Marketing to African American Moms

Known to marketers as The Big 3:Asians, Latinos, and African American dollars mean big business. Marketers havestrategically targeted these growing demographics with great success rates fora number of years. As the conversation between consumers and brands movedonline, ethnocentric tactics took a back seat. Companies just dipping theirtoes into Facebook, blogs, and Twitter probably won’t be thinking too muchabout reaching their exact or even secondary targets. If campaigns for minoritygroups prove few and far between, what chance do African American women (aminority group of a minority group) stand in the online marketing space?

Well Pepsi knows exactly how toproperly leverage their online presence, and recently began their push towardsan important target for them, African American women. In 2010 Pepsi will engageAfrican American women through a number of vehicles, especially social mediasites and community building. PepsiWeInspire.com features six themes: Love,Laughter, Hope, Joy, Beauty, and Wisdom. Each tenant has an African Americancelebrity as the featured blogger; so far actresses Raven-Symone, QueenLatifah, Taraji P. Henson, and singer Keyshia Cole offer their personalthoughts and have been featured in the campaign’s print advertisements. The “WeInspire” campaign proves to be a natural offshoot of Pepsi’s overarching andeternally optimistic “Refresh Everything” initiative.           

GeneralMills, J&J, and P&G all serve as pioneers in the wooing of mommybloggers using social media, but Pepsi is the first company to specificallytarget African American mothers. A campaign centered around six positive themes,and asking a group of women to highlight encouraging stories from their lives makesfor a strong increase in brand equity for this target market. If Pepsi succeedswith this campaign I expect a lot of other brands to jump at the chance to planstrategic social media tactics directed at a very niche audience. In the end,the real winners will be theconsumers who become closer to each other, and ultimately the brands they love.