Diversity Makes Them Singularly Successful : Members of public relations firm pride themselves on helping businesses find inoffensive approaches to marketing in a multiethnic society.

The way the builder saw it in the mid-1980s, young, upwardly mobile blacks and Filipinos would flock to his new houses and would feel at home with such features as cabinets brightly painted in pinks, yellows and oranges.

Alvin Morrison, called in to help market the San Diego project, advised against the paint scheme. Potential buyers, he argued, were young professionals with the same likes and dislikes of any tasteful shopper. Besides, they weren’t going to be impressed with some builder’s idea of ethnic interior decorating.

The builder relented.

“You treat people with respect; you treat them as individuals,” Morrison said recently in recalling the incident. “You don’t try to milk the differences between races and ethnic groups. You don’t, for example, try to ‘Hispanicize’ everything. You look for harmony.”

Concerns for individuals and for inoffensive approaches to business are part of the credo at Morrison, Lee & Stevens Inc., a small Irvine public relations firm that Morrison helped establish in November, 1988.

“Our clients are selling in a multiethnic environment,” Morrison said. “The messages we create for them appeal to people from all ethnic backgrounds.”

Morrison, Lee & Stevens is itself a veritable melting pot of ethnicity.

Morrison is half African-American, one-quarter American Indian and one-quarter white. May Lee is Chinese-American and Diane Stevens is white and from Iowa. Employees have roots ranging from Mexico to Greece and Korea.

“Our sensitivity to racial issues isn’t something we had to learn,” Morrison deadpanned.

The firm’s diversity has been a major factor in its success, say Morrison and some of his clients.

It has helped them build from a three-person operation with three clients in 1988 to a small but solid firm with 11 other employees and $12 million in billings last year. The firm now has a dozen regular clients and handles spot work for a number of others.

Executives at Taco Bell, one of those occasional customers, have hired Morrison Lee to develop a pilot program in Orange County aimed at getting the Irvine-based fast-food chain involved in community work in inner cities. If successful, the program would be launched nationwide.

The firm’s ethnic makeup helps it do the job, said Margaret Jenkins, Taco Bell’s director of international marketing and special projects.

“The basic fundamental marketing and advertising skills must be there,” she said, “but when coupled with their sensitivity, which I feel is a direct result of the diversity of their group, this contributes greatly to their ability to reach out into the communities we are focusing on.”

Jenkins has also been pleased with the firm’s enthusiasm, something she wouldn’t expect from a larger public relations firm more interested in snagging Taco Bell’s entire $125-million annual promotions budget. “Morrison, Lee & Stevens really attacked this assignment,” she said, “and smaller projects often turn into bigger projects.”

Lee said the firm treats all its clients similarly. “We live and breathe our accounts,” she said.

She clipped out news reports, for instance, about Japanese investors pulling out of California real estate and sent copies to her builder clients. She suggested that the million-dollar homes they were building for prospective Japanese buyers be altered to cater to Taiwanese and Chinese investors who were stepping up their presence in the state.

“It’s not the diversity that makes them a better agency,” said Richard Reiser, a longtime public relations executive who is a consultant to the public relations firm. “It’s their ability to work within their diversity as individuals that has made them a better and more successful agency.”

Indeed, some clients said, Morrison Lee earns respect for the abilities of its workers, not for their skin color or birthplace.

In May, 1990, for example, the company organized an open-invitation fete that fed and entertained 5,000 prospective home buyers under tents near a client’s development in Victorville. That weekend, the client, Inco Homes in Upland, sold 60 houses.

“They do top-quality work, never missed a deadline and have done everything I’ve asked them to. That’s client service,” said Steve Vliss, executive vice president for Inco Homes.

Growth hasn’t come easily for the public relations firm. Attacking work, gang-style, meant some things--like following up on billings--fell through the cracks. And employees weren’t always assigned to do the things they did best. Morrison sought help from Reiser, who had built his own agency to $42 million in billings and 165 employees before selling it six years ago.

“None of them had any significant agency management experience,” Reiser said. “Having gone through the wars myself, I was able to guide them on making small changes that made a big positive effect.”