A group of scholars have set out to change how marketing researchers understand how race, power and privilege affect marketplace policies and practices.
Through the creation of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network, Drs. Sonya Grier, Kevin Thomas and Guillaume Johnson’s collaborative efforts seek to provide a transdisciplinary and international research space for scholars and scholar-activists studying the marketplace to link their work to a framework promoting “inclusive, fair and just marketplaces.”
“We hope that we can contribute to interventions that help to make the marketplace more equitable for everyone so that everyone has the same consumption opportunities,” said Grier, professor of marketing in the Kogod School of Business at American University. “There’s a lot to be learned from integrating perspectives from across disciplines and across groups.”
The RIM network builds on the cross-disciplinary work of researchers in public health, economics, politics, sociology, psychology, communications and other fields. This is because the founding researchers noted the work already being done in these fields that conceptualized how race impacts areas such as advertising, health disparities and access to education and housing, for example.
“Ads are just the tip of the iceberg,” Grier said, “but marketing is also about access to products and goods. It’s about the pricing of products and goods and how they’re distributed, and what products and goods are available to different groups.”
Grier added that this critical analysis of race in the RIM network will be valuable because when race gets obscured in marketing research – often with coded words such as “identity,” “diversity” and “multiculturalism” – “the research may not be as relevant or as applicable to the particular problems or challenges that need to be addressed” for specific racial groups.
Failure to critically understand the dynamics of race in marketing may emerge in stereotypes about certain consumers such as in recent marketing controversies at H&M and Dove, or even result in violence such as in the 2014 police shooting death of John Crawford III – who was holding a toy BB gun air rifle – in a Walmart store in Ohio.
