Jackie Ferguson: Welcome to Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox, the podcast where bold ideas meet inspiring stories brought to you by The Diversity Movement. I'm Jackie Ferguson, author, investor, business leader, and human rights advocate. Each episode, I sit down with trailblazers, game changers, and boundary pushers to uncover their journeys, insights, and strategies for success. Whether it's innovation, inclusion, or personal growth, we're here to ignite meaningful conversations that empower and inspire. Thank you for joining me today. Let's get started. Welcome to Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. Today, we're joined by Dr. Sonya Grier, Eminent Scholar Chair in marketing at American University's Kogod School of business. With a career spanning policy, academia, and industry, Dr. Grier is a leading expert in how race and marketing intersect. She has won the American Marketing Association's Thomas Kinnear Prize for Scholarly Excellence five times more than any other scholar and has been researching these issues for over 30 years. We'll discuss how race shapes consumer behavior, marketing strategies, and the broader marketplace. Dr. Grier, thank you for joining the show.
Sonya Grier: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Of course. I'm excited to be here.
Ferguson: I'm glad that you're here. Well, let's start with your background. Tell us a little about what inspired your interest in marketing and how did your journey lead you to focus on race in the marketplace?
Grier: Okay, so I really kind of fell into marketing. In high school, junior year of high school, I participated in a program called Leadership Education and Development. Which is a program to introduce high school students to careers in business. It still exists today. And so I spent a month on the campus of Columbia University studying issues of business and visiting companies. And I remember visiting, you know, meeting people like Ernesta Procope. Who was one of the first Black Women to start the largest Black-owned insurance firm. And I remember she talked a lot about making money but also using that money to invest in the community. And so it gave me a sense of the ways that business could be used. And in that program, I think marketing was really fascinating to me because it was both art and science. It was kind of left brain and right brain. And it really covered so many different aspects of business. And when I went to college, although I didn't study business, I studied political science and research methodology. I think research had really caught my eye and I was also an African American Studies major. And so I've always sort of been thinking both about research and about race in a lot of ways. When I went into my graduate program at Northwestern, I started to make a lot of observations about race in the marketplace, although I wasn't calling it that. So, for example, I noticed that we didn't have cases that talked about Black businesses or talked about my consumer behavior. So for example, we would always do the suave case. In class and talk about how everyone washed their hair every day. Well, I didn't wash my hair every day. And for me to bring up a lot of these disruptions in class, as often the only Black person there. In class, you know, that was something you would be doing all the time. So that really led me to initiate an independent study with a faculty member and another student to understand why we had no Black professors and why we weren't having Black cases and thinking about all of these issues. And so we did interviews with undergraduates and identified a marketing plan for Kellogg to increase their students of color in the doctoral program. And in the next year, we had one of the largest number of Black doctoral students, including me. So that's how I got into that program. So I would say these types of things really set the stage for me to understand how consumer research could be really powerful and marketing as well to help empower people and do things beyond making profit to really help make communities and institutions better.
Ferguson: Absolutely. Now, Dr. Grier, you've worked, as I said in the intro, across policy, academia, and in the private sector as well. How have these diverse experiences shaped your approach to understanding race and consumer behavior?
Grier: I would say that my exposure to these different experiences, or at the Federal Trade Commission, I worked with lawyers and economists. In the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program, I worked with public health scholars, practitioners, and medical professionals. And so this has really allowed me to see and understand the similarities of race across these different markets. So I think the exposure to the functioning of race and its role in these different markets across a Diversity of context has really sharpened my understanding of race and honed my ability to think about strategies from a more holistic perspective. So, for example, I could see the underlying similarities of challenges across target marketing when I worked at Kraft, my dissertation research, which was conducted in South Africa, my research on food marketing in Black Communities and health disparities that I did in the RWJ program, the marketing of entertainment violence to youth, which I studied at the FTC, and didn't focus on race, but we know that youth of color spend significantly more time with media. So if there were any effects, those effects were stronger. And then my ongoing research around issues like shopping discrimination and the lack of faculty diversity. So seeing the similarities in the functioning of race across these different markets really helped me to think about it from a much broader and nuanced perspective to think about more innovative and comprehensive solutions.
Ferguson: Got it. That makes sense. Now let's talk about your MBA independent study research, which you mentioned helped attract one of the largest cohorts of Black doctoral students. What did you uncover in that research and what lessons can institutions learn from that research today?
Grier: It was over 25 years ago. But I will say that one thing that I really remember to this day is that the undergraduates thought professors were nerds. Down to the stereotypes about, you know, patches on the corduroy blazers and all that type of thing. But I do think we learn some things that are really important. And one is that you need to focus on what the audience values and not what you value. You know, oftentimes institutions, and even in this case trying to recruit students, you're saying these are the benefits of this job. These are the things that will be of value to you. Well, the things that are of value to an institution aren't always what's of value to that person you're trying to recruit. So you really have to understand what is going to appeal to them. I think another thing that we learned is that awareness and opportunities are not always equally distributed. Not everyone knew and understood the benefits of getting a PhD, of being a faculty member, of teaching and research in the way that it was often presented. And so I think it's really important to understand your audience. And our research really highlighted how audience-centric marketing is essential, but it's often overlooked. You know, we often come, institutions, organizations, marketers come from what they have identified are the benefits, what they think is going to resonate with this target audience, and that's not always the case. So I would say that's something that's really stuck with me, and I sort of push that everywhere. I talk about practical marketing in my classes, et cetera.