Social Responsibility

Speaking again of customer loyalty . . . this is a good thing, right? After all, if an organization is considered socially responsible, customers tend to stay, right? But what exactly constitutes social responsibility? So I have an example and it is a bit controversial.   When I lived in Atlanta, DC, New York, and Los Angeles (much like other large cites in which I’ve lived), there were portions of town that were designated/specific to certain races or ethnicity. Sales departments for those companies would always make sure that the sales people were representative of the ethnic make up of the territory. In other words, we would get Black representatives to work with the Black neighborhoods, Vietnamese representatives to work with the Vietnamese ones, and so on. At first, I thought this was a bit racist. Then I quickly learned that there are certainly people of all races that will not patronize a company if they do not see representation. And the impact could be huge to miss out on these segments. According to Arends (2014), sometimes there are subtle nuances to how each [segment] does business that can only be exhibited from someone with a readily similar background. The trust factor also increases when this happens (paras 4 – 6).   What do you think about these types of practices?