Perspectives: race and advertising: conceptualizing a way forward through aesthetics

Abstract

As brands and advertisers worldwide are claiming to be reviewing the ways they represent race, this conceptual piece provides a call to action for international advertising researchers to also reassess how they engage and analyze race. Our goal is threefold: (1) provide an abbreviated assessment of the current body of advertising literature involving race and advertising and summarize its insights and lacunae; (2) expand the conceptualization of race currently held in advertising research by proffering a racial aesthetics framework that examines what race is and how it is reified through advertising (i.e. white supremacy; racial respectability; racial pride; race as biology; colourblind/post-racial; hyper-racial) and (3) illustrate how our conceptualization can support a more robust and informative body of research. Our intention in these three endeavours is not to provide an exhaustive accounting, rather we purposely paint with broad strokes to invite fellow researchers to deepen, broaden, and reimagine future research on race and advertising.

Keywords:

• Race in the Marketplace
• Racial Aesthetics
• Critical Advertising

Acknowledgment

The authors thank IJA Associate Editor Lars Bergkvist and the anonymous reviewers for their support and constructive comments throughout the preparation of this article. The authors also express gratitude to our colleagues and friends of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network for their commitment to the advancement of research on race and markets.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

This is a conceptual article. No data were collected.

Notes

1 Additional literature examines diverse phenomena related to race such as the types and frequency of products advertised to specific racially categorized groups (e.g., Petty et al. 2002).

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for this work.