Hidden in plain sight. The case of colonial advertising.

According with historians and cultural studies' scholars, the colonial food's advertising is a good example of how the observation of “innocent” routines can raise awareness of the colonial aspects hidden in contemporary daily life (Eckhardt et al., 2022). In spite of their important insight, however, these scholars scarcely explored how consumers can actually react to it. To contribute to this understudied topic, we chose the case study of a long-selling Italian chocolate candy, bearing the image of an ‘African Moor’ (Masiola & Tomei, 2013) only recently avoided by a new marketing strategy. Before discussing participants' reactions, we point out that war crimes committed during the Fascist invasion of Africa (1935-1936) are still silenced in the societal discourse about the national past. In a 2X2 study, participants saw an image where the candy's wrapping showed Vs. not showed the African Moor (IV1 ), and a brief message on the product's colonial history was added Vs. not added to the item’s image (IV2). 199 Italian participants (102 women, 75 men, 22 n.s.; mean age = 38.36, SD = 14.48), each one randomly assigned to one condition, self-assessed their emotions about the candy and judged the colonial marketing of this long-selling product. Answers were grouped according to participants' age: 19- 27 y.o., 28- 44 y.o., 45-71 y.o. Self-assessed shame significantly differed [F(3) = 2.91, p= .036, η2p= .051] when opposing the condition African Moor + text (M=3.45) to the control condition No African Moor + no text (M=2.38, Tukey’s post-hoc p=.017). Interactions between judgments about the product's marketing and partecipants' age showed that, when the African Moor was presented with the text, the adult participants criticised more than younger and older ones the use of colonial image [F(2) = 2.31, p= .036., η2p=.078]. Suggestions stemming from results and future research directions are discussed.