The Civil Rights Movement and Social Sensitivity

Abstract

African American consumers, totaling 35 million and with an annual income of $601 billion in 2001, constitutes a huge target market in the United States. Given the growing practice of target marketing, the consumer behavior of African Americans has attracted a great deal of research attention. Some of the studies have explored the question of their social sensitivity when making purchasing decisions. But the research has invariably been framed narrowly to examine, for example, the response of African American consumers to marketing variables such as type of ad or media representation. Such studies are largely devoid of sociohistorically-grounded conceptual analysis. Consequently, the marketing literature is generally missing historically-based research, research which examines the critical role of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in developing the African American consumer market and in engendering a collective sense of social sensitivity in their consumer behavior. The present study represents an attempt to redress this research gap. It provides a conceptual discussion of how the CRM was instrumental in the emergence of the African American consumer market, as well as in the emergence of social sensitivity in their consumer behavior, and it reports an empirical analysis of the social sensitivity of African American consumers, using primary data from a random national survey designed and conducted by Ketchum Public Relations Worldwide. The overall findings of this study reveal that, while some African American consumers are influenced by traditional marketing variables such as product availability, a large majority of African American consumers studied, namely, those who are older, more educated, with higher income, are inclined to use their purchasing power to further social change within the business community. Their open manifestation of social sensitivity is not only a matter of cultural preferences and identification but is also a form of political action in pursuit of socioeconomic justice and parity.