CHAPTER 7
Internal “International” Blunders REMEMBERING
THE
FOLKS BACK HOME
markets can lead to market blunders that are equally as significant in terms of cost and reputation as those that arise when products or services cross country borders. Companies that confine marketing efforts by country borders and assume that all people within are of a single mind have forgotten about the German-speaking population that lives in France, the substantial Indian immigration to England, the English, Dutch and French influences in Africa and Southeast Asia, and the Italian settlements in Argentina, to name only a few. Such assumptions often create unpleasant surprises. Many of the most famous incidents of domestic cross-cultural blunders have been reported in the United States, in part because of its high influx of immigrants and also its freedom of the investigative press. But past histories of colonization and migration, combined with the ever-increasing world travel industry of today, have resulted in checkered populations in nearly every corner of the globe.
DIVERSITY WITHIN DOMESTIC
When Cultures Clash (General Mills) Sometime in late 1995, General Mills announced that it would celebrate its 75th anniversary with an ethnic makeover of Betty Crocker—by far the company’s most readily identifiable product icon. The company said it would transform the facial features of 75 ethnically diverse women into a single, new composite “Betty” in an attempt to increase the appeal of the company’s brands “to a broader range of housewives representing the country’s shifting ethnic diversity.” Since the “birth” of Betty Crocker in 1921, this was the eighth time General Mills transformed the fictional character with an appearance felt to be more in tune with the makeup of its traditional customer base. “She will be less white bread and more whole meat,” opined Russell Adams, then chairman of the African American studies department at Howard University in Washington, DC, in an interview in the October 1995 issue of Jet magazine. He predicted that the new character would “have a light tan hue, a hint of a slant to her eyes, and perhaps, a bit of width in the nose.” General Mills, he said, “will be shrewd enough not to let her looks be offensive to anybody.”
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