#146: One dissenting voice, Chubbies and brand allyship, the beauty industry on blast, racism on Yelp, and misinformation
Happy Saturday -
First, something feel-good:
This thread is evidence of the way TikTok’s duet feature can result in the most hilarious and creative collaborations.
Watch all the videos here. Keep going, trust me.
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In this edition #146 of The World’s Best Newsletter:
How one entrepreneur put her entire industry on blast
Why one dissenting voice is SO powerful
Yelp now includes warning on racist businesses
A strong example of brand allyship from 4 white founders @ Chubbies
YGKAT: Election suppression in 2016 via Facebook
Can we fix misinformation like we did secondhand smoke?
Quote of the week: What’s more important?
Update from my little corner of the internet:
I’m happy to have been included in new research from Canvas8 on understanding allyship. Read the full report here.
Read two new inspiring interviews with winners of the Adobe Experience Maker Awards, Lisa Martin of VMWare, winner of The Closer (and tai chi enthusiast) and Gavin Portnoy of NCMEC, working to bring missing kids home with a digital strategy.
I sat down with Brenda Meller for a fun interview featuring pie, purpose, and COVID-19. Like, real pie.
OK, on with the good stuff:
1 - How one entrepreneur put her entire industry on blast
Want to highlight this slice of accountability pie (yum).
Back in June, in response to the blackout of “superficial messages of support and MLK quotes beauty brands were posting on social media,” Sharon Chuter launched the Pull Up for Change initiative.
It “challenged brands to post the racial breakdown of their teams along with commitments to improve” and since June, hundreds of brands have participated.
What I love about this:
It’s a direct action initiative, calling for transparency from companies, only 40% of which are transparent about the gender and racial makeup of their employees.
Chuter’s Pull Up for Change challenge [asked] brands to “pull up or shut up,” which means “show me, don’t tell me.” Chuter asked companies specifically how many black executives and employees they had. The results were eye-opening.
It shines a spotlight on exceptional truths:
In stores:
Just last week, Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS all announced they were no longer going to lock up beauty products marketed to black consumers, a practice common for decades. (Vox/Marketwatch)
In corporate offices:
At Revlon, only 5 percent of employees at the director level or above are black. At Sephora, just 6 percent of leadership roles are filled by black people. L’Oréal, a global company with 12,000 US employees, counts 8 percent who identify as black at the executive level in America. No black people hold leadership roles at Glossier. And at Lime Crime, there are no black employees at the brand’s corporate headquarters at all.
Yikes.
It shows the power of activism from within an industry. Chuter formerly worked in corporate roles at L’Oreal and LVMH, and has her own makeup brand now, Uoma. Before her campaign, popular beauty brands would have never shared data like this.
Effecting change is complicated, but it starts by shining a light on the truth.
2 - Why one dissenting voice is SO powerful
Via Nir Eyal, article by Lawrence Yeo:
"If one person voices what everyone else is thinking, what was initially a minority opinion can quickly become the majority…
Whereas each additional consensus voice doesn’t make much impact, a single dissenting voice has the power to bring the entire argument down.
10 people all saying the same thing is far less interesting than the 1 person that has a reasonable, opposing view."
This simple, important read is a reminder of the power of dissent, challenging the status quo, and voicing exceptional truths - what everyone is thinking, but not saying.
The spell of pluralistic ignorance is usually broken with one ardent voice. If one person voices what everyone else is thinking, what was initially a minority opinion can quickly become the majority.
This power becomes harder the larger the consensus view becomes, meaning:
If you don’t agree with a consensus opinion, make it known earlier than later. The longer you wait, the less your voice will be considered and heard.
Speak up.
The article goes on to illustrate how un-voiced dissent can balloon into the banality of evil - case in point: the Nazis were elected into power.
Summarizing political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt:
…evil and wickedness didn’t manifest in the form of villains and hateful beings. In reality, it develops in the minds of normal people that want nothing more than to be a part of something. All they want is an identity, and if they can’t find it themselves, they want someone else to give it to them.
So, what do we do?
Make your thoughts known, particularly in the early stages (it opens the door for others to speak up freely as well.)
Stop and think about what you are doing. Carve out space to think for yourself.
I found this article by being part of Nir Eyal’s community. His book, Indistractable, is a must-read. Not a paid endorsement! “Control your attention, and choose your life.”
3 - Yelp now includes warning on racist businesses
Another path for transparency for empowered consumers:
Via Miami Herald:
In the interest of the company’s “zero tolerance policy to racism,” it will now place a consumer alert on a business’s page “to caution people about businesses that may be associated with overtly racist actions.”
“Now, when a business gains public attention for reports of racist conduct, such as using racist language or symbols, Yelp will place a new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to inform users, along with a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident,” Yelp said.
Note: The alert cannot be based on media reports, as that could artificially impact a business’s star rating. It must be based on personal experiences. 👏
Via Yelp’s blog:
Reviews mentioning Black-owned businesses were up more than 617% this summer compared to last summer.
While searches for Black-owned businesses surged on Yelp, so did the volume of reviews warning users of racist behavior at businesses. (This move was in direct response to that issue.)
Yelp’s top priority is to ensure the trust and safety of our users and provide them with reliable content to inform their spending decisions, including decisions about whether they’ll be welcome and safe at a particular business.
A business can also mark themselves as Open to All on their business page.
4 - A strong example of brand allyship from 4 white founders @ Chubbies
My wife (we’ve just celebrated four years, hello prah!) forwarded me the latest email-from-a-CEO-about-what-we’re-doing-for-BLM
*cue expected eye roll*
but WAIT!
It’s great.
Should (a word I am trying to remove from my vocab) a short-shorts company founded by four white guys with the names Kyle, Rainer, Preston, and Tom for frat boy consumer be so vocal about the BLM movement?
Should?
Who cares, they are doing it and their brand response is extensive:
Without reluctance, hesitation, or concern: we condemn police brutality, racial injustice, and white supremacy.
Moreover, we believe Breonna Taylor deserved better. We believe George Floyd deserved better. We believe Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Riah Milton and countless others deserved better. To be silent in regards to such grave injustice is to be guilty of complicity.
However, our voice alone is not enough. Words must be accompanied by action, and action must be accompanied by transparency. As such, here are the actions we’ve taken since our last statement:
The email goes on to list five categories of action:
Working w/ DEI experts to expose existing bias/inequality, and create a 5-year roadmap w/ changes from recruiting to content creation to community building
Management trainings about bias, hiring
New equitable hiring practices
Hiring more diversity in models, amplifying content from BIPOC customers
Incorporated a philanthropic foundation to donate systematically to causes
I applaud their clear stance on the issue:
We believe that every individual, company, and organization - no matter how small - can, and should, make a difference. We believe that Black people should have the right to live without fear of harassment, persecution, oppression, police brutality and the incessant threat of violence. We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight for racial equality. Finally, we commit to doing more, because we fundamentally believe change depends on actions over words, and on ‘consistency over momentary intensity.’
And their commitment to action, as outlined above and in their initial statement.
Kudos to Kyle, Rainer, Preston, Tom and everyone at Chubbies.
(And PS, my wife loves their stuff. Not just for frat boys!)
5 - YGKAT: Election Suppression in 2016 via Facebook
In my last newsletter I shared how Facebook was built to be as addictive as cigarettes, using the ideals of the Tobacco industry to hook smokers on their product.
In addition to being addictive, the platform is also weaponized in US elections.
This week’s “you-gotta-know-about-this” YGKAT is this report:
Channel 4 News in London tracked down 3.5 million Black Americans who were targeted by President Trump’s 2016 campaign… in “deterrence” operations to suppress their vote.
These were “voters they wanted to stay home on election day” across 16 key battleground states.
Voters were grouped into categories ‘audiences’ so they could be targeted with the highly-precise ads on Facebook and other platforms
One of the categories was named ‘Deterrence’, which was later described publicly by Trump’s chief data scientist as containing people that the campaign “hope don’t show up to vote”.
The 2016 campaign preceded the first fall in Black turnout in 20 years and allowed Donald Trump to take shock victories in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan by wafer-thin margins, reaching the White House despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign spent £44 million on Facebook ads alone during 2016, posting almost six million different versions of highly targeted messages that were pumped directly into the feeds of target voters across America, helped by a Facebook employee embedded within the Trump campaign.
So, what do we do?
I believe this article, like the Mueller report, is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of democracy in the US.
Facebook is now taking steps to ban political ads after the polls close and making a political ad library (which doesn’t exist from 2016).
We also saw a crackdown on conspiracy theory QAnon.
But, WIRED argues that’s not enough:
A performative post-election ban won’t solve anything. But cutting off the platform’s data-driven rage machine will.
And at the same time that Facebook is seeking kudos for its political ad moratorium, it’s making another major change: turning on algorithmic amplification for posts within groups.
This means that you won’t just see posts from groups that you’ve signed up for, but also posts from other groups that Facebook thinks you should see.
6 - Can we fix misinformation like we did secondhand smoke?
Joan Donovan suggests in the MIT Technology Review that if the tobacco industry’s playbook was used to create the problem, maybe the same mindset can be be used to undo the damage.
Notably, the focus on impact with secondhand smoke —
…regulating the tobacco industry was not an obvious choice to policymakers in the 1980s and 1990s, when they struggled with the notion that it was an individual’s choice to smoke.
Instead, a broad public campaign to address the dangers of secondhand smoke is what finally broke the industry's heavy reliance on the myth of smoking as a personal freedom.
It wasn’t enough to suggest that smoking causes lung disease and cancer, because those were personal ailments—an individual’s choice.
But secondhand smoke? That showed how those individual choices could harm other people.
And, a marketing tenet, demonstrating the cost of doing nothing is a pathway to changing behaviors.
To achieve policy change, researchers and advocates had to demonstrate that the cost of doing nothing was quantifiable in lost productivity, sick time, educational programs, supplementary insurance, and even hard infrastructure expenses such as ventilation and alarm systems.
If these externalities hadn’t been acknowledged, perhaps we’d still be coughing in smoke-filled workplaces, planes, and restaurants.
And, like secondhand smoke, misinformation damages the quality of public life. Every conspiracy theory, every propaganda or disinformation campaign, affects people—and the expense of not responding can grow exponentially over time.
Since the 2016 US election, newsrooms, technology companies, civil society organizations, politicians, educators, and researchers have been working to quarantine the viral spread of misinformation.
The true costs have been passed on to them, and to the everyday folks who rely on social media to get news and information.
In summary: Focusing on the impact of misinformation - like we did secondhand smoke - is a critical part of the effort to combat it.
PS: I also recommend Joan’s piece about how social media (remember when we called it SoMe? LOL) can combat the coronavirus ‘infodemic’
7 - Quote of the week
Comes from a MUST-WATCH 15 minute documentary, They/Them, exploring the use of “they/them” as a pronoun. My favorite line:
What’s more important, people’s feelings and tender hearts or your grammar rule?
The film shares the perspectives of those who live outside of him or her and manifest a beautiful shade of something else in between and beyond our societal definitions of what it means to be gendered. They are beautiful, they are valid, and they are deserving of our empathy and our support. Watch here.
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Upcoming events:
Weds Oct 14th at 3:00pm EDT, watch me live on LinkedIn in a new show for the CX industry, Experience TV.
I’ll be the closing keynote at Managing Editor Live, October 22nd with Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Woke-Washed Marketing - register here!
Be good to yourself and others,
Katie
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Katie Martell