Pepsi pioneered niche marketing with an all-black department in the 1940s.

Evidence

As the trailing brand, Pepsi was willing, early on, to try innovative promotional techniques, like catering to the disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an all-black marketing department, known as the “negro-markets” department. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Early segmentation of ‘all-American’ meaning white anticipates later chapters on how attention markets fragment by identity; connects to the reader’s thread on complacency about commercial culture.