So you want to start a big moneymaking website, but you’re fresh out of ideas, or feel that all the good opportunities have been taken. Here are two not so secret secrets that could possibly help you make a fortune.
- SECRET #1: No matter the industry, if you fulfill a need for a customer, HE WILL PAY YOU. If you make things easier, or more convenient or comfortable for a customer, HE WILL PAY YOU. If you simply give a customer what he wants, HE WILL PAY YOU.
- SECRET #2: Find your competitors underserved customers and serve them.
There it is, two not so secret secrets for creating wealth from a business. If you analyze most (if not all) businesses, they get paid from serving needs, making things easier, providing convenience, comfort, and giving consumers what they want.
Clothing companies collect substantial revenues by fulfilling their customers’ needs to cover their nakedness. Fast food joints make a hefty profit by selling convenience to working parents who don’t have time to cook after a long work day. Mattress companies know that I could sleep on the floor, but they also know that the floor is hard and I’ll pay handsomely for a comfortable night’s sleep. My 55 inch flat screen TV causes me to waste major time, and I don’t need it, but because I wanted it, some electronics store got a huge chunk of cash from me.
Although businesses serve needs and provide comforts on a daily basis, many of them tend to overlook or just poorly serve certain customer niches. I often find that black consumers are not being serviced properly or at all by many businesses. Collectively we spend too many billions of dollars to be ignored. Many of our people voice complaints about how they wish non-black businesses would cater to us, but I think we as black people should focus on seizing the opportunity of filling voids that they leave.
HOW BUSINESSES IGNORE BLACK CONSUMERS
To increase their bottom lines, many businesses tend to focus on specific demographics of customers. Getting right to the point, time and time again, these same businesses tend to overlook black consumers. Some do it inadvertently, by not focusing on us at all and lump us in with traditional American customer types, i.e. white people. For those businesses who aim their marketing at black consumers, many simply don’t connect with us because of a lack of understanding our culture. While these things may not matter or even register with many black patrons, there’s a huge number of African Americans who feel ignored and/or misunderstood by the average business
I’m sure that you’ve seen plenty of print and TV ads with like five white people and one black person. That black person is meant to represent all black people, although the white people are presented as a diverse group.
Maybe you’ve seen a product that was marketed mainly to white consumers, and thought, this would be cool if there were a black version. Maybe you’ve been in a white owned establishment and their cool atmosphere was totally in line with their culture and you thought to yourself, this would be even nicer if it catered to the tastes of me and my people.
Simple minded people may write this off as a racist or anti-white rant, but I have to ask you don’t we as black customers with green money deserve to be catered to the way every other group is? For products that target male consumers, haven’t we seen over and over that those same products will also be made into a female version, a teen version, a kid version, a Spanish version, and/or a senior version?
Their advertisements will speak the language of and feature people from that respective group. A company that aims its products at teens won’t misrepresent them with images of seniors. If seniors are the focus group, the reverse is true. They won’t be presented with images of teens to promote products to them. The companies will give them their proper respect as customers. When it comes to us as black customers, it’s not unusual to be ignored completely or misrepresented by someone that doesn’t look or act like us, nor is it unusual to be downright stereotyped and insulted.
This blatant ignoring and underserving of black customers, if properly acted on can actually be the seeds to a prosperous venture for black entrepreneurs. All you have to do is act on it.
WHY YOU SHOULD MAKE IT YOUR BUSINESS TO PAY BLACKS SOME ATTENTION
Let me ask again, don’t we as black customers with green money deserve to be catered to the way every other group is? Truthfully, companies who profit from us owe it to us to fine tune their products to appeal to black people simply because we are their customers. Realistically, many of these companies could care less about properly appealing to blacks as a customer base, simply because we will spend our hard earned dollars with them anyway.
They can extract our money from us without much effort because as a collective we are overwhelmingly a group of consumers and on the flipside we are underwhelming producers.
Many of our people could care less about any of this and are happy as long as they get to spend their money on everything trendy from companies who will gladly take their money, but won’t give many of them jobs, nor put any of that money back into our communities that support them. That’s beyond sad and depressing and to that I say…WHATEVER.
My focus is on our black people who do give a damn, and please believe there is a huge amount of our people who are waiting for you and me to provide them with products and services that cater to them in a respectful and understanding manner that they can be proud of.
We should literally make it our business to pay attention to these black people because it makes economic sense to serve the needs of this ignored and underserved group of customers. We should recognize and seize the numerous opportunities that these other companies overlook. It doesn’t matter if it’s a brick and mortar business or an internet based one, we owe it to black customers to provide them with businesses that they can be proud to support. Not only will we enrich ourselves, but we can inspire young black children and professionals to have a paradigm shift to aspire to be producers rather consumers, and employers rather than servants.
No comments yet.