July 12th, 1998 – France celebrates its first soccer world cup and the largest celebrations since the end of WWII can be seen around the country. The news headlines are all about the “Black Blanc Beur” (Black White and Arabs) generation. Earlier the same year, a huge crowd of French people of African descent march to commemorate the abolition of slavery. It seems that France is finally acknowledging the country’s ethnic diversity.
The truth is that France has the largest black population, the biggest Muslim population, the most important Jewish community in all of Europe! Recognizing this and thinking everyone was ready made me decide to reach out to some of the top executives at the country’s largest advertising agencies. I pleaded with them to go multicultural and to start paying more attention to these diverse consumers; their continual answer was “There’s no room for that.”
Because of this constant mentality un-open to change, I decided to do it by myself. In 2003, the SOPI agency became the very first agency in France to implement ethnic and cultural diversity in market research, advertising, and media, and we did so during a quite tense social and legislative time, especially due to tough new immigration laws. There was not much success at the start – business leaders felt that the spending power was just not there. This is where our research began, the problem was the scarcity of information available (because of legal and ideological restrictions), and that quantitative studies require a very sophisticated and scalable methodology. This kind of information caught the media’s attention and generated great interest from many different industry sectors.
The first industry verticals to take notice were the banking, IT & communications, cosmetics and food industries. For example, we were the first to assist Nestlé to launch a range of Halal products, designed for the French market. Still, what we do continues to remain somewhat controversial.
It is only in the last year (2007), that we can begin to report a subsequent shift in local companies’ views towards ethnic diversity. More to come…
