We have all seen how the Big Tech corporations have started piling on to businesses that support conservative views. The fate of Parler is a very good example, but it is easy to just dismiss all that because it is America and ‘Orange Man Bad’. It is a different story, however, when it starts happening in your own backyard. We all remember when Air New Zealand baited a woman who did not want to be addressed in Maori, eventually seeing her being called a ‘racist’ online. This was unnecessary from Air New Zealand, who need to show cultural sensitivity to non-Maori speakers as well… not that this is ever likely to happen. More recently, Vodafone, Spark and 2 Degrees all ganged up on customers who were frustrated with Maori Language Week and objected to Vodafone unofficially renaming itself as ‘Vodafone Aotearoa’. Remember this?
But Vodafone New Zealand is the company’s correct name. Aotearoa is not an official name of our country, and Vodafone cannot make it so.
This didn’t stop all three telecommunications providers from treating this customer disgracefully, just because he didn’t want to speak Maori.
There is no obligation to speak Maori. If you want to speak it, go ahead, but if you don’t, then you have that choice. I have never met a Maori that doesn’t speak perfect English but I have met quite a few Maori people who don’t speak Maori themselves. If it is okay for them to avoid it, why are these big businesses upsetting customers who also don’t want to speak it?
It is not racist to not want to speak Maori. I don’t want to speak Portuguese either, but I don’t hate Portuguese people. I just have no interest in speaking their language.
The latest debacle in what is becoming a very long line, is advertisers pulling out from Magic Talk Radio because John Banks had a caller who referred to Maori as a ‘Stone Age culture’ and Banks simply didn’t close him down quickly enough. Banks didn’t particularly agree with the caller or reinforce his view; he just didn’t pull the plug on him as fast as Vodafone would have liked. I once heard Phil Gifford shut down someone on Newstalk ZB because he said we couldn’t joke about Maoris any more. What I thought was a gross overreaction turned out to be nothing more than a sop to the network’s advertisers.
This is not the way things are supposed to work. Since when did advertisers call the shots on the content of their chosen media outlet?
Advertisers may think they have the power, but they don’t. This is not how to run a business.
Conservative listeners to Magic Talk will not notice if Vodafone doesn’t advertise on their network. They won’t notice if Kiwibank pulls their advertising either. Those who listen to conservative media probably don’t listen to the woke stations, so they will miss out on the advertising from these firms all together. In the long run, this will mean a significant decline to their customer base, not because their customers are protesting in any way, but because they simply don’t hear from them. They will miss out on the news, the special offers and the new products that these firms will offer. So long as Magic Talk does not capitulate and become woke, which will mean it will lose its conservative audience anyway, other advertisers will fill the gaps and Magic Talk listeners will naturally support them, because they hear about them regularly.
Anyway, antagonising your customers is no way to grow a business. For every customer who publicly complains about such behaviour from firms like Vodafone, there will be many who will quietly switch providers without making a fuss. It happens every time.
Air New Zealand and Vodafone (and Spark and 2 Degrees) didn’t need to jump on the bandwagon and insult part of their customer base. Many of us acutely dislike racism, but don’t see calling our country by its proper name as racist in any way. If we need to call out racism, we need to call out real cases of racism, not silly things that are possibly symbolic but mean nothing. Not wanting to be addressed in a language that you don’t speak is not racism. Failing to shut someone down quickly on the radio is not racism. But these companies are making a fundamental business error. It never pays to insult a large portion of your customer base. They may think they are big enough and powerful enough to do what they like, but they are not, and I suspect that New Zealanders, slowly and quietly, will demonstrate that fact to them in time. Customers always do.
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