Microsoft is taking some heat for changing the race of a man featured in a photo on their web site. And I don't understand what the problem is.
Someone happened to notice that the Polish version of their web site has a white man featured in the photo; on other versions of the web site, it's a black man in the photo. Microsoft is apologizing for doing so, yet they shouldn't have to.
Every marketing major in the world knows that you change the advertising in different markets, in order to achieve a deeper market penetration. An ad that works in the U.S. market won't necessarily work in the Polish market.
According to the CIA World Factbook, Poland's population is a lot less diverse than ours is: it shows that the population is 96.7% Polish, 0.4% German, 0.1% Belarusian, Ukrainian 0.1% Ukrainian, and 2.7% is listed as "other." Caucasions make up nearly 100% of Poland's entire population.
By contrast, the U.S. population diversity looks something like this: white 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61%.
The CIA put this in their writeup: ...a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean a person of Latin American descent (including persons of Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican origin) living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.); about 15.1% of the total US population is Hispanic.
Companies doing advertising in the U.S. need to be more diverse in their advertising; those in Poland do not, and they shouldn't be criticized for changing their approach. Microsoft probably uses people of Asian descent for their advertising in China. That's smart advertising.
Microsoft should stand it's ground on this issue.
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