Interesting piece in USA Today about how marketing efforts aimed at a mass marketplace may actually miss a pretty sizable chunk of the marketplace – middle aged and middle class African Americans who are loyal to different media outlets than their white counterparts.
Tom Joyner, a popular radio host with a primarily African American audience, tells USA Today that marketers “could have so much more if they specifically and unashamedly direct their efforts to an African-American audience. This strategy goes back 50 years when Ebony magazine convinced advertisers to use black models in their print ads. To this day there are generations of black people who are loyal to some of those brands. As a people, that's the way we are, and we've got a whole lot of money.”
Tom Joyner, a popular radio host with a primarily African American audience, tells USA Today that marketers “could have so much more if they specifically and unashamedly direct their efforts to an African-American audience. This strategy goes back 50 years when Ebony magazine convinced advertisers to use black models in their print ads. To this day there are generations of black people who are loyal to some of those brands. As a people, that's the way we are, and we've got a whole lot of money.”
- KC's View:
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One of the tests that USA Today ran to test its hypothesis was to have its reporter mention the name “Tom Joyner” to both white people and black people to see who recognized it.
White people had no clue who he was, while black people instantly recognized him.
We must confess that we had no idea who Tom Joyner was, so we can at least confirm some measure of the hypothesis’s accuracy. And while the whole idea of speaking to black people a different way than white people somehow seems racist, that doesn’t seem to be the argument.
But that doesn’t make us any more comfortable with it. However, it may be more our problem than anyone else’s.
