Starbucks is in a PR crisis. In Philadelphia, a store employee had two young black men arrested who apparently were guilty of nothing more than waiting for a third friend to join them before ordering. (He showed up while they were being arrested in handcuffs.) She told 911, “I have two gentlemen in my cafe who are refusing to make a purchase or leave.” A too-old phrase in the black community for young men being hassled by police while doing nothing more than walking through a white neighborhood is that their crime is “Walking while black”; this Starbucks case is being described as “Waiting while black”.

It quickly became more than a local story – the above video shot by another patron has been viewed over 10 million times — and the Starbucks CEO has met with the two men, been commenting and apologizing. The last four tweets to their 11.9 million Twitter followers, over four days, are all about this incident.

Yesterday Starbucks announced that on the afternoon of May 29 they will close all 8,000 U.S. company-owned stores “to conduct racial-bias training to address implicit bias & prevent discrimination” for over 175,000 employees. The training curriculum will be designed by some big name “national and local experts”. They also made it clear, more than once in just the press release, that they aren’t the only company with an implicit bias problem, so they’ll make the training available to other companies. How nice.

Call me cynical, but if implicit bias could be solved in an afternoon, it wouldn’t exist anymore. Effective change, whether about bias, or learning to be a better public speaker, or a better manager, or anything else, typically requires practice, repetition, and incentives.

When I was in high school I was in debate. One year the topic was that every person should have to participate in national service. This was several years after the Kerner Commission released its report with its famous conclusion, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Our coach came up with the excellent idea that we should base our case on that, and that the only way to reduce racial bias is through people of different races working together as equals. National service would provide that; he had experienced it when serving in the Army in Vietnam.

Since most Starbucks employees are from the local neighborhood, it’s likely that their shops in predominantly white neighborhoods will continue to have mostly- or all-white staffs and customers. A few weeks after the training, will the white employees in one of those stores respond differently to the rare site of a black person in the store?

Rather than this one afternoon of training, I’d like to know what Starbucks is changing in the long run in terms of hiring and training. If it’s not much, then this seems like mostly an expensive PR event.

Most people who are considering a purchase these days start their research by searching online.

Overall, only 10% or less clicks happen on the search ads. A majority of clicks typically happen on just the first three organic links on the search engine results page (SERP) on Google and Bing. In many industries your chance of getting in those first three links is very low, or may take a long time.

However, search ad software firm WordStream reports that when the person is searching with keywords that clearly show that they’re interested in buying now, close to two-thirds of clicks are on the paid ads.

For example, if someone is searching on “email marketing” they may just be curious. But if they’re searching on “email marketing software pricing” they’re more likely to be in serious buying mode.

Look how different Google’s search results are for “laundry detergent” (research mode)

And “best laundry detergent” (buying mode)

That’s the power of focusing your marketing around customer intent.

When a company starts to ramp up its marketing programs, the people often face the problem that they’re already 100% busy. Even if the consultant or agency that they hire is going to do most of the work, they will still need at a minimum a few hours a week of executive and staff time to gain company and industry knowledge, develop plans and budgets, get materials written and reviewed, and so on.

Doing a Keep/Add/Drop review of people’s time may be a useful way to find those hours.

Even if you’re 100% busy, is all of that work important and necessary? Are you correctly distinguishing between what’s urgent and what’s important?

Dwight Eisenhower said, ““What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

Can you just drop some work entirely without a negative impact? Check email less often? Are all of your meetings necessary and productive? Can some of your work be done by others in the company, or a virtual assistant?

What of the new work will you add to each person’s responsibilities?

And what of your current work do you need to keep?

Over the weekend it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to the personal data of 50 million Facebook users and used that data to target ads for Trump during the 2016 campaign. This is no little matter as the digital advertising program of the Trump campaign was a significant contributor to their win.

The response of Facebook, though, has been crickets. Late Monday afternoon an NPR reporter at Facebook headquarters was reporting that they had essentially said nothing.

Apparently what happened was that 275,000 Facebook users downloaded an app that said it would do a personality assessment of them. Buried in the user agreement for the app was a section authoring the app developer to also access information about the users’ Facebook connections. Those connections were how the app had information on 50 million people, and Cambridge Analytica used access to the app to get all of that data.

The quiet reaction of a few at Facebook has been that they didn’t do anything wrong. The people who downloaded the app agreed to have their connection data accessed.

But the 49,725,000 connections didn’t agree to that.

This silence and niggling over details is the opposite of what a company should do in a crisis. Since the Tylenol crisis of the 1982, when containers were tampered with and people died, the crisis playbook has been to do what Johnson & Johnson did then: be totally transparent and act quickly to fix the problem. Johnson & Johnson was not responsible for the tampering, but they immediately recalled all Tylenol and added tamper-proof seals to each container. Other drug makers followed their lead.

The current situation, of course, may go beyond being a mere PR problem. Facebook may share some of the responsibility for the problem in a way that J&J did not.

Nonetheless, Facebook is only making matters worse with its silence.

James Carbary is the Founder of Sweet Fish Media and co-host of the B2B Growth Show podcast. This is an excerpt of an interview with him that appears in my forthcoming Bullseye Marketing book.

Louis: James, do you know how many people are listening to your B2B Growth Show podcast?

James: We are getting anywhere from 40,000 to 45,000 downloads a month. So each episode is getting downloaded anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 times over an 8-week period and then the downloads tend to trickle in after that 8-week mark.

Louis: That’s great. I am surprised it lasts even eight weeks; that’s a terrific length of time.

What do you see as the opportunity with podcasts? And is it different or greater than what companies can do with blogging or YouTube videos or other content?

James: I think that the unique thing about podcasting, which has been my thesis from the time we started the agency, is that a podcast is just one way for you to become the media company. And when you are the media company — be that through your blog, be that through your podcast, be that through publication that you write for — when you are the media company you can create very strategic relationships with a wide range of people. So if you are looking for referral partners, instead of saying, “You want to refer a business my way?” You can say, “I’d love to feature you on my podcast.” Instead of saying, “You want to buy my product?” You can say, “I’d love to have you on my podcast.” Instead of saying, “Can you feature me on your podcast?” You can say, “I’d love to feature you on my podcast.” And so a podcast to me is just a very tangible way to add value first to the people that you are ultimately trying to work with in some way, shape or form.

Podcasting is not the only way that you can do that. There are several ways that you can do that.

So for the example of B2B Growth, Jonathan, my co-host and myself, we didn’t know anything about B2B marketing when we started the show. But we knew that our buyers were B2B marketers and so we started reaching out to them asking to feature them on our podcast by having conversations with them about topics of their choosing. A couple of things happened. One, we built really strategic relationships with those potential buyers and several of those people have now purchased our service from us. So that’s I think a massive benefit. But then also we learned B2B marketing from experts by having these conversations. And so it positioned us as thought leaders in the space by creating the platform that distributed that type of content from these experts.

Louis: One of the big issues for any B2B marketing is getting in front of the right audience. If you are having 1200, 1800 or more downloads of your podcast, how do you know it’s the right audience? Not just you but for someone who is creating a podcast: how are they going to get the right audience to listen to them?

James: That’s a great question. I think that the way that we’ve done it is we’ve just been very, very targeted and specific in the type of content that we create. So in order to attract our audience essentially we feature their peers on our show.  And so if we are featuring a lot of VPs of marketing at companies with more than 50 employees that are B2B companies, we know that the content that they are talking about isn’t going to be relevant to everybody. So not everybody is going to want to listen to it, but it is going to be hyper relevant to the exact type of people that we want to reach.

Louis: What do you think are effective promotional or amplification strategies that you’ve seen companies use, perhaps with podcasts that you produced for them, to get their content in front of the right audience?

James: One thing that I have recently started doing is, setting up co-promotions with other podcasts in my space. So The Marketing Book Podcast, I went to Douglas Burdett and I said, Hey, I will talk about your show for 20 to 30 seconds at the beginning of our show for a few episodes, would you be willing to do the same for me and in that way, we will expose both of our audiences to each other’s podcasts? He said yes and so we are doing a co-promotion together.  And I’ve structured similar deals with 5 or 6 other shows that are reaching B2B marketers.

This an excerpt from my upcoming book on my Bullseye Marketing Framework.

There are countless types of websites:

• corporate (IBM, GM)
• social media (Facebook, Pinterest, TripAdvisor)
• ecommerce (Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair)
• SaaS software (Slack, Trello, Optimizely)
• non-profit (Red Cross, Partners in Health, Human Rights Watch)
• Schools and colleges
• Entertainment
• Games
• Blogs, personal expression
• , Etc.

Here are 10 tips that should help make a great website regardless of its purpose…

1.     Establish goals

What do you want to achieve with your website? Generate leads? Sell products? Build your personal brand? Attract donations? Volunteers? Provide a platform for social connections? For personal expression?

You need to define your goals before you put much effort into the messaging, information architecture, technology, and so forth.

2.     Speak to the customer

The home page is the most-visited page on most websites and most website visitors are first time visitors, so make sure that you have a single, compelling, customer-centric message on your home page that quickly communicates who you are and why visitors should care.

Having a single, compelling message means that you should not use a carousel — those slide shows of several images/messages that change every few seconds. Instead of conveying several messages – the hope of people using carousels — carousels dilute all of your messages and frustrate your visitors. In 2013 the shouldiuseacarousel.com website was created and it well communicates the case against carousels.

Here is the before and after of a website home page for a client of mine that prints custom labels for food companies. Their customers include major brands like Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma and Dunkin’ Donuts, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their original website, which was very cluttered.

 

After the redesign they presented a strong message around their core service, and their website was full of conversion opportunities that made it easy for companies to order from them. Their new website is also mobile-ready, unlike their old one.

 

3.     Information architecture and navigation

The information architecture (IA) of a site is how it is organized. The navigation is the on-screen menus, etc., people use to move through the content.

When developing your IA keep in mind what your visitor is coming to the site to do, and make it easy for them to do it. Also remember that many of your visitors – maybe a majority — are looking at your site on a phone, and you need an experience that will work for them. Because of its small screen, developing for mobile is more challenging and less forgiving. Start with the mobile experience and work out from there to small tablets and then desktop.

My philosophy of navigation is to keep it simple and to use Web-standard conventions like having the main desktop navigation across the top of the page. Maybe a game site could create a different navigation experience, but for 99.9% of sites you’ll want to make it as fast and easy as possible for people to do what they want to do and get to your content. Cars can be as different as a Hummer, a Ferrari and a Smart Car, but they all have the steering wheel in the front seat. Save your creativity for your content.

In your navigation, avoid drop-down and fly-out menus: they clutter up the screen and get in the way of other content. And they aren’t easy for search engines to analyze.

Comprehensive mega dropdowns, like the one on the Walmart desktop, are an exception. Of course, as Walmart does, you’ll need to program the site so a simpler navigation appears on phones.

4.     Chunk your content

You should break up your content between pages, and within pages.

One contemporary website design trend is long, multi-topic scrolling pages. The only problem is people don’t like to scroll down long, multi-topic pages. Heat maps show that on almost any web page the farther down content is the less it is read. That’s why Google weights the content at the top of the page more heavily than that farther down for indexing what the page is about.

For one client I re-engineered their website from long, scrolling pages into many shorter, single-topic pages with a traditional navigation at the top. The average time-on-site for a visit immediately jumped up 50 percent.

So if you have content that you don’t care if people read, feel free to put it at the bottom of a long, multi-topic page. But if you think that all of your content is important, break it up into shorter pages and make it easy for people to navigate to them.

There’s nothing wrong with having long, single-topic pages of content; some studies have shown that blog posts with 2,500-3,000 words get higher readership and sharing than shorter pieces. But make it easy for people to scan and take in what you are saying by chunking your content.

• Break your content up into short sections with headlines and subheads to guide the reader and enable them to scan a page to see if they’re interested.
• Use numbered and bulleted lists.
• Use images to emphasize important points.

5.     Segment and personalize content

In 1998 Jeff Bezos said, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.”[i]

That vision was way ahead of its time, but it has come to pass. Today Amazon has hundreds of millions of customers and hundreds of millions of home pages. They personalize based on previous purchases, browsing, and other factors.

You don’t need to have an ecommerce site to create a personalized website. Leading marketing automation and experience management platforms, and even lighter solutions aimed at smaller sites, let you personalize content based on such factors as which pages the person has previously visited, their geolocation, how often they visit, their relationship to you (customer, partner, etc.), what other site they were referred from, their corporate domain, and others. You could personalize the home page message for each known visitor.

Optimizely customized their home page experience for 16 market segments, including key accounts that they were targeting with an account based marketing program. With targeted home page messages they caught the attention of visitors and achieved significantly greater engagement.

6. Provide calls to action

Your website should have many calls to action (CTAs) throughout it encouraging site visitors to do what you want them to (those goals you started with).  You can offer visitors the opportunity to sign up for upcoming physical and digital events, register for a free trial, access content, make a purchase, make a donation, join, volunteer, and much more.

Pay special attention to the next chapter on conversion rate optimization for all sorts of tips on using CTAs and increasing conversions.

7. Social media buttons

Of course you want social media and email buttons on your website. But what do you want them to do?

On many corporate sites the social media buttons are low on the page – maybe even in the footer – and take you to that company’s Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with the hope that you’ll then follow them.

On news and ecommerce sites the social media and email buttons are often high on the page – sometimes at the very top – to encourage people to share that page’s content with their social media followers.

Which purpose is more important for your company?

8. Make your site accessible

Companies need to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired. Over three million Americans are blind and many use screen reading software to access the Internet. Other people are color blind: think of reading a subway map with color-coded lines when you can’t distinguish between colors. Companies may need to provide text explanations for critical color-based information.

Some of the things you need to do to create an accessible website include:

• Structure menus and pages so screen readers can navigate and read them
• Use descriptive alt tags on all images (alt tags are read by the screen readers to explain what the image is/says)
• Provide transcripts for your videos and podcasts

If you don’t want to make your website accessible to help the two-to-three percent of people who are visually impaired do business with you, or to be nice, you need to do it because it’s required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Enter the attorneys.

Hundreds of class action lawsuits have been filed to require organizations to make their websites accessible. For now these usually target larger companies with deep pockets: retailers have faced the most suits, as have restaurant chains, universities, banks, and other industries.

These suits charge that not only do the inaccessible websites stop the plaintiffs from doing business with the organization, they also make it impossible for them to apply for jobs. Most defendants settle.

Better get on it.

9. Optimize for search engines

Of course you want your website content to be read by as many people as possible, and so you need to optimize your site and content for high rankings on Google and Bing. Be sure to read the search engine optimization chapter in Phase 3 and apply its recommendations to your site.

10. Use the right technology

If you plan to update your site regularly — and you should, of course, if for no other reason than that Google likes sites with fresh content – and you don’t want your IT department to be a bottleneck, you will need a content management system (CMS) to empower many people to make website changes. Some vendors these days call their CMS an “experience manager”.

There are hundreds of content management systems available and some are tailored for particular uses such as community sites or ecommerce sites or educational institutions; at my former agency we developed and successfully marketed a CMS that was tailored to the needs of small colleges and private schools.

If many people in your organization who don’t have deep tech expertise will be posting content to the site, then you need a CMS that’s easy to use.  When considering a new CMS don’t just watch demos but have the end users in your organization try the contenders out for themselves.

The CMS should also have a permissions structure that enables you to say which parts of the website each person can edit, and what their level of privileges are. For example, some people may be able to create and edit, but not publish without it first being approved by another person.

And the CMS should integrate with your other online channels. A subtle feature regarding posting to social media is that you should be able to designate what image will show in your posts. See in the image above how the post from HubSpot includes an image but the one from the American Marketing Association doesn’t. Twitter grabbed the image based on instructions in the HubSpot page’s metadata. Since social posts with images get much more engagement, even a subtle feature like this can make a real difference in your results.

 

Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich and the author of Spin Sucks. This is part of an interview that I conducted for the book that I am writing on my Bullseye Marketing Framework.

Louis: What is PR today and how is it different than in the past?

Gini: I believe in the PESO model which is Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. So you have your traditional earned media which is media relations, publicity, working with influencers, brand ambassadors, things like that. You’ve got shared which is social. Owned which is content, content marketing. And then paid, not from the perspective that we are going to go out and create these gorgeous ads and then put them on the Super Bowl. No, it’s more like take the content that we are creating and then amplify it through paid social or through email marketing. So it all works together from an integration standpoint and that’s what we do. So, we really look at communications as an integrated model.  A lot of people think of PR and they think of publicity. They think, you know, you’re getting on the front page of the New York Times. And that’s just one teeny-tiny part of it. We really look at it holistically.

Louis: So I think of traditionally PR as being kind of the earned media part of the peso model. You know the publicity, the media relations, influencers and so forth. How then is a PR agency today different from a marketing agency?

Gini: Well, it’s probably not in some cases. There are certainly some digital agencies that are trying to do everything that a PR agency would do as well. Typically what I find marketing agencies do better at is branding, product development, that kind of stuff versus communicating externally and internally.

Louis: Is there an area of the PESO model that you think is most important to your work as a PR professional?

Gini: I think content is where it starts because without content, you don’t have earned. Without content, you have nothing to share on social. Without content, you have nothing to share in email or amplify on paid. So, I think that’s where it all starts. I think you are right in that most PR professionals and most executives expect that you should start with earned but you can’t start with earned if you don’t have anything to share.

Louis: Yes. Well, content is kind of central to everything today, like you’ve said. So, what about influencer relations now? You know, that’s kind of at the heart of the earned part of it.

Gini: Yes.

Louis: So, do you do that for your clients and if you do, how do you go about doing it?

Gini: We do. And I actually we take a different approach because I’ve had the whole experience of working with celebrities. And I used to do food PR, which I really miss, and I’ve done everything with celebrity chefs. And I have gone that whole route but what we find is that that’s great for awareness but not for sales conversions. And because we do so much work with B2B organizations, awareness is great but clients aren’t happy if you are not helping them convert sales. So we find that micro-influencers are actually much more effective because they may have 100 followers but all 100 are avid fans of everything that influencer says and if that influencer believes in and is passionate about a product and they talk about it, all 100 of those people are going to actually buy. Whereas if you are Tiger Woods and you are touting a new watch, millions of people will see that but how many people will buy? I would rather have 100% of 100 people than 0.0001% of a million.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a great point and I have heard that from some other people who are involved in social media influencer outreach. They might be focused on influencers — more like a couple of thousand followers rather than a hundred. But you don’t need someone with Kim Kardashian levels of followers.

Gini: No. You do not.

Louis: So how much of that time when you are working with influencers are they doing it because they love what you’re doing and how much of the time is it because you’re paying them in some form?

Gini: With the micro-influencers, we try to find people who are already using the products or have a passion for the products or the industry or maybe have worked with the competitor. So we try to find those kinds of people. For someone like me who works on both sides because I’m also an influencer, I will not work with an organization unless I’ve used their product and believe in it. And I want to have used it on my own, paid for it, all of that before I even consider it.

When the late Lester Thurow was dean of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management I produced an admission video for the school.

Thurow had three legs to the program he was implementing at the school. He believed that the business leaders that they were educating needed to:

• Be comfortable operating globally
• Understand technology (a perfect approach for a school at M.I.T.)
• Know how to work in teams (he would say, “In school working in a team is called cheating…”)

That all sounds good. But this was 30 years ago. He was ahead of his time in many ways.

I decided that the people considering Sloan didn’t need to see a bunch of students saying, “This school is great. And the professors really care…” like every other admission video. What would move them to prefer Sloan would be to hear from business leaders that Thurow’s approach was what their companies were looking for. So through Sloan I arranged to interview some of the top people of Citibank, Motorola, and other leading companies of the day.

I interviewed John Reed, the chairman and CEO of Citicorp, in his office on the second floor of the old Citicorp building in Manhattan. (Not on the top floor of the new Citicorp building? The rumor was that he was afraid of fires and wanted his office on a low floor.) Of course there were endless requests from the media to meet with him so Reed set aside one hour every week to meet with a reporter. That was the slot that they gave me one week. I had to wait about three months for it.

While we were setting up in the camera and lights, etc., in the library of his office around 8 in the morning, Reed came in and introduced himself. He was wearing a white shirt, which would not look great on video. But he asked, “Would you like me to change into my blue shirt?” He knew his stuff. After all, this was the person who had essentially introduced ATMs into banking.

That idea of setting aside one hour a week for PR stuck with me. No matter how busy a senior executive is, it’s worth 2% of their time to represent the company to the world, comment on important issues, and take advantage of free media.

You may not have reporters lined up for an interview with you, but you can use HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to find out what stories reporters are looking for experts on and get visibility that way. It’s free.

PS: A friend of mine was working at that time in NYC as an investment banker. I told him I was coming to New York to interview John Reed for an hour and he said, “No you’re not.” I assured him I was. Again he said, “No you’re not. Do you know how much people would pay for an hour with John Reed?” Later my friend became Obama’s “Car Czar” and then Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy. But that’s another story.

How much of a business and marketing strategy do you need? And how much of success is based on tactical execution?

Certainly you need to understand who your customer is, why they buy, and how to reach them; your competitors; and your competitive differentiators. (If you don’t have any, you better create them.)

But these things are changing quicker than ever these days. The breakthrough iPhone was out less than a year before competitors started to appear despite Steve Jobs’ claim that “we filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone, and we intend to protect them.” I can’t tell you the number of clients who have said to me, “Our competitors are always stealing our messaging.” (My clients never do that.)

Over 30 years ago Amar Bhide, now at the Tufts Fletcher School, wrote in his seminal Harvard Business Review article, “Hustle as Strategy”, “A surprisingly large number of very successful companies…don’t have long-term strategic plans with an obsessive preoccupation on rivalry. They concentrate on operating details and doing things well. Hustle is their style and their strategy. They move fast, and they get it right.”

I noticed over the weekend that management author and consultant Tom Peters, who engages with others very actively on Twitter (he doesn’t just post), was discussing similar thoughts:

This emphasis on being close to the customer and nimble is certainly applicable to modern marketing, which is far less tied to the Big Idea (the Marlboro Man or Jolly Green Giant) and instead puts out hundreds of small ideas (tweets, emails, blog posts, ads, etc.), sees which connect and scales those.

And it reflects the agile marketing approach. I recently interviewed agile marketing maven Jim Ewel for the book I’m writing on my Bullseye Marketing Framework (I’ll be releasing an excerpt of his interview soon). Jim has been a senior marketing executive at Microsoft, and a successful CEO, so he certainly knows the enterprise strategy approach. Today he advocates a series of quarterly plans, rather than an annual one.

I’ve written 15-20 page marketing strategies for companies, and run workshops to help them develop 12 month action plans. I think these are useful (if read and used) at companies that have traditionally under-invested in marketing and need a sense of the road ahead and not just “we’ll figure it out as we go”.

In Only the Paranoid Survive Intel CEO Andy Grove explained how they made the strategic decision to abandon the memory chip (RAM) market and focus on microprocessors. They had a good reason: they were being hammered in the market by Japanese memory chip manufacturers. One of my favorite business books is Jim Collins’ Good to Great. While he provides some great data and cases, you could summarize the entire book in three words: “Focus and execute.”

On the other hand in Zero to One Peter Thiel laid out a strategic approach to business that may be useful for, oh, maybe 1% of companies (my critique here).

With or without a strategy a strong emphasis on focus and execution is central to success.

This past weekend “Black Panther” opened nationally with over $200 million in ticket sales, and another $169 million from overseas markets. This makes it the most successful February movie opening ever, and one of the top five for any time of year. (It’s a really terrific movie in many ways; I highly recommend it.)

A month ago the prediction was that it would have a $100 million opening weekend. To make those bigger numbers the appeal for Black Panther expanded well beyond U.S. Blacks. It’s not just “a terrific Black film”; it’s a terrific film. Nonetheless they do form a core audience that may help sustain it at the box office longer than it might otherwise.

Last summer’s “Wonder Woman”, also from Marvel Studios, had a similar cultural impact and commercial success, grossing over $800 million worldwide with its female lead.

Super heroes have traditionally been white males. (Black Widow, part of the Marvel Avengers team, has still not had her own movie despite being played in those ensemble films by Scarlett Johansson; for years Marvel has said, “we’re working on it.”) Literally a majority of the audience did not have a super hero that looked like them and had had their experiences. But Marvel is now showing the great commercial success possible from catering to under-served parts of a market.