After the controversy unleashed on the web over the racist tone of one of H&M’s children’s catalogues, Bernadette Rivero, President at Cortez Brothers, issued her opinion on her LinkedIn profile in a reflection titled Supply. Chain. Failure. A to Z.“I’m multilingual and speak fluent advertising, but not corporate. However” said Rivero “supply chain” is a concept I learned about during my involvement with WBENC, the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. It’s the system for creating goods and services from conception to delivery.” She said that the ad seems to her to be a complete supply chain failure. “In this chain, there was not a single person of color, at any stage from A to Z, anywhere up or down the marketing ecosystem, with the power to speak up and say ‘This is not a good idea.’ The targeted audience is going to rail against it, not gravitate towards it” she added.“The way to fix problems like this isn’t by adding one minority member to an internal or external marketing/advertising team – it’s by adding multiple ones at multiple stages” Rivero said.
