ANA Annual Conference

That's right, marketing community. When did you have to be something to engage it? Do you need to be a dog to sell dog food? A woman to market Maxi-pads? Sure, it helps to have personal experience for a richer understanding of insights and their reasons for being -- but gone are the days when a marketer can take a pass on consumers because they speak a language you didn't learn in high school or because they challenge you with cultural distinctions from whatever "tribe" you call your own. Gone are the days when you can just let your agency handle that which you don't know or feel comfortable with. Marketers are in love with the word "insights." It's the word de jour. Insights aren't new, folks. What's new is that you're finally starting to listen and be receptive, so you're beginning to notice them for yourselves.

And, by the way, that's exactly what Mr. Golden went on to explain about his early entry into multicultural marketing. He arrived in Chicago and realized McD's had a local competitor that was addressing ethnic patrons better than it was. He was told by management that he could have $50,000 to "fix the problem." He turned the money down. He knew it wasn't even a bandage. He knew that he would be better served by revising his entire plan for the market. So he listened. He got consumer feedback. Then, he got franchisees together from the communities that were important to the business and he told them about the consumer feedback. And they questioned him. African-American franchisees challenged him when he said they had done "mall intercepts." They opened his eyes to the fact that "we don't have malls in the ghetto." Listening to the right consumer started with listening to the right franchisees and, over time, it has shaped Mr. Golden's perspective about the power of leading with ethnic insights.

Insight 2: A rising tide lifts all boats.
Mr. Golden went on to document the success that leading with ethnic insights has generated for the brand. It wasn't long before he realized that when his African-American sales and Hispanic sales were up, the overall sales benefited and increases were experienced across the board. This is a concept that I have emphasized to so-called general-market agencies for years. When you support your client's effective use of dollars against as critical a consumer segment as Latinos, for example, you are not giving up budget to competitors. You are contributing to the overall success of the brand and that will come back to benefit you as well as everyone else. It is short sighted, selfish and frankly stupid to believe that over-saturating and duplicating against an aging demographic is a winning strategy.

Insight 3: Blank page. No constraints.
After sharing creative work done for Asian-American, African-American and Latino consumers using both culture and language, Mr. Golden shared his philosophy about having his agency partners work on strategies and plans that start with a blank page and no constraints. From there, he acknowledged that it was both an art and a science to aggregate the best work from all segments and apply it to the betterment of the total brand. In the end, there are always messages specifically crafted for the individual segments. At the same time, creative and cultural convergence allowed for ideas that are universally appealing and have cross-cultural impact to flourish.

Insight 4: Who's setting trends? Who's following?
As he arrived at his conclusions, Golden made it very clear that it was African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American consumers that set trends. He added that McDonald's has found it more valuable to apply these segments' preferences to the overall marketplace than to apply overall preferences to these segments.

Insight 5: It's not about skin color. It's about skin in the game.
Finally, Golden boiled it all down to "green" (with the "eco" emphasis on eco-nomy). His presentation was all business. And since the forum was ANA's Masters of Marketing versus the ANA Multicultural Conference, it was a presentation that went far beyond preaching to the choir. It spoke directly to the uncomfortable and unconverted segment as well.

In fact, a polling question fielded by Liodice following the morning's presentations asked the audience to choose where their organization was in terms of multicultural marketing commitments and the use of specialized agency partners. The majority of the audience responded that they had not engaged any specialists of this nature. One can only hope that presentations like Mr. Golden's and the lunch panel comments of Mark Addicks of General Mills, who also prioritizes the voice of ethnic America to champion his brands, will have an impact on a marketing community that seems more comfortable with using pop culture to be "cool" than with using consumer culture to truly communicate and connect.

10 Comments

  By Derek Walker | Grand Prairie, TX November 11, 2009 01:55:56 pm:

Rochelle,

Thank you for posting this. I was disappointed when the Adage coverage of his speech quickly, too quickly I feel, disappeared from the homepage to the subscription section.

There was a comment on the previous article about his speech that needs to find its way to this post. Hint, hint Mr. Editor!!!

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  By Derek Walker | Grand Prairie, TX November 11, 2009 02:02:19 pm:

My bad. The article has been moved to the ANA Annual Conference (click on the link in the right panel), not the subscription section. I still think it should have stayed on the front page. Also, there are now 3 comments attached to that article that should be included here.

Sorry for the misinformation.

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  By JackJones | Chicago, IL November 11, 2009 02:19:59 pm:

Of course, while Golden's speech seemed provocative, I had slightly different response. And is anyone surprised to learn many ANA audience members admitted having little to no engagement with minority shops? Given that their general market advertising agencies remain nearly exclusively White, it's possible that these advertisers literally do not see any minorities at all – in their partnerships or in their work.

http://tinyurl.com/yjpwvw8

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  By DGrayYoung | Olympia Fields, IL November 11, 2009 02:23:43 pm:

Hi Rochelle,

Thanks for posting this recap of Neil Golden's presentation. Now the real interesting part: Let's see who was listening...

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  By YuriyBoykiv | Cliffside Park, NJ November 11, 2009 02:45:38 pm:

This is interesting, however, how come noone is talking about the way the multicultural audience has evolved from consumers reading ethnic newspapers to become an engaged audience with its own identity.
Those people who were not born here usually befriend people from their own community or other immigrant groups. They are vivid consumers of the mainstream TV, print, radio media, but also congregate on social media building online communities, writing blogs, participating in forums, etc. This is a new trend which requires a new marketing model that combines the culturally-sensitive messaging through the English-language media and/or various online channels.
Best,
YB

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  By RichieC | New York, NY November 11, 2009 03:54:17 pm:

"marketing community that seems more comfortable with using pop culture to be "cool" than with using consumer culture to truly communicate and connect"

Such great commentary there. The key is not to "chase cool", but rather to use popular culture to decode the sentiment and dispositions of consumers to engage with them better.

Glad to see that a leading brand continues to plant their flag with diversity and best practices towards connecting with multicultural consumers.

Richie Cruz | AgencyNet
http://www.anidea.com
@agencynet

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  By rukallstar2 | Minneapolis, MN November 11, 2009 06:33:23 pm:

having worked on both sides, for ethnic agencies and general market, and having worked on mcd's, i would say that mr. golden is starting to incorporate multicultural insights in a horizontal, across the board fashion, rather than in a siloed fashion as is usually the case. now general market agencies have absolutely no financial incentive to incorporate other voices at the grown-up brand table, and to be honest the multicultural agencies might not push hard enough to earn a seat at that table, or when they do they get their hands slapped because the general market agency will do anything to protect its turf. it behooves the general market agencies to have a collaborative, rather than colonial relationship as is often the case

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  By BlackCanseco | DIAMOND BAR, CA November 11, 2009 07:25:07 pm:

Mrs. Newman-Carrasco,

I found your support of McD's "rainbow rant" as I call it—to be disconcerting.

This speech represents is one of the first times (outside the fashion or athletic wear industries) where a brand is, simultaneously touting the importance of Black and multicultural influences and consumers while continuing to prop up the leadership positions of its overly-anglo, overly-sheltered, overly-ineffective general market (white) marketing partners.

The same logic McD's and other and ANA member corps use to keep ethnic shops at the back of the bus in sub-servient subcontractor roles is being inverted to praise and reward equally ineffective and unqualified General Market shops.

I mean, how can you tell ethnic shops they can't be AORs because they don't have the insights to reach "general market audiences" then tell general market shops that clearly don't have the insights to target ethnic audiencence that you're going to cover their incompetence by "integrating ethnic insights" (that are coming from ethnic shops i might ad) into their work.

McD's is essentially encouraging ANA Members and their GM shops to milk ethnic shops, media pros even more while rewarding them less.

Where I'm from that's called "pimping."

If McD's were really serious, they'd not only increase their spending with ethnic media outlets exponentially, but they'd put--on a project basis at least--ethnic shops in charge of of targeting said communities since that's who's doing the heavy lifting on the insights anyway.

But doing that would require equality and respect and well...

But hey, at least we're getting a pat on the head from the adults. And that alone makes me feel so much better about the 3-4% cut of the ad/marketing budgets that black shops get from McD's and other ANA members.

They's bee-in reeel good to us. Yessuh, they's is!

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  By havelar | SEATTLE, WA November 12, 2009 01:08:41 pm:

CORRECTION:

Good point, Jack Jones.

I also feel many ad agencies want to keep with their confort zone and NOT ADMIT to clients they "can't" do multi cultural advertising outside of English. Branching out to the billion dollar Hispanic market, for example, is to invest money and time with research and infrastructure with capable creative individuals who are masters of the English and Spanish language (written and spoken)--asumming the agency wants to go beyond the cheap audio VO.

Others avoid the multicultural markets simply because they are living in the past and don't want to let go of what they perceive as the ideal America.

Nonetheless, those ad agencies that adapt will in the long term benefit and be prepared in the future. Others will simply scramble to catch up.

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  By JackJones | Chicago, IL November 26, 2009 02:24:23 am:

Food for thought: http://tinyurl.com/yfazf3u

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