Think of these names – Abraham Lincoln, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammed Ali, Arthur Ashe and Barack Obama. What do they mean to you? Great sports people, politicians and public speakers/activists? Or people who, with others, fought to offer black people better opportunities and rights and encourage integration and equality?

So why are the messages still not getting through?

According to a survey by Lattimer Communications, as many as 86% African-American women say marketers don’t understand them.

86%.

The biggest complaint is that the companies reaching out to them aren’t really communicating with them. Industry culprits include banking/financial, healthcare/pharmaceutical, fast food and the automotive industries.

Consider that the US auto industry calls Detroit “home”, a predominantly black city with almost 82% of its residents African-American. If an industry can’t even get it right with people on its own front doorstep, what’s going wrong?

Is the marketing industry (along with many others) guilty of targeting certain demographics and hoping everyone else joins in? Why does more than 3/4 of a consumer audience feel left out and disenchanted with how they’re sold to?

Sadly, I don’t have the answers. But others do. And they need to look at why they’re alienating such a large number of customers, before someone else does. Barack Obama was swept in on a promise of change – it’s time companies started living up to that premise.

What are you doing to reach out and communicate?

A Matter of Black and White originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.