Make Black people more marketable by building our brand

By Marquis Rollins

Guest Commentator

During your daily commute today, if you were to stop at any Mom & Pop’s convenience store in the nation, you would find it. To locate it requires a search because it has yet to be considered to have any significance at all. Abandoned by consumers for its lack of potential and stocked by storekeepers at the very bottom of the shelf because it has no appeal, there it sits — the undesirable brand.

Although this product promises to be everything that society would want in a product, it fails to deliver the objective. The label is cheap, the ingredients questionable, and no matter the expiration date, one would assume that it could potentially go bad any day.

The mere presence of this product only exists in the store to give consumers an idea of what not to buy into. Now for you, the reader, I ask you to more carefully examine this product. Seek to understand it. Consider both why it is undervalued and how it can be re-shaped, repackaged and redistributed.

It’s important that we acknowledge these perspectives, because what has yet to be realized by many is that in today’s Black community, a majority of us are this product.

We have been born into a brand that could easily make us instant millionaires, but the lack of production has for too long halted projections. Now is the time for us to re-surface and present ourselves to the planet as formidable brands.

Why should McDonald’s, Air Jordan, or Wal-Mart be more recognizable than today’s Black man or woman? We are far more marketable than corporations that big investors seek to align themselves with.

Behind every brand lies a host of bad trial periods, but what we must do is be confident enough to know that our bad trial periods only make our brand better. In order to reach that top shelf, we must strengthen our brand and make it more available to mainstream society. Doing so will not only advance our brand to the ranks of the elite, but will also create space for franchising. Through our children!

Marquis Rollins lives in Lino Lakes.