genealogy Article Who Is Marketised in Colour-Blind Sweden? Racial and Ethnic Representation in Swedish Commercials 2008–2017 Sayaka Osanami Törngren 1,* and Sofia Ulver 2 1 Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, Malmö University, 205 06 Malmö, Sweden 2 Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, 220 07 Lund, Sweden; sofi
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[email protected] Received: 20 August 2020; Accepted: 29 September 2020; Published: 10 October 2020 Abstract: From a social equality representation perspective, advertising should ideally mirror the multicultural composition at the national market, because mass-mediated identity representations may act as cultural resources for those with marginalised identities. To investigate the observance to such an ideal in a context where the ethnic and racial composition of the population saw a rapid change, this article examines 676 Swedish TV commercials in over the period 2008–2017, and analyses the representation of non-White persons of colour (POC). Through this quantitative and qualitative examination, we find that POC are indeed visible in the commercials, but predominantly in the background or playing minor roles. With the, at times, unproportionally high representation of racial and ethnic diversity in Swedish advertising, we find significant tokenism, or in other words, the structurally ineffectual approach common in market-based multiculturalism. Keywords: advertising; persons of colour; representation; Sweden; tokenism 1. Introduction How multicultural is a country through the eyes of the Market? Although marketing is usually criticised for reproducing dominant power structures in society, mass-mediated identity representations at the marketplace may in fact also act as cultural resources for citizens with marginalised identities (Weinberger and Crockett 2018).