AT&T; Exec’s Memo on Ethnic Sales Tips Pushes Buttons

Julie Kim Wagner, an AT&T; account executive in Monterey Park, was trying to be helpful in sharing her observations about the unique needs of customers from different ethnic backgrounds.

For example, she advised some co-workers in an e-mail message to accept coffee or tea when it is offered by a customer of Japanese descent and to emphasize price when speaking with Chinese American customers. It is unwise, she suggested, to let Jewish customers think you are wasting their time.

AT&T; officials insist that Wagner, a Korean American, did not intend to offend anyone with her informal sales tips. But the episode demonstrates the thin line that companies often walk between cultural sensitivity and ethnic stereotyping.

“We encourage our salespeople to better understand the unique business needs of the customers we serve,” said Adele Ambrose, director of media relations for AT&T.; “In this case, we think the comments went beyond understanding the specific unique business needs of a customer and into ethnic stereotyping, and we find the comments offensive.”

The memo, which singled out Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Korean, Middle Eastern and “Iranian or Armenian” customers, was disclosed Wednesday by the Oregonian newspaper in Portland. Recipients of Wagner’s memo circulated it widely in AT&T;’s Portland office.

Wagner was not available for comment Wednesday, but she told the Oregonian that she had intended for the memo to help her co-workers learn about other cultures.

“I don’t have any credentials or expertise on different ethnic backgrounds,” she said. “So I’m sorry if people got upset. It wasn’t meant to be read by everybody.”

AT&T; is not unique in its inadvertent cultural insensitivity. Just last month, American Airlines came under intense criticism for a flight manual that said Latin American customers like to drink before takeoff, don’t expect flights to depart on time and will even call in bomb threats if they are running late and want the flight to be delayed. The airline apologized to customers.

Marketing experts said that ethnic stereotypes can sometimes have limited value, but that they are no substitute for dealing with customers as individuals.

“Stereotypes are in some ways a shorthand for us, but they may have absolutely nothing to do with the person you’re sitting across the desk engaged in negotiation,” said Lori Breslow, a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at MIT who teaches a course in intercultural communications. “To the extent that it helps us to summarize different cultures, I suppose there is some use to stereotypes. But they have extreme limitations to them.”

Lisa Skriloff, president of Multicultural Marketing Resources, a New York firm that represents women and minorities and the companies that sell to them, said it is important to take ethnicity into account when designing marketing campaigns because “if a group doesn’t see themselves in a company’s advertising or marketing campaign, they could get the impression that the company is not interested in their business.”

In any event, the stereotypes described in Wagner’s memo did not ring true to some members of the communities she described. For example, C.K. Tseng, president of the Asian Business Assn. in Los Angeles, took issue with the assertion that for Chinese American customers, price is the bottom line.

“I don’t agree with that. What I want is service, service, service,” Tseng said. “They cannot make generalities.”

The notion that Japanese Americans are particularly sensitive to refusals of coffee and tea seemed ridiculous to Eiko Sugita, a staff member at the Japanese American Chamber of Commerce in Little Tokyo.

“I don’t think it’s that bad, but it’s ignorant,” Sugita said. “I refuse coffee if I don’t feel like drinking it. It’s a stereotype and I don’t think it’s correct.”