Advertising in Black Magazines

Abstract

The African American consumer has been studied since the 1960s. Now a major segment of the national economy, this consumer group represented more than $631 billion of buying power in 2002. Prior research has shown that this market segment has distinct product and service preferences and that the African American consumer responds more favorably to advertisements containing African American models as opposed to white models. In focus groups comprised of African Americans and conducted by Ketchum Public Relations (KPR) in 1998, several companies were identified, some as mosttrusted and others as least-respected. When queried about the advertisement outlets, Black Enterprise, Ebony and Essence were among those named as mosttrusted black print media. In light of this finding, we advance the proposition that the advertisements in these media sources should reflect the spending patterns and other consumer preferences of African Ameri Ashanti Y. Ragoonan is an MBA student, School of Business & Industry, Florida cans. To explore this issue, we analyzed a sample of 2,845 advertisements in 12 issues of each of Black Enterprise, Ebony and Essence, spanning from May 1997 to April 1998-a timeframe that corresponds to the 12-month period prior to the KPR study. The findings of this exploratory study support our propositions about the effectiveness of using African American models in advertisements and the frequency of ads related to the top five expenditure categories of African Americans. We also found modest support for our proposition about the advertising patterns of the most-trusted and the least-respected companies.