Sunday 20 January 2008

Multicultural communication or the key for a successful ethnic PR in France

After a few days without leaving any thoughts on this blog, I started thinking about what makes diversity work in our “mixed ethnic” countries. And I thought it works best when this diversity is one whole mix, part of one whole culture: a multicultural culture. So is multicultural communication the future for an ethnic PR in France? That’s anyway what works best for the moment, simply because the idea of gathering people is much easier to accept than the idea of splitting them up.
Of course, there is the risk of stereotyping a perfect homogeneous society where all the groups are exactly complementary; and some could also fear that communicating on multicultural societies would lead to giving up some aspects of ethnic group identities and keep only some of them, in order to fit in the whole general identity… Well, maybe here is the limit of ethnic PR in France: in the public sphere we could all belong to one French identity, and in the private sphere… Everybody does what he or she wants!
That may sound like a utopian theory, but I think it’s actually becoming true. I’m not saying that ethnic communities are disappearing, melting in one only French culture (and I think that would be sad!), but I just look around me and see how things are lived in the young generations. For example, let’s talk about the French football team: in 1998 some pointed out all the different ethnic origins of the team, where we could see more Black and Arabic people than Whites… But until I heard this comment, I actually didn’t pay attention to this! To me these footballers were just the French team, and I didn’t care about their skin colours… And of course I was not the only one to think this way. Therefore, I believe that this will be the way of thinking in France in the future…So, probably traditional ethnic PR and Marketing, targeting specific communities, will still play a minor role in the country, while multicultural communication will make more and more sense.

2 comments:

Samual said...

I appreciate you for posting such a wonderful Blog.The first step to finding "ownable" Ethnic Marketing spaces is to discover which groups of ethnic consumers are underserved or are not actively targeted by an industry's product or service offerings.

Samual said...

Its a great Blog.The first step to finding "ownable" Ethnic Marketing spaces is to discover which groups of ethnic consumers are underserved or are not actively targeted by an industry's product or service offerings.