The Influence of Consumer Socialization Variables on Attitude Toward Advertising: A Comparison of African-Americans and Caucasians.

Using the theory of consumer socialization, the authors explore factors that might shape attitudes toward advertising for African-American and Caucasian young adults. Though the African-American market is growing in importance to advertisers, little if any research has explored African-American

perceptions of advertising. The theory of consumer socialization provides a conceptual framework for investigating variables that might influence attitudes toward advertising. African-American and Caucasian young adults were surveyed on various consumer socialization variables. Parental communication, peer communication, mass media, gender, and race were found to be related significantly to attitudes toward advertising. African-Americans watched more TV and had more positive attitudes toward advertising than their Caucasian counterparts.

"Business people who don't learn the culture of the African-American market won't prosper in the nineties and into the year 2000" (Rossman 1994).

African-Americans are an extremely important yet relatively neglected target for advertisers and advertising researchers. They spend more than $270 billion a year on consumer goods, and advertisers are spending approximately $865 million a year to reach them (Gray 1997). The African-American middle class, which accounts for more than 40% of African-Americans and represents a major portion of their spending, has also been neglected by the advertising community (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1998). Practitioners have been slow in researching the African-American market primarily because of declining research budgets (Hume 1991). Some academic research on that target has been conducted and reported since the 1970s. Overall, the African-American market represents tremendous potential, yet little research has been conducted in terms of African-American attitudes toward advertising and how socialization may influence those attitudes.

Consumer socialization provides an excellent vantage point from which to gain a better understanding of African-American consumers and their attitudes toward advertising. According to Ward (1974, p. 2), "consumer socialization is the process by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace." Moreover, previous research has related broad patterns of parent-child interactions to several specific parental practices, including the restriction and monitoring of children's consumption and media use and the development of independent consumption (Carlson and Grossbart 1988; Carlson, Grossbart, and Stuenkel 1992).