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Book: Marketers Oblivious To Affluent African Americans

  • Adweek, Tuesday, February 2, 2010 10:43 AM
Black Is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans, a book by Leonard Burnett Jr. and Andrea Hoffman scheduled for publication in March, makes the case that most marketers are missing out on a lucrative market of 340,000-plus African-American households with more than $150,000 in annual income each and a collective $87 billion in disposable income, Mark Dolliver reports.

Even those brands that have identified the market have not done a good job of appealing to it, Burnett and Hoffman say. What was Gucci thinking, for example, in featuring the 18-year-old Rihanna in a campaign? A more mature spokeswoman would have been more appropriate. Indeed, the vast majority of the niche is not part of hip-hop culture, the book explains.

The book notes that AAA audience is "a tightly knit one" and that word travels faster among it than within the general market. "That's one of the things that make this audience so special," Hoffman tells Dolliver. "Grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing are highly relevant. Recommendations from peers who had good experiences are worth gold." Marketers who aren't pursuing AAAs "are leaving money on the table," she concludes.

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