Advertising has been in existence for a period that is as long as human civilization. In fact, it is not easy to report the exact time when advertising started around the world, but one could argue that it came into existence after a trader who was selling at a market placed a sign that informed his clients of the prices of his products. As much as the message of the advertisement could have been simple, it represented most of the advertising messages of the 1840s that came with the invention of the newspaper media. Volney Palmer was the first person on the American soil to express the need for developing advertising agencies when she opened a business in Philadelphia that would sell the ads in 1843. Thirty years later, the US realized a rise in the advertising trade, and it has undergone significant revolutions to start considering target marketing in the 1960s. The Civil Rights movements of the time led to a realization of the need to show ethnic diversity in advertising, and to move away from the dominance of the White race. However, the African Americans were not quickly targeted for many reasons, which could be related to the fact the White race considered them lesser spenders and inferior. However, as time wore on, the trend changed, and this paper traces the path of African American targeted marketing. As this paper reports, African Americans first appeared in commercials in the US when they were being advertised as slaves. However, the post-Civil Rights movements transformed their presentation in the ads and recently, they have started to market their own brands.
The emergence of modern brands started in the mid-20th century when firms and their managers around the US and worldwide moved away from the consideration that product quality was the only issue that mattered to the consumers to the adoption of brand management. It meant that advertising had increased in importance, at least more than it had been in the initial years (Arons, 2011). The companies introduced the discipline of brand management or brand marketing, and it has been a central focus in the recent decades. Literature on brand management indicates that it led to the development of targeted marketing, which required the companies to identify and focus on a specific category of consumers as opposed to the entire population. In the US, as literature reports, most of the companies targeted the White race since they were the ethnic majority and with a huge spending power.
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Even while advertising has such a long history, it has not always depicted the services and products with positive images or messages. For example, the African Americans have featured in ads but have historically appeared in them playing familiar roles to the White race. One of such is that of Aunt Jemima, the swaddled and fat Black mammy that the advertisers used to promote their products (Brimm, 2017). The advertisements utilizing racial stereotypes have were often made by the Whites and were meant to address the White audiences, which resulted in the representation of the African Americans as Whites imagined in them that extended the racial stereotypes. Advertisements have exploited the African American race from the time of slavery since the invention of the newspaper advertising. However, a success story emerged from such an exploitation. Even while social stereotyping is still present within the contemporary society and within the advertising industry, there has been a reduction in the rates of depiction of such stereotyping. This trend has resulted from the fact that a slow evolution of the Black race in the advertisements has been a step in the right direction. Such a forward step is apparent especially when one considers the days when the African Americans were advertised as slaves for sale, as runaway slaves, and the social stereotyping that was rampant within the media.
African Americans first featured in the commercials within the US during the initial years of American slavery (Jordan, 2013). During that time, the enslaved Americans were advertised for sale starting from the legalization of slavery in the country in 1611 to its closure in 1863. Historians have learned through such advertisements that most of the African Americans that apprehended, chased, raffled, bartered, and sold were not uneducated, unskilled, and illiterate as they were depicted. Such advertisements were placed on posters stuck on windows, flyers in newspapers and were done in a similar manner in which inanimate objects could be advertised presently. For example, the Boston News-Letter was the first media house to start a regular weekly publication in the US, and often contained advertisements for slaves. In many of such ads, the slaves were not even marketed by their names, which was quite dehumanizing such as the advertisement made in the same newspaper on March 21, 1734, which is captioned below:
“ A likely Negro Man about Twenty two Years of Age, speaks good English, has had the Smallpox and the Measles, has been seven Years with a LIME BURNER: To be sold, Inquire of John Langdon, Baker, next Door to John Clarke’s at the North End, Boston .” (Mellissa, 2012).
In other cases, the advertisements were placed to give children away like the free puppies ads of the modern age. such ads were popular in the Boston News-Letter between 1770 and 1774. The advertisements were often made alongside others such as agricultural produce like livestock, pigs, cattle, rice, seed, and grain (Fox, 1984). The slaves were called chattel for the fact that they were advertised within posters and were identified as property. Such posters were those that advertised auctions of agricultural products and livestock such as the one depicted in figure 1 below. Domestic slaves were usually sold and bought through the newspaper commercials, and the manner in which the Whites depicted such enslaved women in writing was the cause of the racial mammy stereotype.
Today, the racial stereotype is still believed and the commercials and movies of the modern day still reinforce it that appeared in the late 1960s. Concerning the mammy stereotype, the White race believed that Black women’s fulfilment only came through serving the kitchens of White masters and not raising their own children or feeding their own men (Fox, 1984). Therefore, the comforting image, which the Whites associated with the character of mammy related to the ability of the Black women to serve the Whites from birth to death while showing the highest levels of loyalty and devotion since their pleasure came from the service to the Whites. Therefore, to the White Americans, there was such comfort in the mammy figure, even as unrealistic the depiction was one their domestic female slave, which the advertisers would use latter to market their products, which included the Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix.
From the time when advertising emerged as tool of selling products, services, and ideas, the African American race has been used to raise their recognizability. Many advertising agents and corporations have used the American racial stereotypes in the promotion of their products, but none has been as influential as the caretaker, mammy (Jordan, 2013). The need to make the society find comfort in the presentation of products by the African Americans as characters on the packaging materials caused the use of the stereotypes. It was believed that the Whites could only accept the characters in the commercials if they did not threaten their wellbeing. The stereotype of the old plantation did not threaten the Whites, for example, because the planation slave cared for the White masters and their family within the domestic servitude (Jordan, 2013). When Aunt Jemima and the rest of the stereotypes emerged within the 1800s, most of the Whites had grown up with slave caretakers, which caused them to be comfortable with the representations.
However, according to extant literature, something special started happening in the US advertising in the 1970s (Cruz, 2015). At the residual end of the Civil Rights movements, the advertising industry of the US started to ignore the decades-long habit to depicting the Black race almost exclusively as slaves and inferior, as advertisement props that were aimed at the White race audiences. During this time, firms such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds started raising their racial diversity depiction within their advertisements. Jello became among the largest advertising firms in the US to recruit a Black spokesperson, Bill Cosby in 1974 (Cruz, 2015). The goal of this move was twofold for the firms. First it targeted to keep with the era, and second, it wanted to increase the potential client base. However, the manner in which the firms at that time took to this issue indicated that they understood only so much concerning their target demographics, and the outcomes, such as so many vintage advertisements, seemed largely misguided to their modern audiences. For example, to McDonalds, making an impression to the Black market meant that they use adverts such as ‘Dinnertimin’ and ‘Makin it’ that extensively utilized the g-dropping (Cruz, 2015). The firm also became fond of using the ‘Get down’ campaign it is quest to appeal to the African-American market around the country. In the meantime, ads that featured Caucasians that emerged around the same time left out marks such as ‘on the real, kids can really dig gettin’ down with McDonalds’ as well as ‘em’ (Goings, 1995). The use of the g-dropping trend to make an appeal to the African American market has a long history that traces back to Aunt Jemima’s ‘mammy’ advertisements that used phrases such as ‘every bite is happyfyin’ light’.
It emerged that the campaigns that the White-dominated advertising industry staged to capture the appeal of the African Americans were tone-deaf since the outcome of the attempts proved that they did not know what they were doing (Fox, 1984). The agencies did not have a familiarity with the African Americans, which caused them to designs that were racially naïve as well as those that relied necessarily on stereotypes because of a lack of information. According to one critic of the marketing efforts, Neil Drossman, the adverts that McDonalds had designed to reach the Black market were cynical as well as superficial efforts to reach them. According to Drossman, the Whites considered the Blacks as being too rural and underdeveloped since he remembered being asked in the 1970s if an advert he and his firm had been working on involving a Black couple appeared too urban (Cruz, 2015). He further reported that most of the missteps of the industry were a result of dire ignorance of the mainstream advertising agencies even while there existed specialized Black agencies. The general tone failure was a thing that not even the conventions of the time could excuse. Drossman reported that the respect for the African American target audience and the desire to understand it further was what differentiated the good agencies from the rest of the industry (Jordan, 2013).
Advertisers understood empirically that the African Americans would most probably buy products when they saw themselves reflected in the commercials, which meant that targeted marketing was a sensible undertaking. However, it should be noted that the firms feared that the move would result in their products being branded Black, which would cause them to loose on the White consumers (Cortese, 2015). Nevertheless, this conception turned out to be largely misguided. Demographic targeting flourished even more, and at towards the end of the decade, the Blacks constituted 12 percent of the commercial models, which was a significant increase from only three percent of the 1960s (Cruz, 2015). The targeted marketing legacy of the 1970s and the shifts in the marketing trends of the time came along with symbolic-or-casual racism. Writing in his book called Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, sociologist Anthony Cortese posited that the ethnic minorities and Blacks had not been eliminated from the advertising industry but had transformed in character, assuming subtler and more underhanded or symbolic forms (Cortese, 2015).
As the advertisers were busy concentrating on the African Americans, they failed to incorporate the rest of the racial minorities largely because they did not have significant spending powers, which meant that they were not worth pursuing. The advertisers did not only regurgitate the stereotypes, but also helped created new ones. For instance, the 1970s marked the start of minority targeting for the advertising firms within the categories related to vices. Consider the issue of cigarettes and alcohol, the menthol cigarette produced by Winston and branded Real & Rich & Cool. At the time when the middle class Whites who were fond of the cigarette started to fight smoking during the 1970s, the agencies embarked on advertising their products to the African Americans communities at rate that was 2.6 times that they used within the White communities (Cruz, 2015). It should also be noted that McDonalds continues to operate a website called 365Black that seeks to promote African American culture, which some critics such as Imani Perry consider an insult at African American culture. She commented that the manner in which McDonald has marketed its products directly to the African Americans has been a bother to her for a long time. According to her, so many Blacks resided in the urban regions of the US that were surrounded by fast food restaurants as well as a little supply of fresh produce. To her, that direct marketing to African Americans was addition of insult to injury when the fast food companies such as McDonalds and others presented their investment as being vested in the culture and history of African Americans (Cruz, 2015). This means that the culture of fast food in the US is alien to the African Americans, which McDonalds seems to have ignored even while it pretends to be aware of their history and culture.
A difference exists, though, in a the form of reactions that firms could expect presently if an advertisement goes too far while attempting to make an appeal to a given racial group. The companies are supposed to weigh the benefit as well as the probable profit that they will gain from their ethnic clients against the risks of alienating permanently such huge consumer markets. According to Cortese, in the past, boycotts by the racial clients were used successfully to attain social change (Cortese, 2015). However, activists of the present day are much more bold and hostile because demands that some specific products are removed from retail shelves have grown in intensity. The overall progress within the marketing industry in the depiction of different lifestyles and backgrounds of people has not made the populace to become complacent concerning the types of casually racist imagery. What it means for the advertising agents is that they must try to cope with the current trends on the social sphere and have an insight of the future of their marketing. For example the companies must start to consider targeted marketing that pays attention to the emotional appeal of their target clients. Research done indicates that people increase their purchasing appeal if the commercials they encounter touch their emotions (Moubarak, 2016). It means that the companies have to get concerned that the consumers have moved away from the need to have the right message at the right time for the companies to develop strong brand reputations. Therefore, alongside avoiding to use provocative stereotypes, the companies must consider creating commercials that appeal to the emotions of their clients (Moubarak, 2016).
As much as the idea of emotional appeal may not be a completely new one, it is required that companies give an active consumer input. The emergence of better technologies means that companies can analyze the emotional signals of their audiences with ease. One of the ways of dealing with the mammy stereotypes in the US could be a move that integrates all the races in the nation, which is a move towards the elimination of a feeling of inferiority by the minority groups. First, the companies must start to understand that the long history that the African Americans have had concerning their presentation within the commercials has impacted much on their emotions. Yes, the Black race wants to continue having a strong sense of identity and belonging, which is why the trend in demographic marketing has moved towards allowing the African Americans and other ethnic minorities to market products that bear their own names (Cruz, 2015). For example, Oprah Winfrey is one of the African Americans that has been at the forefront of promoting African American products using her O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, a magazine she launched back in 2000 (Cruz, 2015). Winfrey’s magazine currently boasts of a subscription of more than 2.7 million Americans from different ethnic backgrounds. What this teachers the rest of the advertising agencies is that African Americans have just as the same marketing appeal to their target audiences. Therefore, it means that in the future companies will start hiring African American marketing models for products that target them and avoid using the White-engineered stereotypes that have not focused on the emotional appeal of the Blacks.
In conclusion, as much as ads have a long history, African Americans have not taken an active role in them until recently. Initially, they were depicted in the ads as slaves whom their masters often advertised in dehumanizing ways together with agricultural products such as livestock and grains. Later on, following the Civil Rights movements of the 60s and late 50s, the White race started depicting them using racial stereotypes that included the mammy stereotype that was identified with demeaning perceptions of the Black race. The stereotypes have persisted in the advertising media for a long time until recently when activities became more proactive in fighting them. Today, African Americans have moved to marketing their own brands, and companies have started to realize the trend pays off. Therefore, what is next is for the companies to embrace the issue of emotional advertising, which has been in existence for a while. The emotional focus will lead the companies into understanding the needs of the African Americans and other races and catering for them in the commercials.
References
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