Black models
Immigrants have become a significant consumer market in Europe and the United States. Ethno-marketing and diversity management reflect the growing importance of immigrants as consumers, employees and entrepreneurs, and this prompts changes in advertising and popular culture throughout the world.
Images of black beauty, black power, black people in positions of authority, and images that deliberately seek to unsettle stereotypical views are important, but probably most important are images in which black people simply appear as ordinary.
What is unusual in this ad for sweaters (from a flyer of the Hema department store in the Netherlands, Autumn 2000) is that older men figure as models. That one of them is black is practically irrelevant. Indeed that older people appear in this ad is more striking than the fact that one happens to be black.
In the end this is the most important set breaker. Not images of black people as supermodels like Naomi Campbell, as movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Halle Berry or Denzel Washington, but above all, as ordinary people. Not sport stars, not jazz musicians, not studs, not servants, not ghetto types, but ordinary people who don't have to be overdressed to make sure that they will not be mistaken for the 'wrong blacks'.
