Abstract
From a social equality representation perspective, advertising should ideally mirror the multicultural composition at the national market, because mass-mediated identity representations may act as cultural resources for those with marginalised identities. To investigate the observance to such an ideal in a context where the ethnic and racial composition of the population saw a rapid change, this article examines 676 Swedish TV commercials in over the period 2008–2017, and analyses the representation of non-White persons of colour (POC). Through this quantitative and qualitative examination, we find that POC are indeed visible in the commercials, but predominantly in the background or playing minor roles. With the, at times, unproportionally high representation of racial and ethnic diversity in Swedish advertising, we find significant tokenism, or in other words, the structurally ineffectual approach common in market-based multiculturalism.
Highlights
How multicultural is a country through the eyes of the Market? marketing is usually criticised for reproducing dominant power structures in society, mass-mediated identity representations at the marketplace may act as cultural resources for citizens with marginalised identities (Weinberger and Crockett 2018)
As the quantitative coding only gave information on whether the actors appearing in the commercials were White or non-White, we focused on the specific racial and ethnic representation of persons of colour (POC) in commercials, the list of which can be found in Appendix A
This article studies racial and ethnic representation in advertisements, in a context that has become highly diverse and multicultural only within half a decade, by empirically examining how POCs are represented over time
Summary
How multicultural is a country through the eyes of the Market? marketing is usually criticised for reproducing dominant power structures in society, mass-mediated identity representations at the marketplace may act as cultural resources for citizens with marginalised identities (Weinberger and Crockett 2018). Considering the number of newly arriving immigrants in Sweden every year, the MENA group is expected to remain the largest minority in the coming years From these statistics, we can assume that around 10 per cent of the population in Sweden are of foreign-born POC background. Research shows that race does, matter in different aspects of Swedish society (Osanami Törngren 2020) These swift turns in history, in combination with current, polarised political tensions about immigration from the Middle East and North Africa—which increased radically in 2015 with the extended Syrian refugee crisis—makes Sweden an aptly relevant case in which to explore changing ethnic/racial diversity relations and roles in market-based representations
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