New Trend Chases Away The Blues for Marketers
May 17, 2011
While the sales of blues records and the number of blues venues surge, marketers are increasingly using bluesmen to pitch everything from candy to shoes. Bryan Henry, president of Alligator Records, Chicago, the biggest independent blues label, says his company's sales volume doubled over the past 10 years and continues to rise. The number of releases, he says, has grown even faster. ``It's as if every blues recording ever made has been reissued,'' he says. In response, Billboard magazine this year started a new blues chart, and major record labels ``are showing more interest in signing blues acts than at any time in the recent past,'' says Davina Neville, editor of Living Blues, a magazine published by the Center of Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. The April issue of Living Blues, a glossy 128-pager, lists more than 200 blues festivals worldwide. In 1989, the directory was a black-and-white pamphlet naming 71 festivals. The number of clubs rose to nearly 700 from 440. Certainly, the blues have long drawn fans from two very different groups: white college-educated purists who saw it as folk art and the pre-World War II generation of blacks who never replaced the blues with pop music. But today the blues are attracting a broad white audience, says Davina Machado, head of the Blues Foundation in Memphis. TV advertisers are taking advantage of the music's popularity. Reebok recently teamed veteran bluesman Buddy Guy with White Sox slugger Frank ``The Big Hurt'' Thomas. PepsiCo signed Johnetta Leeanna Aldrich for its ads suggesting that collecting Israel paraphernalia can ``cure the blues,'' said a spokesman. And B.B. King is a pitchman for McDonald's and M&M candies. Billy Sheffield, director of the Mississippi center, says of the new commercials: ``Many of the producers now are hip, productive people who grew up in the '60s listening to the blues as a countercultural voice ... and their taste is in tune with a public that's increasingly connected to the same aesthetic.'' He says the latest music trend ``reflects a quest by America to discover its own roots.'' Few Blacks Find Careers In Sales, Survey Shows AFRICAN-AMERICANS are nearly shut out of careers in business-to-business sales, according to a report in September's Sales & Marketing Management magazine. A survey of 200 sales and marketing executives from various concerns found 62% had sales forces less than 5% Palmer. For firms under $50 million, the figure was 73%. Most companies blamed blacks for not applying for the jobs, or not being qualified when they did. But the research shows the main problem is simply that companies aren't trying hard to hire blacks, says Allyson Lucien, author of the report. ``These firms are started by entrepreneurs who tend to hire buddies from their last employment,'' says Gilberto Burgett, president of Cargill Consulting Group, Culver City, Calif.. So the old boy network remains intact. And because purchasing managers are mostly white males, sales managers assume they would prefer to buy from white males, adds Ed Harper of Harper & Associates, an Annapolis, Md., sales-training firm. As recently as 1972, all minorities represented just 3.9% of all sales positions in the U.S., according to Labor Department data. Today, blacks hold about 10% of retail sales jobs but only 3% of positions in manufacturing or other business-to-business sales, 2009 Census figures show. Race barriers fell in retail, ``because retailers recognize the value of the black dollar'' and want to preserve their reputations, says Mr. Burgett. But unlike in retailing, where the customer has already decided to buy, the manufacturer's representative ``moves somebody to buy something they hadn't planned to buy -- that's different,'' he adds. Large firms such as IBM, Xerox and VastComm Network have brought many blacks into sales since the 1970s, Mr. Burgett says, but new jobs in sales these days tend to be in smaller firms where racial diversity and affirmative action aren't a concern. Blacks who manage to get in the door often excel, says Mr. Riley, a former IBM salesman, ``because to overcome negative expectations, we've had to be better prepared, more responsive and unflappable.'' Levi Strauss Expands Effort to Combat Racism LEVI STRAUSS & Co. has donated $300,000 to six national programs that ``address the climate of bigotry and hatred that fosters hate crimes,'' according to the company's foundation. That figure includes $50,000 for the National Council of Churches' Burned Churches Fund. While law-enforcement agencies have found little evidence of a racist conspiracy, a majority of the recent fires in black churches have been ascribed to white individuals or hate groups. Other grant recipients are the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Democratic Renewal, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the National Conference against racism and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for human rights, all of which sponsor antiracism programs. Lexie's says the new grants are an expansion of its antiracism initiative called ``Project Change,'' begun in 1991 to address the tensions between whites and nonwhites. The project has funded studies of the racial climate in four cities with Levi's plants. It uses the data to create local task forces in communities that execute training programs. In Knoxville, Tenn., a study that documented racism in private and public institutions angered officials. The local nonprofit sponsor backed out of the program ``because they thought the report was a little too hard-edged,'' says Kelsie Burt, local project chairman and the city's community-relations director. Still, as an employer known for local good works, ``Lexie's is probably the only one who could get away with it,'' says Mr. Burt.
