This study introduces Claudia Jones (1915–1964) into the canon of marketing history by examining her pioneering use of media, cultural events and symbolic consumption production as strategies of marketplace reclamation and racial counter-narrative in postwar Britain. It aims to explore how Jones’s activism created alternative communicative infrastructures that challenged dominant racialized media and marketplace narratives between 1948 and 1964.
Adopting a biographical, socio-historical and historiographical methodology, this study draws on primary archival material housed at The National Archives of the UK, the British Library (London), the Wellcome Collection and the Lambeth Archives (London). Secondary literature in Black British cultural studies, postcolonial historiography and critical marketing scholarship is referenced to contextualize Jones’s cultural praxis work through the West Indian Gazette and the inaugural indoor Caribbean Carnival.
This examination reveals how Jones’s communicative strategies, spanning journalism, cultural organizing and public discourse, functioned as powerful interventions into dominant narratives of race and belonging. Through platforms such as the West Indian Gazette and the London Caribbean Carnival, Jones crafted cultural tools that contested the exclusionary logic of British media, government policy and commercial messaging. These acts of symbolic resistance not only reasserted diasporic presence but also forged new pathways for identity formation and collective empowerment within the British marketplace.
This study contributes to emerging scholarship that links race, empire and consumption to challenge the dominant Western-centric frameworks of marketing history. By centering a non-US, diasporic figure such as Claudia Jones, the research directly responds to calls for geographically and racially expansive marketing scholarship (Grier et al., 2024). It positions Jones as a cultural strategist whose work complicates conventional conceptualizations of marketing by showing how communication, resistance and community-building can serve as foundational market practices. In doing so, this study offers both a historiographical amplification and a theoretical provocation to reconsider the boundaries of marketing thought.
