Essay 4923

From The New York Times…

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Consumed | Edward F. Boyd b. 1914
Sales Leader

By ROB WALKER

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a certain unease could be detected about the American drift toward a culture of selling, marketing and consumerism. Even Fortune magazine opined in 1947 that “the American citizen lives in a state of siege from dawn till bedtime,” seeming to echo the sentiments raised in the best-selling novel “The Hucksters” and the celebrated play “Death of a Salesman.” One sales executive at the time, a man named Edward Boyd, later recalled leaving a performance of Arthur Miller’s famous play in tears. “I related to it,” he said. Even so, Boyd stuck with his job, possibly because his own role in the machinery of American selling was a bit more complex: He was a black man building an African-American sales force within the Pepsi-Cola Company when corporate America was anything but integrated.

Boyd was hired by Pepsi, which was based in New York, in 1947, when he was 33; he grew up in California and graduated from U.C.L.A. His story is a key element of the recent book “The Real Pepsi Challenge,” from which the above anecdote is taken and in which Stephanie Capparell argues that Boyd and those he hired helped break the color barrier in big business.

In the post-World War II economy, black Americans were still marginalized in two ways: in their access to better professional jobs and also as consumers. The latter point was not trivial, if you consider that lunch-counter sit-ins, lawsuits against hotels and other key tactics in the civil rights struggle were fundamentally about marketplace access. According to Capparell, “Unlike the mainstream media, the African-American press didn’t join the chorus of criticism of business.” Instead, black newspaper publishers informed the marketing trade about the untapped potential of black consumers. No doubt they wanted advertising dollars from the big companies that had previously ignored them, but the implicit message was that in a market-driven economy, consumer equality matters. Ebony went so far as to call the African-American embrace of the Cadillac, and G.M.’s supposed discomfort about that embrace, part of the “war for racial equality.” And indeed, part of what Boyd had to contend with was a perception that brands adopted by blacks might be rejected by whites.

Other companies were using black entertainers and athletes in ads, but Boyd wanted to move in a different direction, with a series of ads called “Leaders in Their Fields,” highlighting black professionals, including Ralph Bunche, the diplomat and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. While these were clearly Pepsi ads, schools and universities ordered up copies. For store promotions, Capparell writes, “he wanted to show a black family in the same kind of idealized setting as those used in mainstream ads.” And while the “Leaders” campaign was extended twice, increasingly the African-Americans in Pepsi’s ads tended to be happy, young, bourgeois consumers, and inspirational copy gave way to more familiar (and banal) sales pitches: “So Much More Fun! So Much More Zest!”

His job was not easy: Boyd was thrown out of hotels and had to confront his white boss about using an offensive racial epithet. But from today’s perspective, what seems remarkable isn’t the pervasiveness of ignorance and racism but the degree to which these things trumped even the profit motive. Pepsi seemed enlightened by the mere act of openly courting black consumers. Its dominant rival, the Coca-Cola Company, did not advertise in the black press at all until 1951 — and its ads did not depict black faces until the mid-1950s.

Boyd’s career at Pepsi ended in 1951. In the years after a management change at the company, he and much of the team he assembled left. After stints at an ad agency, the humanitarian organization CARE and in consulting, he retired in 1981 and started raising alpacas upstate. Meanwhile, the commercial-culture “state of siege” that Fortune bemoaned 60 years ago never let up, though today the world depicted in mainstream advertising has become a harmonious place, where buddies of all races happily pursue consumer dreams together. In his comments to Capparell, Boyd seemed proud of his contribution. Perhaps the world depicted in advertising, then and now, was a fantasy, but part of Boyd’s thinking seems to be that it’s a fantasy that black consumers wanted to be part of — and would respond to.