What does it mean to be a consumer in America? Does race correlate to the type of service and treatment a customer receives in a store?
Deborah Yeh, Sephora’s Chief Marketing Officer, joins host Porter Braswell to discuss unconscious bias in retail and marketing, as well as how it affects customers and their relationship with brands. Previously, Yeh held marketing leadership roles at GAP and Target.
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DEBORAH YEH: In some parts of our business, discussing race is the work. As marketers, as retailers, we’re people-serving people. And so if we don’t talk about race or racial identity, we’re missing a whole part of the story. The whole emotional side of the business.
PORTER BRASWELL: From HBR Presents, this is Race at Work – the show where we explore how race affects our careers and lives. I’m Porter Braswell. I left a Wall Street career to start a company called Jopwell because I wanted to help corporate America build a more diverse workforce. Each week, we talk to a different leader about their journey with race, equity, and inclusion. These are the conversations we don’t usually have at work. But this show is a safe place to share and learn from each other.
PORTER BRASWELL: In this episode, we discuss unconscious bias in retail and marketing, and how it affects customers and their relationships with brands. My guest today is Deborah Yeh, Chief Marketing Officer of the beauty retailer Sephora. Before that, she had leadership roles in marketing at GAP and Target. To start our conversation, I asked Deborah about some of the obstacles she’s faced in her career, as an Asian professional.
DEBORAH YEH: I first and foremost want to recognize the advantages that I’ve had coming up. Things like, my parents are immigrants, but they were the first in their generations to be able to go to college, and they were able to send me to college without a big pile of debt. That’s just one example. So I was able to get on the corporate ladder, if you will, with a lot of assets that folks don’t always have. So I’ll start there. You know, most of my experiences going up that ladder have been relatively smooth, but I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on some of those experiences and I will just say that, looking back, there is always some friction in not looking like you’re the type for the role. I read a study recently that reported that only 11 or 12 percent of CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, are non-white. So I don’t look like the stereotype for the role. And at times in my career, primarily earlier in my career, I’ve heard things like, “You look young for what you do for a living.” Or, “You should smile more often.” I even had … In college, I had a summer internship, and one of my fellow summer interns would actually use what was actually for me a really painful childhood taunt, which was to call me Little Debbie. Like “Little Debbie, do you have a snack cake for me?” So yeah, these things have shown up in my career. I have the ability right now to be in a position, an executive position. But I still have those memories, for sure.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. You said in a recent interview that there were times in work settings when you felt that you had to code switch to appear a certain way.
DEBORAH YEH: Yeah.
PORTER BRASWELL: First, can you describe code-switching, and also share some of those experiences?
DEBORAH YEH: I’m mindful of the stereotypes, I guess is what I would say. And I am thinking about them as an Asian woman when I stand up and offer a visitor a glass of water in my office. And I hate that, by the way. I very much believe in a servant leadership model, but I’m mindful of my outward identity as an Asian woman. You’re always navigating two different stereotypes. On the one hand, are you a China doll? Are you submissive? Are you overly polite? On the other hand, are you a dragon lady and overly aggressive? And so, as it relates to just tilting your behavior a little bit to ensure that you are being seen the way that you want to be seen, it is something that I’ve found myself doing. Now, by the way, I’ve also learned to do things like speaking up, standing up. When I present, I stand up. I am physically taking up space. And I’d actually say that these have all been positive learnings in my career. But yes, very much so, there is always another track running at the back of your mind.
PORTER BRASWELL: Let’s switch gears. There was a study Sephora commissioned on racial bias in retail that was recently released. And one of the findings was that three in five clients of color will stop shopping at a specific store if they experience unfair treatment. What was your personal reaction to that?
DEBORAH YEH: Frankly, I was excited to see the number because I think some doubters may wonder whether or not this is worth investing in. And there you go. There’s the number that shows that there are tremendous economic consequences for companies who don’t think about all of their customers – end of story. So while it is disheartening to know that the prevalence of unfair treatment and bias at retail is that big, we also know that it is in everyone’s best commercial interest to go after it. I got into doing what I do because I enjoy consumers. I like thinking about them, I like understanding what makes them tick, what motivates them. But I also need to know what’s demotivating. And what I can do to make it better.
PORTER BRASWELL: Have you ever personally experienced a time where you have felt targeted or profiled in a retail store?
DEBORAH YEH: I have experienced, personally, times in which I have felt invisible as a shopper. I have felt at times like, as an Asian woman, people don’t necessarily know, do you speak my language, et cetera. Or, on the flip side, potentially an expectation that I have a lot [of money] to potentially spend. This is not the worst of the things that we’ve heard, by the way. Again, I don’t ever want to over dramatize my own experiences. But yeah, I’ve heard from coworkers who work in retail that they really think about where they put their hands relative to their handbag when they walk into a store. And these are the things we learn about how to be a consumer in America. And so the study really quantified a lot of those things for us. Sephora’s study showed that a number of consumers adopt all kinds of coping mechanisms just to spend their hard-earned money. And it includes everything from dressing up to look like you can afford the product that’s on offer to, in some cases, switching our shopping habits to online because you can just deal more easily. And so it was one of the findings of the study that if we want to make sure that folks feel welcome, we need to make it less of an acrobatic exercise to participate in retail.
PORTER BRASWELL: So for the listeners that may not believe that perspective, I can say with personal experience, I have been profiled in stores. I’ve had people follow me in stores. I have shown up and screamed out loud, trying to get somebody to service me in a store, where I find myself being the only Black person in that store. And so, as a consumer and as a shopper, when you experience that, you also experience the brand through that lens as well. And so it’s so important, at the retail level, that companies really triple down on ensuring that all people that walk into that store feel like they belong, that it’s a privilege to serve them. Because I will go back and talk to my community about my experiences, and then that has a ripple effect. So I appreciate that you all commissioned that [study] and that you are taking action to ensure that that happens less frequently. Because it will continue to happen, but I think addressing it, being able to measure it, and having tangible actions and steps that can address it, is commendable. Has there been a change in how you approach your work following the murder of George Floyd this past summer and the Black Lives Matter movement?
DEBORAH YEH: Gosh. We would be heartless if we didn’t take that moment as an opportunity to reflect back on our work. I’d say that Sephora’s been thinking about and working towards diversity and equity and inclusion for quite some time. We actually initiated a campaign two years ago called We Belong to Something Beautiful. And it was intended as an outward articulation of our values as a company. But these moments in time give us the opportunity to see how much more work we have to do. And I think the murder of George Floyd and everything that we saw this summer shone a light on the systems that are creating opportunities for these things to happen. And at Sephora, and in retail, we have a system. Retail is a system. And so in terms of approaching our work, we’ve been thinking a lot about, “All right, what can we do to make the system more equitable and inclusive for all?” It is not just about a marketing campaign. Never has been about a marketing campaign, by the way – but I think a much deeper digging into the decisions that we’re making as leaders at all levels of the company.
PORTER BRASWELL: And how do you think about creating that type of culture, a more inclusive culture, at the corporate level versus the retail level? Are there similarities and differences to how you go about it, just given the different locations and the closeness to the center of power?
DEBORAH YEH: We don’t try to separate the field from corporate too much. And the reason why is that everyone at the company should understand what we stand for. Our values, etc. But, I think what you’re alluding to is that folks at corporate have different types of daily decisions they’re making. And ones that are potentially more consequential, the more they scale. Right? You can make a decision at headquarters, I can make a decision around a photograph, for instance. One decision. But we’re going to print it thousands of times. Right? That’s a really simple example, but absolutely, the consequences are in some ways bigger. I think at corporate, you can also set the standard. You can think about the policies that you’re putting together, ensure that everyone understands them, and are well trained and feel like they understand the why behind those things in a way that you certainly can’t do in the field. We are thinking about simple things like what are our service standards that eventually roll out to the field, but how do we ensure that everyone who walks into our stores has a welcoming experience consistently? How do you measure yourself at corporate? We are thinking about, “Okay, we need different scorecards now.” We need to be thinking about our metrics in diversity and equity and inclusion, just like we’re looking at our profit metrics. And everyone needs to have visibility into them.
PORTER BRASWELL: And so how does that change city by city? So Sephora has locations all over the country. And what DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] looks like in New York City is going to be very different than what it looks like in Oklahoma City, which is going to be very different from LA [Los Angeles]. So how do you think about, at the field level, building the types of cultures that are appropriate for that given community?
DEBORAH YEH: You know, the principle is to serve and reflect the community. I think that’s what you’re alluding to, and those communities are different from place to place. It can be a matter of making sure that we have enough folks who speak a language in a community to be able to serve a certain clientele. So it starts with recruiting from the community, right? Making sure that folks who are in the community are aware of what that audience needs. But actually, there are many things that still come down to common principles nationally. And some differences are invisible, by the way. We’re talking about race, but things like disability, ethnicity, these are all, in some cases, not seen. And we do need to make sure that we are being inclusive in all of these different factors as well.
PORTER BRASWELL: So in 2019, Sephora closed all of its U.S. stores, distribution centers, and corporate offices for a company-wide diversity training after a former employee, SZA, tweeted that she was racially profiled while shopping at a Sephora store. Can you talk about the decision-making behind that? Who gets involved in that type of planning and decision-making?
DEBORAH YEH: I remember having a conversation with our head of HR at the time, and we agreed that if we were going to talk about this on the outside, we need to live our values from the inside out. And we literally wrote a manifesto, put it on our walls as a external commitment to what consumers or employees or communities could expect out of Sephora, which was that we would continue working to make Sephora a place where everyone felt like they belong. We aligned at the time that it was pretty important for everyone within the company to be involved. This actually, again, goes back to this idea of the lines between corporate and field actually start to blur as it relates to things that are that important to the company. You know, our training involved people sharing times in their life and at work where they actually did not feel like they belonged. And let me tell you, there is nothing like hearing from a colleague, who you care about very much, talk about the challenges they face in their life, due to race or gender identity or any other point of difference. Since then, our employees have experienced probably more than 10, probably 15 at this point now, training touchpoints on a whole bunch of other topics, from client service to anti-racism training, implicit bias, etc. But it starts with that idea of inclusion and really putting that at the center of what you value most.
PORTER BRASWELL: When Sephora made the decision to push out these trainings, was there any pushback? Were there folks saying, “We shouldn’t be doing this”?
DEBORAH YEH: The only pushback at the time was the expense of something like this. When we’re a company this big, we diverted more than 10,000 people, who could have been out selling. And we decided that we’re going to close the stores. We also made the decision, by the way, to include folks like our distribution center employees, who would normally be packing up boxes. They don’t have customer-facing interaction. And there was a little conversation, like, should they get involved in this? But we really did feel like it was important to, one, put in the investments, and, two, to include everybody and to make everyone part of the journey with us.
PORTER BRASWELL: Awesome. So along the lines of brands, within your stores, a CNN article said that there are currently nine Black-owned brands out of more than 290 that Sephora carries. How did we get to that stage? Why are we there, and what are we doing to address that?
DEBORAH YEH: What we’re seeing here is that there is a full ecosystem in bringing a brand to market that starts with a great idea, includes, often times, venture funding, and the means to scale something in a large retailer. It is not an easy task for anyone. And we have an environment in which founders of color, female founders, often are starting farther back in that whole process. And so one of the things that we did do this summer is take the 15 percent pledge, which is a commitment to bring our brand representation of founders of color up to 15 percent, which is equivalent to the African-American population in the [United] States. It’s something that we will invest in – from rethinking how we scout and vet brands, to how we partner with them and incubate them and set them up for success. We could, of course, just do a quick run out there and sign a bunch of different contracts, but we actually want to ensure that the brands that we’re bringing into the store are financially successful. It is expensive to hire a factory to create unique packaging for your product. It is expensive to hire a field team to stand in front of your gondolas and sell your brand. And so we want to make sure that we’re making great choices and that we’re actually leveraging the experience that we’ve had, bringing brands to market, and make sure that we are sharing that freely with the potential entrepreneur and founder community.
PORTER BRASWELL: And how do you think about creating products or showcasing products, when your consumers are all different ages and sizes and races and ethnicities and genders? How do you go about choosing the products that you showcase?
DEBORAH YEH: Sure. So you’re right that even choosing products is a really important decision. We did a study recently around the state of racial bias at retail, and one of the uncoverings is that retailers are making choices around inclusion before someone even steps foot into one of our stores. That actually, having a product assortment that represents the community, is one of the most important symbols and signals that we can make. Now, as a marketer, I also have a role within that as well. How do I pick images, cast models, think about photographers who are really seeing the subject, embracing their story, and uplifting the community in a positive way? And so yeah, absolutely, we have really important roles, as it relates to reflecting back and supporting all the people who are our customers.
PORTER BRASWELL: Earlier you mentioned that there’s always a track or a reminder running in the back of your mind – about how people may see you as a leader because of your race and gender. So I’m curious, does that track or reminder still ring in the back of your mind, now that you’re the CMO? Do you still have that?
DEBORAH YEH: I guess what I would say is, I hope that people aren’t coming in intimidated into my office. I realize that my position of power may create that dynamic. But one thing that has helped me is that I hope that I’ve gotten just a little dose of empathy, coming up, that there are power dynamics in the office. And there are hidden symbols and codes that we’re all navigating. And my hope is that I can be more sensitive to them as a leader, and more accepting of difference. And hopefully, more appreciative and a better advocate for folks who are working for me or interacting with me as an executive.
PORTER BRASWELL: You’ve talked about how negative racial stereotypes can affect our potential at work. And your take is that the model minority myth is harmful to everyone and even you as an Asian executive in a leadership position. Can you talk more about this?
DEBORAH YEH: I guess, maybe first I’ll talk about my layman’s interpretation of it, and it’s this idea that, as Asians, we’re whiz kids, we’re super polite, we’re able to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and just work hard and fit in – a good, dedicated employee. And sometimes people ask, “What’s so wrong with being a model?” It sounds like a pretty positive stereotype. And certainly, I can think of more negative stereotypes that are out there. And in work, how this shows up is it potentially mistypes people. There’s this idea that an employee may be polite, but maybe she’s not a born leader. Or that she’s really analytical, great with the numbers, but not necessarily creative. And in marketing, that can be super challenging. As an executive leader, by the way, that could be super challenging. There are actually some studies out there that actually can measure the ratio of professionals versus executives in a field, and I think Asian women actually are some of the lowest in that ratio. And so it’s super challenging to navigate. I also just think that it kind of puts a burden on folks to propose that achievement is easy for some people, and it actually can be setting some folks up for an impossible standard and a feeling of failure – like “Why am I not the whiz kid? Why am I not a CMO at age 25?” And I’ll say maybe one more thing on it. Now I’m really going! It actually can be super challenging to cross-cultural understanding. If I assume that my own achievement is through working hard, being polite, fitting in, and basically my achievement alone, due to my own grit and hard work, I think it actually dismisses folks who actually didn’t start on an even playing field. And so it kind of perpetuates assumptions that we live in a pure meritocracy. Again, I grew up in a family of immigrants, and it was part of the narrative of our family, that you just worked hard and that is how success came about. But I actually think we need to have a more nuanced understanding, especially cross-culturally, of other communities’ struggles.
PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. So this is a question I like to ask all of our guests. Should race be discussed at work?
DEBORAH YEH: In some parts of our business, discussing race is the work. As marketers, as retailers, we’re people-serving people. And so if we don’t talk about race or racial identity, we’re missing a whole part of the story. The whole emotional side of the business. My goal as a leader is that we not only discuss race at work, but we get good at it. That I get good at it. And it’s a journey. None of us are perfect, but it’s something I’m very much committed to doing.
PORTER BRASWELL: Absolutely. It definitely is a muscle that you have to work out, you have to proactively engage in the topic of race to get comfortable with discussing it. So, thank you for taking the time to join us.
DEBORAH YEH: Thank you.
PORTER BRASWELL: That’s Deborah Yeh, Chief Marketing Officer at Sephora. This episode was produced by Amy Chyan and edited by Anne Saini. I’m Porter Braswell. Thanks for listening to Race at Work – part of the HBR Presents network.