Dear, Corporate America…
Please stop. Stop the advertising, stop the strategic marketing messages, stop the risk assessment, stop playing on the emotions of people at their wits end, grasping at straws and hoping that your actions in times of crises will permanently change their lives for the better. Please stop.
Stop looking at people fighting for their lives, advocating for justice, calling for real systemic reform, as atypical consumer behavior.
We are more than some fictitious persona on your user-journey vision board.
Our social political actions and institutional agendas are more than just some projection on your sales funnel.
Our feelings are more than some script for your brand solidarity media buys, TV spots, and social media campaign calendars. If your product or service is not essential to our real life, our liberty, our pursuit of justice and happiness…sit down, be humble.
You will not have our brand loyalty. Not now.
Your messages are not on brand. Why? because every other brand is offering us the same empty words.
Repeated acts of service, in service to the causes we care about may eventually make us care about you.
One time donations of large sums of corporate dollars in exchange for press and media content are not acts of service. Newly-formed Diversity and Inclusion departments with one or two people of color, minimal resources, no executive stakeholder authority, and limited budgets are not the definition of Representation.
Currently, there are under-represented, underserved, unappreciated, underestimated black people and people of color in your ranks. They are tired. They believed it was your privilege to hire them, especially for their talents. Then they realized it was your privilege that began to tire them after working so hard for approval.
What I simply can’t figure out is how you can understand that making good business investments to earn great returns requires diversifying your portfolio, but with your human resources, you stack all your chips on one type of asset? You’re gambling with lives, and you’re gambling with your bottom line.
I spent three hard-fought years as an underpaid, college-educated, creative and innovative young black man, working for a company much like yours. A company that placed priority on rewarding the complacency of privileged long-timers who had no more new ideas, and didn’t understand the evolving culture and society around them. Maintaining the hierarchy was the status quo. Disruption, innovation, challenging opinion and strategy was reserved for executives incapable of achieving it, but deemed divisive when coming from me. The same ideas I had, the same opportunities I presented, the same conviction I showed, but on the lips of someone not like me, not black, was a breath of fresh air. But I simply could not breathe.
What is being lost in translation?
You have the money, you have the clout, you have the resources, you have the ability to effect real lasting change…what would it take for me, for us, to be treated equally, to be valued, to have our worth acknowledged and even commended?
While you take the time to ruminate about that, please stop.
Stop trying to “cut through the noise”…you are the noise.
Stop with the multimedia hyperbole of advertising and marketing garbage flooding our feeds.
Stop spewing tone-deaf, and redundant messages that are not essential to our struggle and our needs.
Dear Corporate America, you are a part of the systemic and institutional racism we are trying to change. If you really want to help, you need to sow those seeds of justice and equality yourself because we can no longer afford to work in your fields.
- Richard K. Hackman
