1. Introduction
How multicultural is a country through the eyes of the Market? Although marketing is usually criticised for reproducing dominant power structures in society, mass-mediated identity representations at the marketplace may in fact also act as cultural resources for citizens with marginalised identities (
Weinberger and Crockett 2018). Therefore, many social science researchers argue that advertising should ideally mirror the socio-cultural composition of a nation and, given accelerated transnationalism, such composition should intersect with categories of race and ethnicity (
Tukachinsky et al. 2015;
Peruta and Powers 2017). As the marketing field has become increasingly globalised through the presence of the Internet, and consumers around the world are inevitably exposed to different cultures and racial and ethnic groups, multicultural marketing has gained popularity (
Sobol et al. 2018;
Cui 1997). Even so, at the same time as liberal norms of diversity are hailed, Western mass media in general tend to continuously present images that conform to dominant cultural norms and promote particular categories of people, voices, values and bodies (
Edström 2018;
Weinberger and Crockett 2018). In this article, we aim to empirically examine this cultural contradiction by investigating a specific national context where the liberal strategy of multiculturalism is practiced at a public policy level, but where the multicultural representations at the marketplace themselves, albeit heavily debated among consumers (
Pripp and Öhlander 2008;
Hübinette and Räterlinck 2014;
Lundberg 2011;
Sahlin 2011;
Ulver and Laurell 2020), have been underrepresented as the object of academic research; Sweden.
In the US and other countries with a long history of racial diversity (such as South Africa), a lot of attention has been paid to the media’s role, including marketing communications, in issues of race and ethnicity (
Licsandru and Cui 2019). Studies in the US context consistently reveal the under- and mis-representation of racial and ethnic diversity across different media channels (
Mastro and Stamps 2018).
Davis (
2018) points out that an abundance of research on racial representation and multicultural marketing comes from the US and, to a lesser extent, from Europe (
Davis 2018). Indeed, in Sweden, as a European example of increasing racial and ethnic diversity, academic researchers have only recently begun to qualitatively problematise the advertising industry’s approach to racial and ethnic representation and its impact on political consumer activism (
Ulver and Laurell 2020). Therefore, we still know very little about how this representation in such a context actually looks, how it has changed over time, and how it relates to the theorised cultural contradiction of an at once celebrated
and unexecuted equality ethos of liberal multiculturalism (
Kymlicka 2013). This article addresses this multifaceted gap descriptively and empirically by looking at how persons of colour (POC) are represented, over time, in high-profile commercials on Swedish television. With this aim, we analysed 676 TV commercials developed for the Swedish market that were aired in the period 2008–2017 and examine here the patterns of representation of POC in these commercials over the decade. We chose to analyse TV commercials that sufficiently represent advert exposure to consumers at a national, general level (
Barnet 2009) instead of a targeted and digital advertisement such as those in newspapers and on billboards or seen by a geographically or demographically limited number of people. The results show that POCs on one hand are proportionally represented in quantity in Swedish TV commercials, but that the roles they play are minor and tokenised. In the following sections, we will first account for the empirical context of Sweden as an ideal case for research on multicultural marketing, then we will do a brief literature review of previous research on racial and ethnic representation in marketing, proceed to our quantitative and qualitative analyses, and end by discussing our conclusions.
The Swedish Context
Sweden has historically been a country of emigration and became a country of immigration only after World II. It has experienced rapid changes in the racial and ethnic landscape of the population in the past 50 years, although it is still predominantly a White European country. However, the growth of its non-European population, especially of Middle Easterners, since the 1980s is evident (
Migrationsverket 2018). Today, of Sweden’s approximately 10 million residents, 19 per cent are first-generation immigrants born outside Sweden and 9 per cent are non-Swedish citizens. Among the 19 per cent who are first-generation immigrants, around 35 per cent are of Asian and Middle Eastern origin—the largest non-White/European group in Sweden. People of African or Latin American origin represent about 10 and 6 per cent, respectively, of the foreign-born population (
Statistics Sweden 2018).
Sweden does not register information about individuals’ ethnicity and race. Administrative data available to work out the racial and ethnic diversity of the country can be acquired only from a person’s country of birth and origin—defined as a ‘foreign background’. The population of Sweden with a foreign background (the foreign-born and the native-born with two foreign-born parents) increased from 18 per cent in 2008 to 25 per cent by 2017. The native-born population with two native-born parents—the so-called ‘ethnic Swedes’—decreased from 75 per cent in 2008 to 68 in 2017.
Based on individuals’ country of origin and ancestry, the largest ethnic minority identified in Sweden is Finns, who make up approximately 5 per cent of the Swedish population. Other major countries of origin include Syria, Iraq and Iran, which together comprise around 5 per cent of the population.
Table 1 shows the foreign-born population in Sweden by country of origin, from which we can infer the racial composition of the country. Persons of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) background—and especially Middle Eastern background (incorporated within the category ‘Asian’)—make up the largest foreign-born racial minority in Sweden today (7.3 per cent). Considering the number of newly arriving immigrants in Sweden every year, the MENA group is expected to remain the largest minority in the coming years. From these statistics, we can assume that around 10 per cent of the population in Sweden are of foreign-born POC background.
Despite the scientific prominence of the idea of a biological race that existed in Sweden in the early 1900s (read more in, e.g.,
Hagerman 2007;
Osanami Törngren 2011), Sweden today is often said to be a racially
colour-blind society (
Hübinette and Lundström 2014). Race as a concept, category and word is completely abolished at governmental and official levels (
Osanami Törngren 2019;
Hübinette et al. 2012;
Hübinette and Lundström 2014;
Hübinette 2017). From that perspective, Sweden represents a post-racial society in which race as a social category is regarded as irrelevant when discussing discrimination, social injustice and inequality because human rights, democracy, gender equality and antiracism are considered already ensured through existing anti-discrimination legislation (
Hübinette and Lundström 2014). However, research shows that race does, indeed, matter in different aspects of Swedish society (
Osanami Törngren 2020).
These swift turns in history, in combination with current, polarised political tensions about immigration from the Middle East and North Africa—which increased radically in 2015 with the extended Syrian refugee crisis—makes Sweden an aptly relevant case in which to explore changing ethnic/racial diversity relations and roles in market-based representations.
3. Data and Method
Taking into account that much advertising today is digital and carefully targeted, we needed to identify commercials that should sufficiently represent ad exposure to consumers at a national, general level and let alone seen by a majority (
Barnet 2009). Therefore, we focused on analysing TV commercials for this study. The data collection was conducted by four research assistants instructed and trained by a post doc researcher and the second author. The data consist of 676 TV commercials by the 11 largest advert buyer brands during the period 2008–2017 identified through a selection process and checking specifically for the use of TV commercials from Sifo’s Reklammätningar list (
Frick 2019). Advertising agencies were contacted and asked if they wanted to participate in the study by sending YouTube links or actual film files of all the commercials they had created and launched for each brand.
We are aware of the bias that might exist in the selection of 676 commercials. As seen in
Table 2, the number of commercials analysed for each brand and product category varies significantly, with an oversampling of ICA (grocery retailer) commercials. ICA is by far the largest ad buyer, having a series of commercials in a sitcom style, sending a new commercial episode once a week, which amounts to a total of 520 films during the period. Even though there is an imbalance in the number of commercials per brand, we do not observe any statistically significant correlation between them (comparing ICA and other brands) and the representation of non-Whites (r = 0.138).
The content of the selected 676 commercials was coded according to a checklist. To find the frequency of POC representation in the commercial, we applied
Taylor and Stern’s (
1997) analytical frame of “White”/“Non-White” actors (The viewers were given the following instructions in distinguishing White/non-White actors: ‘Identify the persons with non-White skin colour. This can be based on their ethnicity or origin such as Asian, African, African American, Sami, Arabic, MENA, native American. You should not give the specific racial background of the person but simply count the numbers. If you are unsure of the categories, leave the number marked in red so that the involved researcher can double check’). It is important to note that the coding, since the researchers did not have access to the self-identified racial and ethnic identification of the actors, or the manuscript of the content of the commercials, is all based on the external assignment of observed race and ethnicity (
Roth 2016). The data collection focused on the POC representation in commercials and therefore gender was not coded.
The first type of coding was the counting of numbers, for example, the number of White/non-White people in the commercials and how many types of role they played. The second type of coding was more subjective—the student assistants were asked to take a binary stance of Yes or No to questions such as whether there were interactions between White and non-White people or whether the viewer perceived the commercial to be taking place in a multicultural setting (Instruction for this subjective coding said: ‘White and non-White actors interact with each other through, for example, talking, working together or hanging out’, as well as ‘Do you perceive this commercial to show a multicultural context?’). Such a coding, which involves a subjective assessment of commercials, is a valuable indication of how the latter are perceived by the viewers. Each commercial was coded by two different researchers, blind to each other’s coding. The coding was then examined for disagreements by a third coder (the authors of this article). Where disagreements were found, the third coder watched the commercial to reach a conclusion.
The study utilises a mixed-method approach which allows for an analysis of the quantity and quality of POC representation. First, we conducted a quantitative analysis examining the mere frequency of representation of non-White (relative to White) actors in Swedish advertising and the roles that POC plays (
Taylor and Stern 1997). Using SPSS, descriptive statistics and some correlations (through Pearson’s correlation) between different aspects of the commercials are generated.
Simultaneously, we conducted a more qualitative analysis examining the roles and qualities of the non-White actors in line with the quantitative coding scheme. Commercials with the largest number of POC represented, playing leading and speaking roles, are analysed qualitatively. As the quantitative coding only gave information on whether the actors appearing in the commercials were White or non-White, we focused on the specific racial and ethnic representation of POC in commercials, the list of which can be found in
Appendix A.
5. Concluding Remarks
This article studies racial and ethnic representation in advertisements, in a context that has become highly diverse and multicultural only within half a decade, by empirically examining how POCs are represented over time. We examined 676 TV commercials aired in Sweden between 2008 and 2017 and quantitatively explored
whether POC are represented and what kind of roles they play. Whereas the quantitative analysis focused on the numbers of various combinations of POC representations, the qualitative analysis focused on selected TV commercials and looked more carefully into the quality of the representation,
how POCs are represented in the commercials. In the US, research shows that, although people of colour are seen regularly in TV advertisements, they usually appear as secondary characters (
Jacobs Henderson and Baldasty 2003). The quantitative analysis of the 676 Swedish TV commercials for this study shows the same tendency—that, while non-White actors are visible in TV commercials and despite an increase in interaction between White and non-White actors over the years, and also an increase in the relative quantity of POC portrayed, POC are often over-represented playing background roles and are portrayed in isolation. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show the over-utilisation of POC as background actors and thus as
tokens in order to portray Sweden as multicultural. Moreover, there is no statistically significant increase in the representation of POC in Swedish commercials over the years analysed, while the relative number peaks in 2016. The increased representation of POC in 2016 can be understood as the effect of Swedish multicultural ‘catch all’ marketing, responding to the increase in refugee immigration in 2015–2016.
As studies in the US show, Black actors were well represented in the commercials representing POC; however, Asians were invisible. What was striking was the prominence of ethnically ambiguous actors. Middle Easterners can fall into this category, since the group is not as racially distinct as Asians or Blacks. The over-representation of ethnically ambiguous actors can be interpreted as the result of Sweden’s neoliberalised, liberal, multicultural marketing policy (see
Kymlicka 2013), which uses a ‘serve all’ and ‘catch all’ technique in advertising, and where ethnic subjects typically are fetishised and commoditised (
Ahmed 2011;
Veresiu and Giesler 2018). In line with this perspective, together with the practice of casting well-known figures with immigrant backgrounds, ethnically ambiguous actors may serve as mere tokens to represent a multicultural and racially diverse Sweden.
This article answers the calls for more critical examinations of ethnic and racial representation in marketing in general (
Weinberger and Crockett 2018) and in racially dynamic European contexts such as Sweden in particular (
Ulver et al. 2019). Now that we have a better overview of the representation patterns in Swedish commercials, there are several points that need to be addressed in further studies. One of the most important questions is the intersection of gender and race. The focus of this analysis was solely on POC and single categorical representation but previous studies and some of the results from this study point to the importance of examining multiple, categorical, intersectional representation, especially of gender and age.
Two important aspects requiring further investigation are the
consequences of specific racial and ethnic representations and the quality of the representation. For example, the representation of Black–White marriage in several of the commercials qualitatively analysed is an interesting point of discussion. A study in the US shows that the portrayal of Black–White interracial couples in advertising elicits negative attitudes towards the brand (
Bhat et al. 2018), while, in another study, media portrayal was associated with more-positive attitudes towards Black–White interracial marriages, indicating advertising as a way to improve attitudes (
Lienemann and Stopp 2013). Considering that persons of African background are not preferred as a marriage partner in Sweden (
Osanami Törngren 2011;
Osanami Torngren 2018), the frequent portrayal of Black–White couples in advertising and its effect should be followed up in a future study.
From the results we present in this article, we would strongly suggest a wider focus on how companies live up to their diversity representation beyond their marketing. A sheer representation in the form of tokenism does not lead to a just and equitable representation. Moreover, it becomes problematic because the inclusion represented in the commercials does not reflect how the organisation (marketing companies and the brand) actually looks (
Peñaloza 2018). How is the ethnic and racial diversity represented inside the companies? Moreover, who are on the frontline (e.g., executive management) and who are in the background (e.g., factory floors) in the actual organisations? Perhaps, the background roles are indeed representative of what large, multinational companies are like today (e.g., Volvo, Ikea, Amazon etc.). The philosophical (and political) question, then, is instead how inclusion actually happens and what role marketing and advertising have in this. On tokenism,
Gent (
2017) writes that ‘tokens are powerful [as reifications of dominant norms] not because they are common, but because they are exceptional’, and that ‘it is difference that allows for exploitation’ (2017, p. 220). Thus, all advertising, in its inherent aim to show exceptionalism and to commodify alluring difference, is most probably doomed to produce tokenism, no matter how it is done. Moreover, if we are to believe the insights from this research, a culture of colour-blindness does not constitute a vaccine against tokenism. The point is then not
whether advertising produces tokenism but, rather, how
problematic it is.