Urban is not a race!
"Urban" skaters
The term urban should be dropped from the vocabulary of professional marketers. Within the urban environment, you have the leaders and the followers. Most trends that you see moving from the cities to the suburbs tend to come from the black part of the urban community. The problem with the all encompassing term of urban is that it tends to include Latinos , Asians, and cool white kids within the urban diaspora . This is true geographically but it is not entirely accurate when you are tracking the trends born from this space. Although cool white youth, Asians, and Latinos also live in urban environments, they tend to follow the styles and innovations that are born from the black youth within these environments.
By grouping all of these youth into the “urban” race and not differentiating the teachers from the students, we end up looking to the whole group to track style and creativity, thus getting results that are not completely accurate.
Black youth tend to have an open mind, which breeds a heightened sense of creativity and resourcefulness which in turn gives them the necessary freedom and confidence needed to go against the grain. This way of being is a by product of the socioeconomic and racial climate that they grow up in.
In order to get to the answers on how trends and styles move from the city to the suburbs, we must go to the proper source to ask the questions. Jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues and most recently hip hop were all born from black urban communities. I differentiate between black urban and urban here because the difference is distinct. The black youth are not only providing the creative stimulus for the so called “mainstream”, suburban kids to follow but what people tend to not realize is that this same creative stimulus is also watched and followed by their Latin, Asian and cool white urban counter parts as well.
Coming close to identifying the true cultural creators has been good enough to stay in the game thus far in advertising, but in this difficult time for the industry, winning is the only way to stay relevant, not just suiting up and taking the field. Near misses can mean a loss of potential growth and a reduction in profits for a client. Since ad agencies have very few if any of these trend setters within their ranks, they are hitting the wall when it comes time to offer that bit of insight to the client that requires full immersion to identify and can not be found on google. Agencies have to outsource the work to those that they think can help to access the proper information from the proper sources. The problem with this is that they still provide guidelines set by a think tank in the middle of nowhere as to what “urban” is and basically hire consultants to do the fact checking for them on Dr. so-and-so’s theories. News flash; as long as Dr. so-and-so, thinks that urban is one big like minded group of trend setters we recommend you throw out his report because it is not worth the paper it was printed on.
There must be a significant shift in how firms identify what it is that they are looking for and once they have that locked in, then they can properly consult people that have experience within the arena that they are trying to tackle as to the best way to go about gathering information from within it. If you keep on dusting off the same strategy and the same approach you will continually come up with the same tired answer.
Urban Is Not A Race from diverseinsights on Vimeo.
