Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You: How to Delight and Engage the Customers Your Competitors Don't Understand

4. ADVERTISING AND MARKETING

Once you have a diverse team in place—or even just one person on your staff who is different from you—you can effectively advertise and market to that new customer group or groups. Although this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many times business owners ask me if they can advertise to the Hispanic market in their community if they don’t have anyone on staff who speaks Spanish. The answer is no! I understand that they’ve read all the news articles about the growth of the Hispanic market and are eager to grow their business with new customers. But you can’t market to a new and different customer group, at least, not authentically, if there is no one on board who represents that customer. For example, there is a yoga studio directly across the street from my house. They post their class schedule, complete with type of class, time, and instructor name, on their window. Just from observation, I’d guess that 90 to 95 percent of the people who take classes there are young women, in their 20s and early 30s. I never used to see any men of any age go there. Then one day, I was walking by and looked at their schedule posted in the window; prominently featured was “Introducing New Ashram Yoga Class with Yogi David Fordham! Beginners Welcome!” Not only were they clearly promoting that the instructor was a man, they also made it obvious that even if you’ve never taken a yoga class before, you would not feel out of place in this class. It was such a smart ...