How approaching French ethnic diversity?

Here are some translated extracts from an interview to Julien Landfried, Director of the Observatory of Communities, and Jean-Christophe Despres, General Director of Sopi, 1st –and only- multicultural communication agency:

Jean-Christophe Despres: “In the agency, we do different kinds of researches in order to approach the country’s diversity, like crossed ethnologic and sociologic surveys. We’ve also created a behaviour database, under the supervision of an ethic comity. The segmentation by ethnic groups has enabled us to state the first differences between the ”born here” and the “migrants”, that also need to be divided into subgroups. Then, we can establish communication strategies tailored for each group.

Julien Landfried: In these cases, Sopi’s marketing speech seems to me a bit ideological towards ethnic minorities. Ethnic marketing’s aim is promoting the use of a “community product” responding to a specific need: for example, a cosmetic product for black skins or casher meat. So ethnic marketing has nothing to do with the idea of identity. Indeed, identity can’t summarize all characteristics and needs of a person.

Jean-Christophe Despres: One to one marketing is more and more used. Its aim is to create the most personalised link with the targeted persons. So how, in this approach, doing as if the person’s origin has no importance? It’s better to give a fairer importance to identity.”

Then, they both agreed that in order to avoid excesses, we shouldn’t categorize people too much, in an opportunistic way, and use stereotypes. Jean-Christophe Despres also highlighted that all communities are not homogeneous, and that understanding someone’s identity is very complex. Julien Landfried added that we should identify real needs and not make up some new ones according to political conceptions. Otherwise, we would end up putting people into ghettos… We shouldn’t reduce anyone to his or her ethnic community.
To me, that’s the biggest risk, in all parts of life: I’ve always hated people who categorize other people, and who think they have understood everything about them… Maybe it’s because I’m French? Therefore, I think that, of course, there is a chance for ethnic PR to be more developed in France, but their practitioners will have to be very careful to show an obvious tolerance towards ethnic groups: otherwise, in a country like France, they will be totally dismissed!

Source:

Website of UJJEF, Communication et Entreprise