Why race still matters when marketing to African-Americans

By David Morse | February 1, 2012

Reading time: 6 minutes

Abstract

The following is an adapted chapter from David R. Morse's Multicultural Intelligence book. The article focuses on black-white race relations in the U.S. and the societal and cultural obstacles involved in reaching African-Americans.

Research Topics:: Advertising Research | Demographic Analysis | Demographic Profiles | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) | Ethnic Research | Social Research
Industry/Market Focus:: African-American
Content Type: E-Newsletter Article

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Editor's note: David R. Morse is president and CEO of Los Angeles research company New American Dimensions LLC. He can be reached at david@newamericandimensions.com. This article appeared in the February 27, 2012, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

African-American buying power is close to $1 trillion. Still, too many marketers don't seem to get - or want to get - this segment. Or, if they used to get it, they don't anymore, judging by the dwindling dollars that make their way toward African-American marketing.

Today's African-American advertising agencies are facing increased competition from general-market agencies that have successfully convinced advertisers that they can deliver the same services. Additionally, the fast-growing Hispanic market is attracting the lion's share of "multicultural" marketing budgets, further threatening the viability of black agencies. Yet there is still a strong need for marketers to better understand what moves African-American consumers. Without fully appreciating how they consume media and more importantly, the lens through which they see their experience, a marketer's efforts will, at best, fall flat. Said Eugene Morris, head of E. Morris Communications, a Chicago company that specializes in targeting African-Americans, "Marketers assume that their message reaches African-Americans. But reaching them is not selling them."

As ad agencies compete for "ethnic dollars," it's the African-American segment that's getting overlooked. "After all, African-Americans speak English," goes the argument. Now, as marketers see less and less of a need to reach out to African-Americans, they are in danger of reinforcing and compounding a long-held belief system in the black community: They just don't give a damn about us.

Demands to be addressed

Unlike whites, African-Americans tend to talk freely about race and racism. Blacks have had their group identity forged in the fires of slavery and Jim Crow, a couple of words whites are not sure it's even OK to mention. Race is part of the daily lives of most African-Americans; its derivative, racism, is experienced in a myriad of forms: unemployment, incarceration, crime, getting turned down for loans and missed taxicabs. For blacks, race is a subject that demands to be addressed.

A majority of whites see themselves as colorblind and resent that blacks insist on making race such an issue. Pointing to civil rights legislation, the rarity of overt expressions of racism in today's society and the fact they may not harbor any personal malice towards blacks, whites are content to believe in the idea of American egalitarianism and equal opportunity. Embracing the individualism embedded in the American ethos, they point to successful, integrated blacks and wonder why others haven't done the same.

Two Americas

In 1968, the Kerner Commission warned of America becoming two nations, one black and one white, separate and unequal. It is hard to dispute that this is still not the case. Blacks are significantly worse off than whites. According to the Equality Index of the National Urban League's report The State of Black America 2010, the status of African-Americans in America is 72 percent of their white counterparts. The index is a composite score based on rankings on five attributes:

Economics: Score: 57 percent. Fewer than 50 percent of black families own their own homes versus three-quarters of white families.
Health: Score: 77 percent. On average, blacks are twice as likely to die from disease, accident and homicide as whites.
Education: Score: 78 percent. Whites over age 25 are more than one-and-a-half times as likely as blacks to hold a bachelor's degree.
Social justice: Score: 57 percent. Blacks are six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated.
Civic engagement: Score: 102 percent. Largely reflective of the higher percentage of blacks in the military, military volunteerism is 45 percent higher than whites.

In their book By the Color Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, authors Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown write:

"The reality is that blacks and whites today are not much closer to living together, learning together, relaxing together, praying together and playing together than they were a generation ago. The law might bring people together but in matters of choice, blacks and whites are simply going their own ways."

Marketing through the Filter

The Filter is a term coined in the African-American marketing book What's Black About It? In it, authors Pepper Miller and Herb Kemp identify the Filter as psychological baggage from slavery, post-slavery and discrimination:

"The Filter is the nucleus of the black experience and black culture. ... It has predisposed many African-Americans to become overly-sensitive about feeling stereotyped and not feeling valued, respected, included and welcomed. It also explains why many African-Americans want to be seen as a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous group, to desire real inclusion, to see more and see differently when it comes to marketing communications, to rely upon word-of-mouth, to use general-market media but to embrace black media. ... As a result, many African-Americans care about how they are represented and how white Americans perceive them."

So how do blacks want to be perceived? First, and most important, they do not want to be stereotyped. This goes for all cultural groups but blacks are acutely sensitive to it, especially black men, who have suffered disproportionate stereotyping for a longer period of time. Marilyn Kern-Foxworth describes the portrayal of blacks in the 1940s and beyond in her book Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow:

"The mouth was opened unusually wide and filled with large and/or carnivorous white teeth encased by exceptionally large, thick, ruby-red protruding lips. The eyes in these advertisements were most often seen bulging uncontrollably with ecstatic fright."

Of course, we've come a long way from such images. But that still doesn't mean blacks are depicted in the ways they want to be seen. There are images of African-Americans created for white people by white people and there are images of African-Americans created by and for African-Americans. And there's a big difference. Our research shows that African-Americans like to see themselves in all their diversity. Smart advertisers are the ones that test their ads on African-American consumers to make sure they capture African-Americans as they really are.

Three themes

New American Dimensions conducted exploratory research with African-American men in African-American barbershops in Los Angeles. Non-traditional research settings can offer a glimpse of the black experience and expose the emotions surrounding the mind-set of "being black in America" and why targeted efforts are still important. More importantly it showcases the opinions of black men - the most influential but overlooked and underserved segment when it comes to marketing.

We wanted to explore American men's thoughts and perspectives on media and marketing with an honesty that we can rarely achieve in controlled focus group environments - especially among African-American men, who are often the most skeptical toward traditional research methods. We identified three themes.

1. Acknowledge us. Represent us. Respect us. One man commented, "Black people are so hungry to be respected and to be considered in the decisions of what's said and marketed to us ... we've become passionate about the stuff that relates to us." Another participant told us that he always looks for black representation in commercials but never sees it and is offended by that.

2. Show us as we are. Portray the rich spectrum of African-Americans and our experiences. Avoid the worn clichés and stereotypes. One participant plainly told marketers to "respect African-Americans by showing all representations of us. We have diversity. Don't just show a slice of who we are. Show all of who we are."

3. Be authentic. Get to know us. Show you understand us. "We know junk when we see it," said one man. "We know when you just put something out there and say, 'Well, we did do a commercial using you guys.'"

Confront the complexity

In the introduction to his book Race Matters, Cornel West writes, "Our truncated public discussions of race suppress the best of who and what we are as a people because they fail to confront the complexity of the issue in a candid and critical manner."

If we ignore the intricacies of race, if we shy away from the difficulties or inconveniences that it imposes, we risk faulty judgment and simplistic understanding, something that as marketers (and human beings) we cannot afford to do.