Consumer Race & Multiculturation : do racially ambiguous models drive greater advertising effectiveness across all races in an organic multicultural market?

Abstract

Situated within the field of marketing studies, this research employs a transformative consumer research lens to examine the challenges of targeting markets that are increasingly multicultural. Extant studies, deriving from market contexts characterised by an ethnic majority, have investigated minority responses to advertising featuring models ethnically similar to themselves, but with conflicting results. Yet research on racial diversity in advertising continues to be dominated by studies characterising multicultural markets as dominated by one � normally the �white� � group, plus a variety of minority ethnicities. In response to findings based on this context, advertisers populate their advertisements with models representing either the majority race or the minority race, or with multiple individuals each representing a different race. Little comparative research has examined the effectiveness or effect on consumer well-being of these different options, or considered the unintended outcome that these approaches hold the potential to exacerbate consumer vulnerability. In the context of South Africa, this research, by contrast, tests the hypothesis that advertising acknowledging markets as made up of multiculturated consumers � regardless of their ethnicity � has the potential to improve both consumer wellbeing and advertising effectiveness. The South African market has developed organically, with (unlike the West) no significant proportion of recent immigrants fragmenting a formerly homogeneous market. It comprises multiple diverse, and native ethnicities characterised by generations of social and cultural border crossing. Integration across multiple ethnicities has occurred throughout the country�s history, despite colonisation, and the legislated separation of apartheid. In the two post-apartheid decades, a media-rich environment has made exposure to multiple local, foreign and global ethnicities unavoidable. A level of multiculturation, involving more than two ethnicities, is being reached in South Africa. A conceptual framework for multicultural advertising to ensure consumer well-being is developed through a multi-stage research design involving scale development to measure multiculturation and comparative advertising treatment testing and analysis. Through the use of an online consumer panel (university student populations traditionally used), 2,223 South Africans were subjected to a survey. Respondents were permitted to self-define their race, and then rated their level of multiculturation. Exposure to a series of pre-tested mock advertisements, representing the three advertising model configurations, and satisfying four recommended conditions for external validity, was followed by ratings of advertising effectiveness and consumer wellbeing. The use of one-way, two-way and repeated measures ANOVA�s tested the hypotheses, while structural equation modelling developed the final conceptual model. The study adopted an alternative to the typical research focus on migrant ethnicity, instead considering local ethnicity in a multicultural marketplace and maintaining a holistic multicultural approach to measuring the dependent variable. It found that advertisements employing racially ambiguous models drive an emotional effect on the viewer, improving feelings of consumer well-being. In South Africa, advertisers continue to perpetuate fragmentation of the South African market�s organic multicultural make-up through a stereotyped use of race �types� in advertisements. However, better understanding of multiculturated marketplaces is also important to a West also becoming increasingly multicultural, with work, home, school and religious lives all increasing exposure across ethnic lines, and growth in social media networks creating virtual ethnicities. The research argues that the dominant ethnicity is rapidly becoming the multicultural market itself. Thus this study contributes at multiple levels: theoretical, through its argument for a re-focusing of the literature on multiculturation, consumer well-being and marketplace inclusion; methodological, though its innovative use of online panels; practitioner, in its indication of the benefits of employing racially ambiguous models in a multicultural market; and social, in reducing perceived consumer discrimination.