Uncategorized

Racial Cleansing

From time to time, Sal has been known to do the occasional bit of market research. This, you understand, is entirely to do with her desire to help the UK’s corporations to better target their consumer offerings, and nothing at all to do with the brown envelope stuffed with used fivers that they offer as an “incentive” for attending one of the sessions.

So she’s signed up to a couple of companies who send out emails from time to time whenever they’re looking for candidates to fill up a focus group, and as she doesn’t sit in front of a computer all day long, she has these emails forwarded to me.

One of them arrived this morning, in which said market research people were looking for candidates to join a group on hair products. At the bottom, though, was this sentence:

“We also have to have a range of types of hair covered for the research – so please advise if your hair is European, Latin/American, Asian, or African”.

What an odd thing to say. All this time I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that hair can be divided into the categories of “light”, “dark”, “short” and “long”, but apparently hair has a nationality of its own. Who knew? I considered emailing back to ask them how I can find out what nationality my hair is, but I worried that they might think I have illegal immigrant hair and report it to the home office. Perhaps I should arrange for my hair to have a passport of its own.

Sadly, as you may already have spotted, Sal doesn’t fit the criteria for this particular session, as they apparently aren’t interested in marketing their products to those with Australian hair (as I’ll have to assume hers is, until I’m informed otherwise).

I’m confused by some of the other categories, though: I can’t imagine that many of the respondents will have Roman hair. I suppose that explains why they’ve chosen to lump that into an either/or category with American hair. Not sure I can see the connection myself, but what do I know…