As we approach the holiday season, Michelle and Allie are beginning to think about what makes inclusive and exclusive marketing. There are so many opportunities to market in a way that includes everyone this season… why not do it?

Transcript:

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech Podcast hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Frechette:
I’m good. It’s so good to see you because we recorded ahead a couple weeks ago, so I feel like… we’ve DMed each other and texted, but I haven’t your smiling face. I know everybody else doesn’t get to see it, which is fine. They get to hear us. But-

Allie Nimmons:
Just for you.

Michelle Frechette:
I didn’t get to say, “Hi Allie.” So it’s kind of fun to say it again.

Allie Nimmons:
And I’m still so chuffed that we both have purple hair. And that was not a planned decision at all. For as good of friends as we are, you would think, “Oh, they both dye their hair purple and they talked about…” Absolutely not. You definitely did it before me. And I just ended up with purple hair. And then we got on a call one day and I was like, “Oh, we match. That’s so fun.”

Michelle Frechette:
It is fun. It is fun. I know. I waited till after my daughter got married last year. She got married in May. And in July I met with my hairdresser… My hairdresser. My stylist, my whatever. I can’t think of the right words today. My hair stylist. And I said, “I want to go purple.” This is my June appointment. It’s about a six hour process the first time. You have to bleach everything out, especially when you have darker hair. My real color’s brown. So take all of that out. And it took about six hours before we could actually deposit the purple in. So you can’t just show up and go, “I want to be purple today,” unless you have white hair. So yeah, July was the earliest I could do it. In July of 2021 I dyed my hair purple and I’ve been purple ever since.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. I definitely need… you’re a rock star for keeping up with it. Mine has grown out a full inch of brown by now. And I’m just like, “Am I really going to risk trying to bleach it again?” Because I’ve heard horror stories of people trying to bleach their roots and overlapping too much with the original part that’d been bleached and then just breaking the hair right off. So I’m going to probably go to a hair stylist and get it touched up, or just grow it out. I don’t know. I still really like the purple. I think it’s really cute and fun.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s so fun. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
All right. Well today we’re not talking about purple hair. We are but we’re not.

Michelle Frechette:
If we were going to talk about underrepresented or a minority group, purple haired people is one of the smallest student you could probably find.

Allie Nimmons:
What do you think people would do if we just logged on here one day and just had a conversation for 30 minutes and never really got into a particular topic? Do you think people would stick around and listen and wait to see, like, “Are they going to get to the point eventually?” I can think of like three people who would listen to the whole thing.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, lovely. I have that other podcast now with Kathy Zander. That’s pretty much all we do, is we just talk happy stuff for 20 minutes. And I think people listen. My mom does. I don’t know. She doesn’t really, but anyway. Yeah, but this podcast is about more than that. This podcast is about the underrepresented people in the world, especially in the tech world. And we say this often, is that we don’t necessarily know what we’re going to talk about before we meet up. We come with ideas, and then we don’t actually discuss it before we start talking so that when you’re listening to us you get to hear the full conversation. Not the rehashed conversation we just had or something.

Allie Nimmons:
Right.

Michelle Frechette:
But my idea this week was… well first of all, I just submitted eight brands to 19 different websites’ Black Friday. That took almost two days, and so it got me thinking about the holidays. It got me thinking about all of the advertising we’re already seeing on TV, on YouTube. I don’t listen to the radio but I’m sure it’s there too.

Allie Nimmons:
Everywhere.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s everywhere. In my mail every day. It’s everywhere. It’s in my email, about how the holidays are used for sales. But there’s so much in holiday advertising that is not inclusive. It’s not inclusive at all. And I think back to, I think we were talking about this a month or so ago, about little girls seeing Black Ariel for the first time. And having that moment of, “I belong. This is amazing.” And I know that Black Santa exists because I’ve seen him on shelves places. But you don’t see Black Santa on TV. You don’t see Black Santa on the mailers that are coming. Maybe once in a while, but not to the extent that we see White Santa everywhere. And if you’re going to say, “Well, Santa was a real person and he was a white man.”
No. Santa’s a make believe person. He has not been around for 4,000 years flying in a sleigh in 24 hours filling every child’s stockings or whatever. So my Santa can be any color that I want him to be, your Santa could be any color that you want him to be, but by and large marketing targets the white community. It just does. And so I think that when we are talking in tech and we’re talking about advertising and general marketing, we need to remember that it’s not just the white community that’s buying things. It’s not just the white community that makes up your target audience. As a matter of fact, last year I actually got… Etsy. Etsy had television commercials on. I stream all my TV but sometimes it has commercials in it anyway, which is good because I get to at least pay attention a little bit to what’s going on.
And last year’s Etsy commercials had me crying happy tears. There was one with a little girl. Gosh, I can’t remember what country she was from. An Asian country. And her teacher kept mispronouncing her name. It was Zoom classes because it was still during the pandemic. Lockdown stuff. And the teacher… It might’ve been two years ago. But the teacher kept mispronouncing her name and her dad kept hearing it in the background. And it was just so… this little girl was so downtrodden because her teacher wouldn’t even make an effort to learn her name. So he went on Etsy and he bought a necklace that was her name and gave it to her for Christmas. And when she saw it, she felt so she belonged and seen, and heard. I was like, “Oh, that’s amazing.”

Allie Nimmons:
It’s so amazing.

Michelle Frechette:
And then there was another one where a guy is bringing his guy home for Christmas to meet the parents for the first time. And he’s worried about meeting his partner’s parents. I don’t remember if they were married or not, but his partner’s parents as a gay couple. And the dad gives him an ornament and it’s embroidered, the two guys, and hangs it on the tree. Totally, yeah, affirming this couple. And I’m like, “Oh my God.” I’m crying over all these Etsy commercials. There was more. Those are the two that are at top of my head. I am sure there were some right wing, conservative people who were like, “That’s terrible. I’m never going to shop on Etsy again.” Good. Apparently you’re not Etsy’s target market, and that’s okay. Anyway, so it got me thinking about that. I’ve talked a lot. What do you think? What are your thoughts?

Allie Nimmons:
No, I totally agree. I think that the history of Christmas time… and I say Christmas time for a reason. Marketing is so American and western. I think about a Christmas Story, the movie. And the commercialization around Christmas. And the big department stores that would have the Christmas displays in there. I remember listening to a podcast. One of my favorite podcasts ever is called Stuff You Should Know. And they have, every year, a Christmas episode where they just talk about Christmas things, or holiday things, I should say. And one year, yeah, they did talk about the big department store, Macy’s displays in New York and stuff that would have Santas and sleighs and all the big boxes with presents and trees. And it’s so ostentatious, and it’s so in your face. And I think at a certain point in time there was a spectacle to it and it was this show that people would just go walk through the city to look at the Christmas displays.
That was an outing in and of itself. And-

Michelle Frechette:
Makes sense.

Allie Nimmons:
There is something very beautiful and romantic about that. I love going to the mall and hearing Christmas music playing over the… I think there’s something very nostalgic and fun about that. And I think what happens is we forget about… because when all that started, that was the ’40s and ’50s and the beginning of all of that stuff. And I think that now that we’re in this very globalized society, we forget about that. We forget that we live in the age of globalization. And we forget that those things, while they might feel nostalgic and romantic to us, you’re right, can be very isolating or othering to people who are like, “Well, I don’t get this at all.” And so if your goal as a marketer for a company is to market products to the most people possible, why would you limit yourself in that way?
Why would you not try to be as inclusive as possible? And I think that it’s such a weird balancing act, the commercialization of Christmas, because it makes sense. This is the time we go out and buy gifts for people. So obviously companies are vying for your attention of, “Buy this gift. No, buy that gift.” It makes sense. I’m not mad at companies for rearing up their marketing in time for not at all for the holidays.

Michelle Frechette:
No, not at all.

Allie Nimmons:
It makes sense. But it’s the rigidity of not being open to the globalized platform that doesn’t make any sense to me. So yeah, I think it’s a really bizarre thing. And getting stuck in that old timey vibe of… I immediately just think of the Coke commercials with Santa Claus and the polar bear. And like yeah, okay, that’s cute. But the Etsy commercials that you’re talking about, it’s like you can go one of two ways. You can go for what I think is the easy way out, which are the things that we associate with Christmas; trees and polar bears and Santa, or you can go for the way that people feel or the way that people want to feel at the holidays, which is, “Somebody gave me a gift that really touches me and shows that they were thinking about me.”
That’s really what all of these… whether you want to look at it as Christmas or Kwanza or Hanukkah or… I forget the Pagan holiday for this time of year, but there’s lots of different holidays in winter time. Is it Yule Tide?

Michelle Frechette:
It’s Winter-

Allie Nimmons:
Something like that. Winter Solstice.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, Winter Solstice. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
All of that is about all of these very emotional things. Love and family and renewal and celebration and looking back and looking forward. And those are all so universal. And it seems like a no-brainer to me as a marketer to focus on the universal, because then those are also the things that people share with each other in terms of commercials, memes, videos, whatever. Those are the things we look at and we think, “Oh, Michelle would really enjoy this because I know that she’s also touched by sappy Christmas commercials. I should send this to her.” If it’s the stereotypical Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. Western Christian sort of Christmas, that’s so tiny. That’s such a tiny market, and you lose people.
So to me, all that is to say it just doesn’t make sense. I want to go for making people feel all of the positive feelings we associate with the holiday season, because there’s a lot of negative also associated with that if you go the family route. Sometimes people don’t have great relationships with their family. But what I love what you talked about with the Etsy commercials is also having that variety of, okay, you’re not gay. Maybe the gay couple commercial didn’t resonate with you, but maybe you have a kid and you saw them struggle with Zoom classes. And this commercial will resonate. Getting into those sorts of things makes a lot more sense to me. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. And I’m not gay and it still resonated with me and made me cry because I have a heart and I love people. You know what I mean? And I’m not saying that to alienate anybody, of course, but if you can’t watch something about people feeling validated, people feeling uplifted, people feeling seen and heard in such a positive way and not be touched emotionally at all, then maybe Christmas isn’t for you at all.

Allie Nimmons:
Or maybe you’re just a homophobe.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. But also racist and bigoted and all of the different things that come with those commercials. And I don’t know, I just think that focusing on one demographic, it’s problematic. And maybe their numbers say otherwise, and fine. I’m not telling a business what they have to do, but I’m just saying that there are more people in the world than necessarily the people that you have targeted to this point. When I was growing up, I think it was Sears Wish Book came out every year. And you could go into it and pick up this catalog that was like an inch thick, and it was all holiday stuff. Yeah, it was vacuum cleaners and it was microwaves and it was all that kind of stuff too that the dads give moms. Even the moms are, “Great, thanks. More stuff for doing work around the house.”
But the first half of that book was absolutely geared to children. And that would come in the mail. It went to every household. It was like you got a phone book in the mail and you got this Sears catalog in the mail. And it might’ve been JC Penny, now that I think of it. Whichever one it was. Anyway, we would go through it. My brother had a black marker, I had a red marker, and Greg, my other brother, had like a green marker. We’d go through. We would circle the things we wanted in this catalog, and that was how we made our Christmas wishlist. And mom would look through the catalog and see what it was we wanted and determine what was appropriate and what was budget-friendly and all of those other things. It was geared towards children. But as I think back over it, I obviously don’t remember it for sure, but I’m going to guess that it was all white children in that catalog at the time because it was the ’70s. It was-

Allie Nimmons:
I’m sure you could find old scans of it. Yeah, I had the same… I was probably in the last generation that had that because my grandma, she would get Fingerhut Magazine.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, I remember those. Yep.

Allie Nimmons:
It wasn’t the main department store, but it was just a mail order company. Because I don’t think they had stores. Called Fingerhut, which is, looking back, such a weird name for a company. What does that even mean?

Michelle Frechette:
Who named that?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. But yeah, we would get Fingerhut Magazine. And my grandma would give it to me. And she would give me a marker. And I would flip immediately to the kids’ section. And there would be toys and clothes. And there would be a boy section and a girl section. That’s a whole other thing.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes, of course.

Allie Nimmons:
Gendered toys. We could talk about that forever.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
And I do remember browsing the boy section and being like, “What’s in here? Let me see what’s in here.” But I remember always picking stuff. And I’d pick like 50 things. I picked so much stuff, but I would get three. From that magazine I remember getting a Barbie car that fit my Barbies into it that was remote controlled, that I could drive around the house. And that was the best Christmas fricking ever. So just to wax nostalgic about that for a second because that was a deep memory that just popped into the forefront when you mentioned the magazines. I haven’t thought about that in a really long time.

Michelle Frechette:
[inaudible 00:16:58].

Allie Nimmons:
But yeah, there is such a commercialization to Christmas when we’re kids because everything is targeted to us. We have all the power. That fantasy of the making Santa a list of what you want. And it’s almost like we don’t grow out of that in a lot of ways. We grow up and Christmas remains commercial, but now you’re the one who has to… I’m already… it’s November 17th. I’ve been mulling over, “All right, what am I going to get my husband for Christmas? What am I going to get my mom for Christmas?” I’ve got to start collecting things and getting boxes and Post-It and all that stuff. And yeah, it becomes this very much things, things, things, things, things. Discounts, discounts, discounts. And I think the ads that we remember are the ones that supersede all of that. The ones that say, “It matters what you get someone but it doesn’t.” It more matters what you’re saying and what you want to say, and what you want to communicate with that thing. And those are the ads that we remember.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep. The modern day version of the Sears Wishbook is my Amazon Wishlist

Allie Nimmons:
Me and my family have to… we’re not Amazon stands here. We all have our feelings about Amazon these days.

Michelle Frechette:
Sure.

Allie Nimmons:
But when my family and I, me, my parents who are not technically literate, and my sister. When we figured out that we could just put things on our Amazon list and then just order them for each other and send them automatically to each… game-changer. Huge game-changer.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
Because it’s like you never have to worry about, “Well, is this something that they would want? Are they going to use it?” You know they want it. And it’s still a surprise because you don’t know. I did figure out, Michelle, though, I don’t know if you’ve seen this: on your wishlist you can toggle an option to see what has been purchased before you get it.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes. I am aware.

Allie Nimmons:
So you can peek. I didn’t know that for many Christmases and then I realized that I could essentially peek under the tree and see what I was getting.

Michelle Frechette:
I don’t let myself do that.

Allie Nimmons:
I do every once in a while.

Michelle Frechette:
I want some element of surprise. The other thing I wanted to mention about holiday stuff is our company, the WordPress community, other places that I belong to have these secret Santa exchanges where you’re paired up… you’re not paired up with somebody, because that would be giving to each other. But I-

Allie Nimmons:
You get a random person assigned to you. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
And then you’re also assigned to a random person. And my company is not all people who celebrate Christmas. And so are we alienating people by calling it secret Santa? Is there another word that we could use? Holiday gift exchange, secret gift exchange?

Allie Nimmons:
I’ve heard that.

Michelle Frechette:
Things like that. We use an app online. I don’t know if there’s an option to choose a different name for your gift exchange, but secret Santa is just something that people don’t even think about. They just use that terminology.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
And then… I don’t know. I guess all I’m saying with the whole Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Kwanza, Solstice, everything is, if you can be inclusive in the events that you create, in the marketing and advertising that you create, in the sales that you create, then do. And I cannot think of any way, any impediment to being inclusive in any of those things.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
If your entire business is selling Christmas trees, okay, I get it. Yes, you sell Christmas trees. But we’re in the tech industry and I don’t think any of us are doing that.

Allie Nimmons:
I knew plenty. When I was growing up in New York I knew plenty of people who were Jewish, who celebrated Hanukkah, who had Christmas trees. They maybe didn’t call them Christmas trees. Maybe they didn’t have the same… they didn’t put an angel on the top and stuff like that. But having a tree to decorate was still… I see that sometimes as almost more American than Christian or Christmas-related.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s actually Pagan.

Allie Nimmons:
There you go.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s actually a Pagan tradition. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
So I feel like even if you sell Christmas trees or sell Christmas ornaments or whatever, you can make menorah Christmas ornaments or, I’m sorry, menorah tree ornaments. You could make Kwanza candle tree ornaments.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
Families are so blended as well at this point. I know many Jewish people who are married to non-Jewish people who celebrate Christmas.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep. Exactly.

Allie Nimmons:
So you have the two things existing in the same place. And it’s like, why would you not cater to those people as well and give them the things that they’re looking for? There’s always an opportunity. And it just seems like… I know that a lot of marketing is you have to be specific. You have to know exactly who you’re talking to and be very… What’s the word? Micro about who it is you’re speaking to.

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
But I feel like sometimes that is incredibly limiting. Obviously you don’t want to try and talk to everyone all the time all at once, but holiday time? It’s a pretty universal thing that everyone is thinking about the holidays, has time off, and is going to go shopping, so why not reach out to everyone?

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely. Exactly. And before anybody comes at us, this is not a war on Christmas.

Allie Nimmons:
I hate that phrase. That’s up there with woke for me.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes. This is a plea to be inclusive and embracing of all people and all cultures. If you want to say Merry Christmas, say Merry Christmas. But if somebody says, “Happy holidays,” to you, don’t be offended. If somebody said to me, “Happy Hanukkah,” I’d be like, “Well, thank you.”

Allie Nimmons:
Happy freaking Hanukkah back to you too. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
Whatever. Yeah, exactly. Anytime anybody wishes me well in any language or for any event, I am all for it.

Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
I wonder if there’s a particular greeting for Kwanza. It’s so funny. Because I’m black, people throughout my life have assumed that I celebrate Kwanza or assume that I know about Kwanza. I don’t know a dang thing about Kwanza. Maybe that should be my resolution this year. My pre-New Year’s resolution is to learn some about Kwanza and learn how that works.

Michelle Frechette:
I just looked it up. “Wishing you a blessed Kwanza.” But if you’re going to say it in Swahili, you say, “Habari gani.”

Allie Nimmons:
Damn. Nice.

Michelle Frechette:
Habari gani So there you go. Let’s go.

Allie Nimmons:
Let’s see if the captioners will get that correct in the Swahili when we get our captions for this episode.

Michelle Frechette:
I’ll spell it out if everybody’s listing. It’s H-A-B-A-R-I. Habari. Gani. G-A-N-I.

Allie Nimmons:
Nice. That’s amazing.

Michelle Frechette:
So happy all the things to everybody.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes. Happy all of the things. And yeah, we will be taking a break next week for the giving of thanks because we can. Not necessarily because we want to honor Christopher Columbus, but because we both probably have at least one day off of work and we want to relax.

Michelle Frechette:
We want to honor our families and our time together with our families.

Allie Nimmons:
Precisely. Alrighty.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
So thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you all again week after next.
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