The Slippery Slope of Demographic Marketing

PREDICTING CONSUMER RESPONSE to marketing efforts is not just a numbers game. With growing diversity in the U.S. population and an economy that spans cultural and national borders, advertising is often segmented to target specific minority demographics. But to define a target group simply by percentage of population or other statistics such as income or education level mistakenly ignores consumers’ perception of their identity and status in the larger social context. And it is that perception of social status that can affect how an individual responds to images in an ad campaign.

“Your identity and how you are going to respond to a targeted ad is not based upon how some marketer defines you. Identity is pliable and flexible and can vary according to context,” says assistant professor of marketing Sonya Grier. Grier’s recent work delves into the social dimensions of marketing to various consumer segments and explores the applications of “distinctiveness” theory to consumer behavior. “Distinctiveness is the notion that people’s traits will be more salient to them when they are in a minority. If you wear glasses, that trait will be more salient to you in a group of people who don’t,” she explains. Applied to marketing, when a trait is more salient, people respond more to its targeting. For example, ethnic minority consumers have been found to respond more favorably to ads targeted to their ethnicity than to a pitch aimed at ethnic majority consumers.

Grier went to South Africa to look at consumer response to targeted ads in a context that challenges traditional research done in Western cultures, where groups in minority by percentage of population are typically also social, economic, and political minorities. With coauthor Rohit Deshpande of Harvard Business School, she writes, “South Africa represents a microcosm of major global trends.” She considered the local context by recruiting half of her subjects from one city with a black majority, and the other half from another city where there are more whites than blacks. Using in-home interviews of 176 English-speaking adult women, black and white, she measured spontaneous self-concept, ethnic identification, importance of race, and perceptions of relative social status by asking subjective questions. She then documented each subject’s response to the trustworthiness of advertising and her attitude toward the marketed brand using two ad campaigns that were identical except for the race of the people portrayed in the photographs.

Results of the experiment found that ethnicity was more salient for members of each city’s ethnic minority, as in prior research. However, results also showed that including a consideration of social status added to the explanatory value of distinctiveness. “It helped to understand more of what was going on than just thinking about numbers alone,” Grier explains.

It was not just the individual’s sense of her own status that affected her response to the ad images; perceptions of others’ status mattered as well. “Even higher-status people who see a larger gap between their group status and another group status had a stronger identity,” Grier says. “People can have a higher psychological consciousness of group identity, whether they are in a minority or a majority, based upon their perceptions of status and its dynamics in the marketplace.”

Status is not the only social dimension that can affect the way individuals respond to targeted marketing efforts. Grier also is examining how people respond to ads targeted to others depending upon how much interaction they have with members of ethnic groups other than their own. Her current project uses “contact” theory, which predicts that increasing real, equal-status contact between individuals will diminish the occurrence of prejudice. “Results thus far suggest that the most influence on consumer attitudes toward ads targeted to other groups comes from people who are their friends, not who they work with or who their neighbors are,” she notes.

Grier, who teaches the course Social and Nonprofit Marketing, recognizes that the impact of marketing goes beyond what products people buy to encompass social dynamics. To look at economics without looking at the complexities of human interrelationship will not tell the whole story. Grier reminds us, “Business is in society.”

—LISA EUNSON

Social Dimensions of Consumer Distinctiveness: The Influence of Social Status on Group Identity and Advertising Persuasion, Sonya A. Grier and Rohit Deshpande, Journal of Marketing Research (Vol. 38), May 2001; also GSB Research Paper #1554