The Impact of Disparate Levels of Marketplace Inclusion on Consumer–Brand Relationships

Abstract

While most racial discrimination has manifested historically as explicit exclusion, its contemporary iteration may be an implicit failure to include. Both forms of discrimination affect the way racial minorities interact with the marketplace. After providing a conceptual grounding in relevant literature, the authors propose a novel examination of how American minority groups perceive brands in ways that are similar to one another but different from majority American consumers. Using the research paradigm advanced by Fiske and her colleagues on perception and stereotyping, the authors find that there are differences in brand perceptions between racial groups, suggesting that disparate levels of marketplace access have impactful, systematic consequences for minority consumers.