The overlooked $170 billion

The overlooked $170 billion
While
engaging Islam may appear complex, what remains quite simple is that
there are millions of American consumers – with an estimated $170
billion of purchasing power – still being ignored.

I’ve
seen plenty of things making FUN of us….We would love to be part of a
general marketing campaign if the media world would accept Muslims as a
common part of the North American diaspora. -Amethyst, Creator of Ninjabi

Advertising in the United States has often influenced the pop-culture
identities of religious and ethnic minorities. To be targeted by
marketers serves as an invitation to join in the national narrative of
capitalism. To shop is to be American.

In 2009, the US marketplace will begin to truly recognize and court the
$170 billion purchasing power of American-Muslims. To date, pop-culture
representations of Islam are either cloaked in evil or infused with
pathos. But as Hallmark, Wal-Mart and 20th Century Fox aim to engage
this consumer demographic, it will slowly help to prove that
American-Muslims are, as Professor Farid Senzai says, “boring as the
rest of us [Americans]” but also, as Amethyst states above “a common
part of the North American diaspora.

The American advertising industry often avoids engaging the nuances of
race, religion and ethnicity, instead opting for code works like
‘urban’ or window dressing for the idea of diversity. Seeing as this
industry moves billions of dollars, this lack of open engagement is not
just feckless, it is a missed market opportunity. Money is being left
on the table.

When considering marketers’ slow embrace of Muslim consumers, we must
acknowledge legal scholar Leti Volpp’s point that “September 11
facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups
together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’ This
consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group
are identified as terrorists and disidentified as citizens.”

It is this conflation that bore the 2008 Dunkin Donuts controversy.
Spokeswoman Rachel Ray wore a scarf that looked like a keffiyeh in a TV
commercial and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin then chided Ray for
wearing a ‘jihadi chic’ garment. Dunkin Donuts dropped the advert. At
no point was the spot even attempting to engage Islam or the Middle
East, yet there was backlash.

No doubt that marketers considering this space are wary of the
Islamophobic chatter within media. And are likely confused by the
diversity of people and practices within the American-Muslim
population. But I posit that this may be similar to the hurdles brands
faced when first reaching out to gay and lesbian consumers. And as Saad
Ahmad, of the blog Chill Yo, Islam Yo, said “seeing that we live in a capitalist society, [including Islam] in advertising is really just an economic issue.”

Such inclusion has been discussed within the ad industry, but little
action has been taken. Yet consumer demand is there and (full
disclosure) our company is responding to it.
We’d be heedless to ignore Long Island radiologist Almas Abbasi. who
told the New York Times “If Ramadan starts, and you see an ad in the
newspaper saying, ‘Happy Ramadan, here’s a special in our store,’
everyone will run to that store.” Now, American brands indeed do this
within primarily Muslim countries – Burger King in UAE, HP in
Bangladesh, Oreos in Indonesia etc. Though to date, no Muslim holidays
are seized as a sales opportunity within the US. Except perhaps in
Dearborn, Michigan, a city with the highest concentration of Muslims
and Middle Eastern folks in America. Wal-Mart has opened a store in
Dearborn designed for this demo. Newsweek reports that:

Wal-Mart
offers its standard fare, plus 550 items targeted at Middle Eastern
shoppers….walk through the front door of the 200,000-square-foot
supercenter and instead of rows of checkout counters, you find a scene
akin to a farmers market in Beirut. Twenty-two tables are stacked high
with fresh produce like kusa and batenjan, squash and eggplant used in
Middle Eastern dishes… a walled-off section of the butcher case is
devoted to Halal meats.

Ikea has taken measures to court
Dearborn shoppers and the local McDonalds and KFC serve halal meat. On
the national scale, Hallmark carries Eid cards and the USPS issued an
Eid stamp in 2001. But that’s about it.

While tailoring products to reach this consumer base is one important
step for retailers, writer Yasmine Hafiz reminds us that “the average
Muslim consumer is much like the average American consumer, with wants
and needs mainly dictated by their income, education, and type of
family. Their socioeconomic status dictates their spending habits more
than their religious affiliation… there’s a lot of untapped buying
potential amongst all these doctors & engineers.”

And as noted on the blog Muslim Canvas,
“I guess the value I see in this marketing stuff is the effect it’ll
have on the American psyche, rather than the Muslim psyche necessarily.
[Seeing] a hijabi mom spreading Jif peanut butter on her son’s
sandwich, or of a long-bearded man answering the door on a Domino’s
commercial, could go a long way for our “image”.

The forthcoming US version
of the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie could be a space for
product placement. That said, brands must be adroit and not fall prey
to tropes like the soul-claps and sombreros that plague too many
minority-market campaigns. Nor forget that only half of American-Muslim
women wear a hijab or think that Islam is the sole aspect of Muslim
consumers’ identities.

While engaging Islam may appear complex, what remains quite simple is
that there are millions of American consumers still being ignored.
Millions of consumers who are waiting to see which brands will be smart
enough to embrace them as fellow Americans.

Michael Hastings-Black is the co-founder of Desedo Films,
a New York City production company that specializes in new media and
minority markets. This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Muslim
Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption from Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.