This research investigates whether business professionals, on average, exhibit racial bias in strategic marketing decisions involving Black consumers. Across nine studies and four replications with current and aspiring business professionals from the United States, France, and Brazil, the authors find evidence that commonly held lay theories linking Blackness with economic hardship are associated with racialized interpretations of income. Specifically, professionals tend to perceive Black consumers as lower income than equally earning White consumers. These perceptions, in turn, are associated with consumption-specific stereotypes that characterize Black consumers as more price sensitive and less attuned to quality, innovation, and customization. As a result, professionals are less likely to prioritize predominantly Black consumer markets in core marketing decisions, such as market entry and product portfolio selection, even in contexts where these markets offer greater objective economic potential (i.e., higher individual and aggregate income). Importantly, the findings show that both diversity training and deliberation-based interventions reduce the likelihood of such biases. The authors discuss implications for marketing practice and marketplace equity.

Consumers often wonder about the product's maximum output: the highest rotation speed of a blender or the best printing quality of a printer. We examine how the number of levels (e.g., a blender with 3 vs. 7 speeds) influences judgments of maximum product output. Objectively speaking, the number of levels is no more than a set of breakpoints in an already predetermined continuum from the product's minimum to maximum output. Nevertheless, because of the ubiquitous association between number of breakpoints and quantity in daily life, consumers do not simply view more levels as a signal of greater precision (i.e., giving consumers more control over the possible outputs). They also incorrectly believe that the product has greater power (i.e., a higher maximum output), even when such an inference is in conflict with diagnostic attribute information (e.g., watts). A series of five studies documents the phenomenon, its asymmetric nature, and its boundary conditions. Reliance on the inaccurate “more levels, more power” lay theory weakens when participants consider a reduction rather than an increase in number of levels, and it disappears when the consumer is presented with an explicit relationship between each level and its corresponding output value (e.g., level 4:400 W).