The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer Is Transforming American Business - Softcover

Garcia, Guy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060584661 ISBN 13: 9780060584665

Publisher: HarperBusiness, 2005

Synopsis

An economic revolution is transforming America: the New Mainstream. In this groundbreaking book, Guy Garcia explains how Americans will eat, work, play, learn, and spend money in the twenty-first century - and why any organization that ignores the lessons of the New Mainstream is doomed to fail.

Led by the growing statistical and buying power of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, the New Mainstream is a loose coalition of minorities who have been forced to forge their own identity in American culture - even as they use and consume goods and services targeted to the general public. This shift in consumer buying power is not only transforming how products are developed, marketed, and bought, it also illustrates that diversity is the driving force of American capitalism. As Garcia shows, The New Mainstream is both a wake-up call and a road map to this new economic reality.

About this title

About the Author:

Guy Garcia was a staff writer at Time magazine for thirteen years. The author of Skin Deep and Obsidian Sky, he is also the founding editor of the urban website TotalNewYork.com. More recently, he has worked on the development of AOL Latin America, AOL International, and AOL Music.

From Publishers Weekly:

Garcia marshals experience as a journalist (13 years at Time), novelist (Obsidian Sky) and multimedia entrepreneur to make "the business case for diversity": "Simply put, diversity breeds money." Those who fail to heed "the multicultural gospel" risk marginalization by the New Mainstream, a dynamic fusion of the "creative class," non-European immigrants and native-born American consumers with rapidly changing tastes and habits. At times, Garcia risks reducing culture to market forces and people to consumers ("for the new multicultural consumer, making and spending money is nothing less than a sacred, life-affirming act"). However, he works enough skepticism and detail into his argument to avoid flattening himself with it, mobilizing an impressively broad knowledge of cultures—popular, folk and high—and a lively sense of history. He warns that "ethnocentric nativism" and xenophobic policies, whether fueled by economic, cultural or terror-driven fears, can only damage the American corporation and nation. Garcia is at his best juggling a diverse range of examples of U.S. multiculturalism—Walt Whitman, 50 Cent, Octavio Paz, Shakira and Craig's List, to name a few—to make the argument that diversity is, more than ever, the dynamo driving American capitalism, and businesses had best take heed.
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About this edition

• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060584661
• ISBN 13: 9780060584665
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320