Understanding East Asian consumers’ responses to inclusive beauty products in advertising

Abstract

Increasing global demand for inclusivity has resulted in a critical need to understand how consumers respond to inclusive marketing. Centering on skin color, which is an interminable inclusivity issue, this research examines how consumers in East Asian markets (e.g., China and South Korea) evaluate and respond to inclusive (vs. non-inclusive) beauty products in advertisements across three empirical studies. The different ethnic environments of consumers in Studies 1 A and 1B and consumers’ individual differences in other-group orientation in Study 2 moderate the way inclusive products are evaluated and responded to. Additionally, a serial mediation analysis reveals that the inclusivity of products increases perceptions of brand inclusiveness and altruistic motives, thereby contributing to favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions. This research sheds light on the nuanced process of how consumers evaluate and respond to inclusive beauty products in advertisements based on individual and environmental differences.

Keywords:

• inclusivity
• inclusiveness
• diversity
• multi-cultural marketing
• multi-ethnic marketing
• Asian consumers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that this white skin tone pursued in East Asia does not simply reflect impact of colonization in the form of idealizing Western facial appearances (e.g., white skin tone as Caucasian) but intricately reflects a long-held favoritism toward a fairer skin tone within one’s own ethnic group, reflecting higher status and privilege, which is similarly observed throughout most Asian countries (Henley and Porath, 2021; Yip, Ainsworth and Hugh, 2019). However, we do not provide further discussion of the historical background or politics underlying the unique manifestations of fair skin color ideal in Asia in this research but rather the present research intends to examine consumers’ reactions to inclusive products that incorporate non-dominant group’s needs in the advertising. For critical perspectives on conceptualization and historical development and politics of skin tone ideals in Asia, see Henley and Porath (2021) and Yip, Ainsworth, and Hugh (2019).

2 Due to the very high proportion of the majority ethnic group, collection of population statistics on an ethnicity-basis population is not conventional in Korean’s census. Other proxy measures used to estimate the proportions of non-Korean ethnicities can be considered, such as country-of-origin for immigration cases.

3 A log transformation was conducted to adjust for skewness, after a currency adjustment at 0.00092*1,000 KRW for 1 USD. Two missing values from the US data were deleted to conduct the log transformation.

4 A log transformation was conducted to adjust for skewness, after a currency adjustment at 0.016*1 CNY for 1 USD.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [2020S1A5A2A03].