Boyd, Edward Francis

▪ 2008

      American business executive

born June 27, 1914, Riverside, Calif.

died April 30, 2007 , Los Angeles, Calif.

was the trailblazing creator of advertisements for Pepsi-Cola that featured middle-class African American consumers in fun-loving scenarios rather than the standard ads that caricatured blacks. In the process, Boyd helped to introduce what later became known as niche marketing: advertising campaigns aimed at a specific group. Boyd introduced the first point-of-purchase displays specifically targeted to minorities, and one of his most famous displays pictured a small boy shopping for Pepsi with his mother (the boy was Ron Brown, who later became U.S. secretary of commerce). After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, Boyd held a variety of jobs before being hired by Pepsi in 1947 as an assistant sales manager. Boyd, one of the first African Americans to enter corporate America, assembled an all-black, college-educated sales force that crisscrossed the country spreading company goodwill despite the Jim Crow laws of the era that frequently forced them to sit in the back of buses and search for hotels and restaurants where they would be welcome. Boyd and his team helped boost sales in the African American market into the double digits, and their marketing blitz resulted in Pepsi's overtaking Coke in the cola wars for the first time. After leaving Pepsi in 1951, Boyd worked for several other companies before establishing his own market-research consultancy, Resources Management Ltd. He retired in 1981.

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