Andy Li, Ted Matherly, Amna Kirmani and Julian De Freitas, “Alienation without representation: Negative consumer response to activist rebranding,” under review, Journal of Marketing.
Spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, consumers called for companies to modify brands with racially charged elements. The largest of such brands was PepsiCo’s Aunt Jemima, a breakfast cereal brand that was later rebranded to Pearl Milling Company in 2021. This research quantifies the effects of Aunt Jemima’s activist rebranding to Pearl Milling Company on actual sales and consumer purchasing and identifies a potential driver of these outcomes. Analyses using retail panel data reveal that brand-level sales declined, on average, by 24.4% after the rebrand announcement, with sales yet to recover to pre-rebranding level by the end of 2023. Analysis of household-level shopping trip data revealed that Black (vs. non-Black) households became, and remained, less likely to purchase Aunt Jemima/Pearl Milling Company products post-rebrand announcement. A follow-up online experiment showed that Black participants’ negative reactions toward activist rebranding were driven, in part, by decreased feelings of marketplace representation. The experiment also tested an intervention, where the rebrand replaced the original Black brand iconographies with a positive Black representation, that successfully mitigated Black participants’ negative responses. These results suggest that Aunt Jemima’s activist rebranding may have backfired, especially among the Black consumers that the rebranding was trying to serve.
Cover photo by Yelp 229wtmk” by Yelp Inc., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0