Project 2

Reflection Memorandum

The purpose for this project was to highlight the ways in which companies and organizations unknowingly use language, visuals, and phrases that come across as rasicst. These mistakes have led to backlash from their audiences. This project gives us the opportunity to imagine how the audience would respond to such mistakes and how we can put ourselves in the companies’ shoes when responding to these complaints.

The audience for complaint was for the COO of a company. I choose a letter formatting style for this project. It seemed appropriate to contact the COO this way because I wanted the letter to seem more personal. I was pretending to be a long-standing customer that cared about how the company and their visual choices on their cereal boxes could be potentially harmful as it could be seen as discriminatory.

This was a very important project because these scenarios can be avoided if the company understood their audience better. There should be a system in place that pre-approves marketing and communication strategies before delivering it to an audience. It will cover the general education guidelines.

In the article “Kellogg’s to replace racially insensitive Corn Pops boxes following Twitter call out”, by Mike Snyder, discusses a complaint by writer Saladin Amend. Amend saw Kellogg’s artwork for the Corn Pops cereal box to be racially offensive.

The cereal box showed cartoon characters shaped like pop kernels having a good time in a shopping mall. While every other pop kernel was the same color, there was an obvious and odd difference between one character on the cereal box.

This character was the only a single brown kernel characterized as being the janitor waxing the shopping mall floors. Ahmed posted on Twitter (Also known as X, a social media platform) saying, ”Why is literally the only brown corn pop on the whole cereal box the janitor? this is teaching kids racism.”

Kellogg quickly responded 5 hours later to Ahmed’s Twitter post. They replied on Twitter stating, “Kellogg is committed to diversity & inclusion. We did not intend to offend – we apologize. The artwork is updated & will be in stores soon.” The spokesperson from Kellogg’s also apologized for the incident and did not intend to offend anyone.