Expansion to Other People of Color · Marketing to Minorities: Expansion and Development (1950s-1990s)

"The majority of our people are good and responsible, but the Americans are full of racism and prejudice...the majority of Hispanics are very hard-working people." -Hispanic focus group, 1983

During the 1970s and 1980s, minority populations began to increase sharply in the United States, especially as people from Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico immigrated to America.1 Targeting the African-American market had proven to be a successful strategy for advertising agencies such as J. Walter Thompson (JWT) and Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO). Rena Bartos, a market researcher who worked from 1960 to 1998, mentions in her papers that black consumers in the 1980s were a powerful consumer force. This prompted JWT to create a Special Markets Group to focus on advertising to minority markets. Realizing this, pioneering advertisers also began to experiment with targeted advertising to other ethnicities. Goldfarb Consultants wrote in their 1983 research report that Asian-Americans were strongly clustered in California and were a specialty market ready to be tapped.

A Spanish USA publication from 1981 conducted several focus group sessions on advertising to Spanish-speaking minorities. These focus groups found that though Hispanics preferred commercials in Spanish, poorly-translated Spanish voiceovers and advertising that treated Hispanics as a singular group - rather than as diverse racial and ethnic groups with different interests and desires - caused more harm than benefit.3 A study conducted in 1983 by Goldfarb Consultants found that Hispanic-Americans identified strongly with their ancestral country and were more likely to purchase products that appealed to their particular (and sometimes hybrid) sense of community, customs, and tradition.

"Mazola Margarine advertisement, page 81." Minority Marketing. Chicago: Crain, 1980. Print.

Still, advertising to minorities was lacking and problematic in many ways. For example, a book published in 1980 about minority marketing praises Mazola for being “authentic” and using a “real, full-blooded American Indian” as their model in their ad for margarine. This ad places Tenaya, a Chiricahua Apache model, in a field of corn, reinforcing simple stereotypes about Native Americans and their diverse ways of life. Mazola equates Native Americans with maize, which disregards the complex narratives, traditions, and civilizations of different Native American peoples.

Furthermore, the language used to describe different races would be considered outdated and pejorative today. The term “Negro” was heavily used in the 1950s and 1960s before being replaced by “black” and “African-American.” Additionally, even in the 1980s, advertising books used the term “Oriental”5 to describe Asian-Americans, a term which much of the Asian-American population repudiates today.

Pew Research Center, Hispanic Trends. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/04/19/statistical-portrait-of-hispanics-in-the-united-states-key-charts/
“California Market Pulse Consumer Research.” Goldfarb Consultants Ford Research Reports. Box 1.
“Spanish USA: A study of the Hispanic Market in the United States, 1981.” Non-Proprietary Research Reports, J. Walter Thompson. Box 6.
“Hispanic Consumer Market.” Goldfarb Consultants Ford Research Reports. Box 1.
Minority Marketing. Chicago: Crain Books, 1980. Print.