Sinterklaas or Sint-Nicolaas is a traditional
holiday figure based on Saint Nicholas. It is celebrated annually with the
giving of gifts on the night before the 5th of December. According to the myth,
Sinterklaas has a servant which is called ‘zwarte piet’ or black piet. This servant is
painted black and since a few years, there’s a discussion if it’s racism or not
that the servant is painted black.
Last year the discussion concerned a big Dutch
supermarket, Albert Heijn, because it was said in the media that they wouldn’t
make use of zwarte piet on any of the sweets they sold during Sinterklaas.
Consequently, there were some people who started using the hashtag #boycotah or
#boycotalbertheijn. Many people said they wouldn’t go to Albert Heijn any more.
Albert Heijn didn’t respond to any of these
allegations, but one day they placed an advertisement in a newspaper, see the
link below. In sum, the advertisement states that they will have sweets with
images of Piet on it, and that it’s not true that they won’t use any images.
They let the public choose.
I think this is a good example of the power of
the public, because they wanted to boycot Albert Heijn. Besides, I think that
if the public hadn’t responded to the allegations, it wouldn’t have been a problem
for the Albert Heijn at all because no one would have known about it. I’m
curious if something like this will happen again this year, since the treats
are already in stores now and the hashtag #pietendiscussie (pietendiscussion) is
already back on twitter.
Danique van Hemsbergen
I agree that the Pietendiscussie is a good example of how companies have to concede to the power of the public. Last year, indeed a lot of people actually banned Albert Heijn because they were not taking a straight position in this matter. At first they responded to the media with ‘in these kind of situations you have to take a position’. Then they ignored every message about this on social media, while this was really starting to escalate into a crisis. Eventually, they posted the poem you posted. I think that is was a smart move from Albert Heijn to eventually cave and to try to do some damage control by posting this picture. But I think that this was a case of ‘too little, too late’, because perhaps the damage was already done. When the public is giving their opinion about a matter like this, a company should listen to their audience. The clear message they got was that they were not ready to change their image about Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet yet, so I think Albert Heijn should have listened to that and not yet change these images. Not until a leading medium like ‘Sinterklaasjournaal’ changed it.
ReplyDelete- Anouk de Jong
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ReplyDeleteYou seem to have some predictive capacities! I just read this article on NOS.nl: http://nos.nl/artikel/2060592-albert-heijn-houdt-vast-aan-zwarte-piet.html . To sum it up, Albert Heijn has announced that some of the Piet's they'll use this year will remain to be Zwart. It is clear that Albert Heijn has decided to anticipate before getting sucked into this discussion like last year.
ReplyDeleteI think the whole case of the Pietendiscussie (not only the case of AH) is a good example of the power of the public. In the end, it was the public who came up with the whole discussion if it is racism or not.
ReplyDelete- Margo van Gils