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. With In Consumed: Sales Leader
Edward Boyd: He knew advertising was all about fantasy — but it was a fantasy that black consumers might want to be part of.
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….
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site.
Note: This column is a little unusual in being a person, but that’s because it’s part of the Magazine’s annual “The Lives They Lived” issue. Boyd died earlier this year. As the column notes, his story is a significant part of Stephanie Capparell’s recent book, The Real Pepsi Challenge.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
I am recalling a Negro earlier than Boyd. My parents knew him. He worked for a company that produced a popular, but #2 selling brand of baking powder , as I recall. My parents spoke of him–and I have a vague memory of his stopping with us overnight-in the days when we were not allowed to stay in hotels. This man had convinced the company that Negroes were “brand loyal.” He was sent on an advertising tour to present the product to Negroes.
I am sure it was before Boyd, just prior to the beginning of WW11. This man would be about my parents’ ages. They were born in1899 and 1906.
That’s interesting, do you know what company it was?
In the book about Boyd and Pepsi, the author mentions some precedents but only “vice” categories such as alcohol. She also makes the case that what Pepsi did was unusual in that they built this whole department and gave its members, all African-American, unusual latitude and power, for the time at least…