Marketers are slowly – but not always surely – beginning to understand African-Americans.
Like many of their peers, the marketers at Dr Pepper were looking to broaden their product’s reach to include “urban youth,” a demographic term that, for all intents and purposes, means young African-Americans.
“We did some research, and saw where the brand fits in with 12- to 17-year-old urban youths,” reports Samantha Noel, brand manager at Plano, TX-based Dr Pepper/Seven Up, a division of Cadbury Schweppes PLC, London. The good news was that focus groups of urban high school kids in Dallas, Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles had nothing bad to say about Dr Pepper; the bad news was that the brand “was not even on their radar screen,” Noel admits.
Working with Shift Advertising, a subsidiary of Dallas-based The Richard Group, Noel decided that an initial sampling program made sense. “We didn’t want to charge into the market,” she says. “We wanted to take a step back to understand what they think.”
This prudent approach makes sense in most marketing cases, but perhaps more so when targeting efforts to African-Americans – a population that spends $500 billion annually but yet, for various reasons, is still a mystery to many marketers.
“I don’t see us moving as far ahead as we should be as an industry,” says Gisele Simmons, director of ethnic marketing at The Guild Group, a promotion agency in White Plains, NY. “Clients are still saying that ethnic markets don’t represent a large enough volume.”
The companies that do succeed, she adds, are the ones willing to break out of general marketing modes and dig deeper to discover the nuances and needs of particular ethnic groups.
Finding the Source That’s the direction Dr Pepper took. Shift recommended that the brand hook up with The Source, a 12-year-old music magazine heavily aligned with the world of hip-hop, which was created by and is still largely populated (despite mainstream acceptance) with the African-Americans Dr Pepper wanted to reach.
“We position ourselves as a youth culture brand,” explains Joyce Parente, director of marketing for The Source, New York City. “Hip-hop is not about race, it’s a way of looking at the world,” which is influenced by music, sports, clothing, and other cultural elements. While the magazine doesn’t specifically target African-Americans, young black males are its core audience, making up 50 percent of the monthly’s readership.
The Source invites sponsors to participate in at least three major promotions annually, one of which this year was deemed perfect for Dr Pepper’s goals. The partners last month kicked off “The Source Block Shaker Tour 2000 Sponsored by Dr Pepper,” a 10-city traveling hip-hop show. Launched simultaneously in New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco, the tour runs through September 19 and will make additional stops in Washington, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
Each stop runs from three to nine days and includes appearances at such venues as sporting events, concerts, street festivals, parades, and nightclubs. The centerpiece is a customized van displaying the Dr Pepper logo and equipped with a pulsating sound system. “This has a true guerrilla marketing feel, because the vans move from stop to stop every day. And the vans really shake,” says Parente.
Tour staffers, who sometimes include a “Dream Team” of college females, hand out free samples of Dr Pepper along with posters, T-shirts, and CDs. Stops are supported by spot-market radio and signage at key retail outlets, parks, community centers, and other teen hangouts. The Source is responsible for keeping the tour’s four vans on the move and hiring DJs or hip-hop musicians in each city to add some local intimacy.
“The reason we recommended the tour is so Dr Pepper would have the street credibility of The Source,” says Crystal Merritt, account supervisor at Shift.
Making a Mark A similar “taking it to the streets” strategy is at the core of promotional programs designed by Segmented Marketing Services, Inc., Winston-Salem, NC, for clients such as Lever Brothers, Coca-Cola, and Pillsbury. As its primary method of reaching African-Americans, SMS (founded in 1978 by former Quaker Oats marketing manager Sandra Miller Jones) distributes product samples through a network of churches, salons, barber shops, nightclubs, “and other ad hoc networks that we have developed,” says ceo Lafayette Jones.
Jones joined his wife two decades ago after spending 15 years in packaged goods marketing for companies including Procter & Gamble, Lever, and the old General Foods. He maintains that ethnic consumers, including Asian-American and Hispanics as well as African-Americans, “are the market of the future, and the future is now.”
To get there, marketers need to improve heavily on past performance, he says. For instance, Jones asserts that SMS research has found that 80 percent of ethnic consumers who get samples use them, and more than 30 percent will then convert to a full-size purchase. One of the reasons why those figures are so high, however, is that less than five percent of African-Americans and Hispanics currently receive samples, so many still look upon them as gifts.
In a promotion conducted last year, the U.S. Postal Service introduced a new stamp bearing Madam C. J. Walker, a freed slave who pioneered the ethnic beauty product category in the early 1900s. Walker’s story fit naturally into SMS’s network, so along with four-color shopping bags featuring a large image of the stamp, gift bags containing third-party samples from Clorets, Pantene shampoo, and Sure deodorant were sent to nearly 15,000 salons, barber shops, and churches. Nearly four million samples were distributed in all.
To support the effort, posters were hung in the beauty shops, which also displayed take-one pads with information on the stamp. Copies of Urban Call, a quarterly trade newspaper published by SMS and circulated through more than 100,000 inner-city retailers, wholesalers, and buyers, carried a special supplement sponsored by the USPS. The program helped sell 50 million Walker stamps, says Jones.
One of the most glaring misconceptions about African-Americans, says Jones, is that they all have low incomes. The North American operation of luxury car maker Jaguar Cars, a division of Ford Motor Co., is eschewing that notion with its first campaign aimed at black buyers, which represent “a broader audience that we haven’t been focusing on,” says Al Saltiel, the auto maker’s general marketing manager.
Mahwah, NJ-based Jaguar hired director-actor Spike Lee and his 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, New York City, to develop creative marketing programs that primarily reach out to blacks. Known more for such feature films as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, Lee has also done extensive work in advertising, most notably the Michael Jordan/Mars Blackmon spots for Nike in the 1980s. (Lee’s production has partnered with ad agency DDB Worldwide to form SpikeDDB, a full-service agency.)
The director’s initial effort for Jaguar is an eight-minute short film titled The Harlem to Martha’s Vineyard Special. The infomercial was introduced at the New York International Auto Show (and on Jaguar’s Web site) in April and will become part of a direct-mail campaign set for the fourth quarter. The piece centers on a young, affluent black couple – she’s a bread-winning surgeon, he’s an aspiring sculptor – who venture out from their elegant Harlem apartment for a weekend retreat. Also starring in the short are the Jaguar S-Type, the couple’s city vehicle, and the XK8 convertible they use to zip around the Vineyard.
To learn more about where blacks fit within the customer base, Jaguar recently took a deeper dive into its owner data. One startling kernel of uncovered information was that African-American owners “are significantly younger than [owners] in the general market – by as much as five years,” says Saltiel. Typical Jaguar buyers are in their early 50s; typical black owners are in their late 40s. “Research into what motivates this consumer is something to focus on as we’re going forward,” he adds. “We need to do more work.”
In addition to the direct-mail campaign, which will either include the Lee film in the initial package or as a bounce-back, Jaguar has been ramping up ethnic-event marketing. The brand sponsors the annual Black Enterprise Ski Challenge in Colorado, a Sports Illustrated golf outing, and the Acapulco Black Film Festival. “Our goals are really straightforward: to generate awareness of Jaguar in the African-American community, to establish a rapport by targeting those consumers with various communications, and ultimately to sell more cars,” Saltiel says.
Being color-blind may be a virtue elsewhere, but it’s a sin in marketing.
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