Trendwatching.com has a report out today covering the gay community. I haven’t had a chance to read it all the way through yet, but it has a lot of information and seems interesting.
NaCo is very cool. How do I know? Because of the two sure-fire 100% guaranteed leading indicators of coolness.
1. Our interns love their stuff.
2. I had never heard of it, and the interns had to explain to me what it was.
Both as reliable indicators of coolness as the sun coming up in the morning.
But apparently somebody doesn’t think they’re all that cool. As reported on AdAge.com today, recently some Macy’s stores in Texas and Georgia started stocking some of NaCo’s t-shirts:
Macy’s, however, quickly found that not everyone is amused by NaCo’s sense of humor. Its T-shirt with the fashion-parody slogan “Brown is the new white” drew immediate fire from a conservative anti-immigration website, generating e-mails to Macy’s threatening a boycott and online rants about racism and immigrants trying to take over America (one poster pointed out a possible link between Macys’ red-star logo and communism). Fox News did a story, and Macy’s pulled the “Brown is the new white” shirt.”
Dean Schwartz, president-CEO of Naco USA, is unperturbed and said, “Macys has taken it in stride.”
Good for NaCo and good for Macy’s. If you’re going to be different and cool; if you’re going to try to change things, then you’re going to catch some heat. There is always someone invested in the status quo, or what they think is the status quo. So despite the fact that America has been a melting pot since its beginning, some people are angry about what they see as the Latin-ization of the US. The people who threatened to boycott Macy’s are of the same vein as the ones who phoned in death threats to Pizza Patron.
Angry conservative bloggers and anti-immigrant boycotts won’t stop the emergence of the Hispanic market in the US, but it will continue to be one of the challenges faced by companies who serve and market to Hispanics.
My friends and I have a joke about David Beckham. We call him Pelé. Why?
Because he is:
• An aging foreign soccer star.
• Past his prime but still able to play.
• Still the biggest star in international soccer.
• Brought into the biggest soccer market in the US.
• To put a fledgling US soccer league over the top.
• Because soccer’s really going to make it in the US this time.
To all appearances, David Beckham is Pelé 30 years later. Although, to the best of my recollection, Pelé wasn’t married to a Spice Girl.
So what makes the LA Galaxy and the MLS think they’re really going to do it this time? What makes them think that soccer is going to have success in a world where the NBA is limping along and the NHL is on life support?
For one thing, the league is better structured than the old NASL. They don’t have a ridiculous TV contract and they don’t have to fill 70,000 seat stadiums to break even. They also have a reasonable salary cap (with exceptions for giant international stars).
But the real key to the potential success of MLS can be boiled down to one word:
Mexicans
The truth is, the MLS will never really succeed against the NFL, NBA, or Major League Baseball on a head to head level with mainstream white America. Most white Americans were all raised on the stuff. To them soccer seems slow and low scoring, which in their minds equals boring. MLS is going to have to succeed somewhere else. And that somewhere else is the fastest growing demographic in the US with a trillion dollars in spending power.
The one main advantage that MLS has over the NASL is that over the last 30 years, Hispanics have become a huge market, and many of them still love the game they grew up with.
The challenge becomes getting Hispanics to transfer their loyalties from Cruz Azul and Pumas to the LA Galaxy and the Red Bulls of New York. One of the brilliant marketing efforts along this line was getting the owners of Chivas involved in a team in the US, so that the leap is shortened for some fans, from supporting Chivas to supporting… Chivas!
The other advantage for the MLS is that Latinos are setting many of American culture’s trends now. Everyone wants to be Latino. Latinos made Shakira popular and white America followed. J-Lo. Reggaeton. Mexican food. Cuban food. Brazilian drinks. If something is sufficiently popular in the Latino market it has a real chance to succeed in the general market.
That could be the real advantage that MLS has that will give it a chance to survive. Not the Spice Girls.