As emerging and aspiring marketers, we need to know the ways of our consumers and potential consumers. Knowing how they behave, what they like, what they don’t like, what they have access to and surprisingly their privileges.

On October the 12^th, two outside lecturers visited us and presented an exercise to help us understand our consumers as marketers from a privileged point of view. Some students took part in the two part exercise.

The exercise involved about 20 students standing together in a horizontal line, one of the outside lecturers then proceeded to ask the students a series of questions all involving certain privileges.

Here’s an image of the students before the exercise began:

 

Some of the questions were as follows:

Positive questions required you to take a step forward and the negative ones required you to take a step backwards.

• Take a step forward if you feel safe walking alone at night
• Take a step back if you ever been bullied about something you couldn’t change
• Take a step back if you have to leave your village to attend university
• Take a step back if anyone in your family suffer from health issues
• Take a step back if you Have you been sexually molested
• Take a step forward if you have more than 50 books in your house

After the first part the activity, we all evaluated the results and analyse where the students were standing after the questions were asked. The first thing we noticed was that the majority of the students at the back of the group were black African females. The students that were in the front of the group were white males. This put everything in perspective.  We noticed that white males will always ha the have upper hand when it comes to privileges.

Lets breakdown the word “privilege”

A privilege is a special right , advantage or immunity granted or only available to a particular person or group.

Now breaking it down a bit further and doing some further research , there is unfortunately something called “ white privilege “ this refers to myriad of social advantages , benefits and courtesies that comes with being a member of the dominant race , now , not all white people benefit from white privilege but it is definitely a thing in our society .

The occurring incident that happens in America concerning white privilege would be police brutality and more importantly the arrests of people of colour for no apparent reason. One incident that stands out the most for me is when two men of colour were arrested  for sitting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia on April the 12^th; the men had been waiting for an acquaintance when they were arrested on suspicion of trespassing. The sad truth of the matter is that if the two men were white, nothing would have been done onto them. And seeing that this incident happened early this year means that we are still a far way from cancelling white privilege, which is very unfortunate.

Now referring back to the exercise that took place, the audience were asked how the activity affected them and what information they gained from it, the students that took part in the exercise also expressed what they gained and learnt, one student had said that it had made her realise that she doesn’t have it as bad as she thought she did after seeing where she had been standing after the questions were asked.

We then had to, in groups, come up with questions that would change the result of the first part of the exercise. the groups of 5 were handed a piece of paper to write their answers on , some of the questions well statements my group had written was “ take a step forward if rely mostly on public transport “

A different group of people had to now stand in a horizontal line and take part in the second part of the exercise, I was one of those students.one of the outside lecturers had read out the statements that the students had written and resulted in most of the students of colour, including myself, being in the front and the white dominant males being slightly. I found this part very effective because even though we had designed the questions to only benefit those of colour , the white dominant males were not far from the front , which sheds a light on white privilege being present whether we like it or not .

Out of the two workshops we had done in the past week , I found the 2^nd one most effective due to actually shedding light on the occurring problems we are currently facing as students and most importantly citizens and future marketers of south Africa .