A New America : Part One: Strangers at Home

Everyone puts multiethnic faces in marketing materials, but it's mostly a token gesture. Because even as the U.S. grows increasingly diverse, most professionals have little real knowledge of those different from themselves. OtherWise is a deep and engaging exploration of diversity in America and how we can bridge differences—across race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, faith, and even politics. It goes far beyond census data into the realm of cognitive and social science, helping readers break through stereotypes and fears to a profound understanding of people unlike themselves. This is not touchy-feely stuff, but crucial information for businesspeople everywhere whose success depends on embracing the new realities of their workforce, their suppliers, and their customers. Readers will discover: What America's changing demography means for business; How unconscious biases shape behaviors and beliefs; How to connect across cultures, borders, and perspectives; How to move beyond tolerating differences to capitalizing on them. OtherWise strips away the barriers of 'us' and 'them,' and lays bare profound truths for relating to others around us.

Back in the 1980s, Peter Francese used to find himself sighing a lot whenever he went on the road to promote American Demographics, the magazine he founded. Inevitably, he would find himself in the conference room of some big-shot chief marketing officer (CMO), trying to get him interested in the demographic changes that were going to radically change the world as he knew it. And Francese could hear his audience's brain slip into a daydreaming gear.'He always seemed to be a guy in his early fifties, and the longer I talked to him, the more I realized that his only real skill was signing invoices,' Francese remembers. 'He was probably good at negotiating contracts, but he knew nothing about the marketplace.' Undaunted, Francese would press on, throwing chart after chart on the screen showing how a tectonic shift in the market was about to upend the CMO's carefully laid plans. 'Eventually,' Francese says, 'the guy would wave his hands and say, ‘I get all I need to know from watching my friends and neighbors.’ And that would be it.'Francese may have been slightly ahead of his time, but his magazine attracted the readership of 22,000 more enlightened marketing executives, before he sold it in 2004 to Crain Communications, which folded it into its flagship trade publication Advertising Age. Francese currently writes an occasional white paper for Ad Age and is the chief demographic analyst for the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency. It seems that the new crop of CMOs has a livelier interest in demographic change, which Francese can satisfy nicely from his node on the information superhighway in New Hampshire. Still, when Francese speaks to a large group of marketing and advertising people, he often conducts the same brief survey.'How many of you think the majority of adults in the United States graduated from college?' he asks. Most of the hands in the audience go up.