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A Communications Disservice

By crooky | April 17, 2008

So often, I see organizations and companies that hurt their chances of being taken seriously by messing up their marketing and communications. I’ve even seen firms that apparently specialize in marketing strategies with some of the worst websites around. A shitty website is your first touch point with many potential customers - why wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward?

This concept shouldn’t be news to you but a photo sent to me today by a good friend made me mull it for a while:

Demotivator - You\'re Doing it Wrong!

I turned the image into a Demotivator poster for my blog post but that’s not an altered image otherwise - that was the actual cover of an industry newsletter in Australia. It’s okay if your first reaction to the image was to laugh. I laughed as well. I didn’t laugh because I am racist - I laughed at the piss-poor execution of a communications strategy around a serious and sensitive topic.

Let’s deconstruct the image:

1. Okay. She’s of asian descent. That’s obvious. Would she be eating a great big steaming bowl of rice with stir-fried veggies on top with chopsticks in the work lunchroom? Maybe. Never mind that most people bring their lunch to work in tupperware, not a big ceramic bowl… isn’t it racist to imply that all asian people eat big bowls of rice at lunch? Why not a burrito? Or a burger? Or a salad?

2. The people committing the hate crime are white. Oh I get it, because only white people are racist, right? The whole concept is so meta-racist, it made my head hurt.

3. The framing of the image. It looks like a still shot from a particularly racist episode of Friends. Blondie in the back is guffawing at the grade four-esque antics of the big ape in the safety vest while the young lady in the front is comicly offended. The scene looks hilarious! Twenty years of formula sitcom training have programmed us to laugh at situations framed like this.

In the end, what I’m trying to point out is that tackling the issue of racism in the workplace is a worthwhile cause but this kind of messaging does a disservice to the cause. It’s an extreme example but there are many, many more all around us.

Think about what your own branding, communications and marketing says about you and your business. You may have your target audience laughing at you, not with you.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting, Levity |

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