"You CANNOT Act Wisely, Unless You Are Informed Wisely."

Sometimes I'm forwarded some quality e-mails from either my mom, a friend's mom or some co-workers. Today I was educated on the marketing term "NUD." NUD stands for Non Urban Dictate. It was stated to be a "little known" marketing term that is used in reference to people of color. In essence, the use of the term is applied when companies are not interested in marketing to people of color. Therefore, avoiding markets that consist of a majority color audience or a dense population of people of color.

All the reasons as to why this occurs may not be for discriminatory reasons, some others reasons were that, "blacks don't index high in certain categories or that a company's strategy is to market to the black consumer down the road after they've established a strong position in their primary target." However, the fact that a term such as this does exist, does tend to raise some flags of concern. Some companies are stated to use this as a "theory" rather than a policy to avoid the bad press of being a discriminatory company. But, given this information, I feel that us people of color should take into consideration all factors regarding this issue and carefully consider with whom we choose to support financially.

A list of companies were included in the e-mail, but after doing further research on the issue, I found that the alleged group behind this list, The Urban Institute, released a statement in 2002 stating that they are "not in any way associated with the purported research or with any supposed list of companies with NUDs, and never was." I decided to leave it up to you whether you'd like to take this issue further and do some outside investigation. However, regardless of the authenticity of the list, policies such as this do exist and some companies actually do have descriminatory practices they follow. I believe it is important that we as a community make informed decisions on our own, before waiting for our favorite rapper, actress, etc. to boycott products or companies before taking action.