I recently visited New York City (The Big Apple) with my grandchildren and their mother. One of the “adventures” on the schedule was a visit to American Girl Place, a Mecca for young girls ages 5 to 12. To me this store on Park Avenue is the epitome of great marketing. In the best Harvard Business School tradition, American Girl has identified the “decision making unit”, young girls, their mothers and grandmothers, ( It is not clear to me who the decision maker is) and has tailored a product and marketing message to each of them. For the girls are the dolls with matching clothes for the girls; for the mothers and grandmothers are the educational books and multicultural components. The fact that there is no sports bar for bored old grandfathers probably says something about our role in the process. This program certainly seems to be a marketing success. As our eight year old grand daughter said “Grandma, I think every girl in NYC will own an American Girl doll”. This may be a bit of a stretch as the dolls are $100 and it’s hard to get out without $100 of accessories. She may, nonetheless, be correct as it seemed as though every other girl on the street was carrying an American Girl doll. As I thought about the success of this marketing program, I was motivated to compare it to the effort of the US government to market our foreign policy in other parts of the world. We have budgeted $600 mm per year and assigned Karen Hughes, one of President Bush’s most trusted advisors to implement a public diplomacy initiative. Our government seems to have realized that encouraging democracy in countries where a large majority of the population does not like US policies is likely to result in the election of a government that is opposed to the US. We have seen the beginnings of this in the election of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and the strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The US government, however, seems to have missed the most important part of an effective marketing program: developing a product that meets the needs and desires of the targeted customers. I don’t think that we can sell unconditional support for Israel and their policies and actions to the “Arab street”. Palestinians who have lived under occupation for 40 years will probably not buy an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Emerging democracies will not like a country who says that it supports democracy, but then tries to overthrow elected governments that it does not like (Consider Palestine and Venezuela). As a recent panel at the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School on U.S. Public Public Diplomacy toward The Arab-Muslim World concluded - "It's the policy stupid". I am not sure this $600mm is well spent. If you build a product that nobody wants, the best marketing program in the world will not sell it. As an Israeli blogger said in discussing the destruction by the Israeli army of toilets built by American Christian groups for Palestinians whose homes had been demolished: “Isn’t there a better way to waste taxpayer money?”.
Current Affairs
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