Ads featuring interracial couples produce mixed results for brands

A new paper co-written by a Gies College of Business scholar who studies how authenticity and aesthetics intersect with branding found that interracial couples featured in advertisements enhanced brand outcomes relative to white couples, but also decreased brand outcomes relative to Black, Hispanic and Asian couples.

The findings point to such effects being driven by the perception of the couple’s “warmth,” which is either strengthened or weakened by the presence of other dominant or nondominant racial group members, said Rosanna K. Smith, a professor of business administration at Gies College of Business at Illinois and a co-author of the research.

“We found that the perceived warmth of the couple in the ad drove brand outcomes,” said Smith, who is also a John. M. Jones Faculty Fellow and the co-coordinator of the Gies Business Research Lab. “Interracial couples increased brand evaluations and the desire to purchase from the brand relative to white couples, but interracial couples decreased brand outcomes relative to minority couples.”

The paper was co-written by Nicole Davis of the University of Kentucky and Julio Sevilla of the University of Georgia and published in Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers started from the premise that the representation of interracial couples in marketing appeals likely influences brand perceptions.

“We noticed that interracial couples were frequently appearing in U.S. advertising — to the point that they were possibly being overrepresented in advertising relative to their prevalence in the actual U.S. population,” she said. “So the question we had was, ‘What effect does having an interracial couple versus a monoracial couple in an ad actually have on consumer behavior?’”

In the U.S., interracial marriage has only been legal since 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. Since then, interracial marriages have become more common, increasing from 3% in 1967 to 19% in 2019, according to the paper.

Although the rise in the representation of interracial couples in marketing campaigns has boomed, it’s unclear if the inclusion of interracial couples would be an effective marketing strategy, the scholars said.

“Even though interracial couples have long faced societal backlash and discrimination, the prevalence of interracial couples in advertising suggests that firms assume this is an effective strategy,’” Smith said. “But there’s no clear evidence that brands benefit from this inclusion.”

Across six laboratory-controlled studies with almost 5,000 participants and a field experiment on Facebook, the researchers tested how ads featuring an interracial couple composed of one white individual and one minority individual — Black, Hispanic or Asian — fared compared to white couples and same-race minority couples in advertisements.

The scholars found that consumers viewed interracial couples in ads as warmer — that is, more approachable and friendly — than white couples. But consumers also found interracial couples to be less warm than minority couples, according to the paper.

“Essentially, we found that interracial couples produce mixed attitudes,” Smith said. “Their effect on consumer evaluations falls somewhere in between monoracial minority couples and monoracial couples from the dominant racial group — in the U.S., that’s white couples. So interracial couples are not the optimal strategy for brands — nor are they the least-optimal strategy, either. They appear to be in the middle.

“We reason that this is because nondominant groups, like racial minorities, tend to be seen as warmer than dominant groups, due to their lower status on the social hierarchy. Interracial couples mix both dominant and nondominant group members resulting in warmth that falls between minority and white couples.”

Notably, the researchers also found that the effects depended on differences among individual consumers. Specifically, effects depended on consumers’ level of “social dominance orientation” — that is, the desire to maintain the status quo of the current social hierarchy — and by the introduction of other “nondominant” attributes, such as a gay couple, into the mix.

“We found that consumers who were high on social dominance orientation were less likely to prefer interracial or minority couple ads over white couple ads,” Smith said. “We also found that the perceived warmth of a white couple can increase when the couple possesses other minority characteristics, such as a minority sexual orientation. One study revealed that a gay white couple increased warmth and brand outcomes similarly to a heterosexual, same-race minority couple, outperforming heterosexual interracial couples and heterosexual white couples.”

The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of how consumers respond to diversity, Smith said.

“Our key takeaway for marketers is that interracial couples evoke a complex response,” she said. “Consumers do not have a blanket response to diverse representation — they differentiate between interracial and same-race minority couples. Consumers are sophisticated and they’re paying attention to the specific composition of diversity.”