Why Great Businesses from Underrepresented Communities Stay Invisible

In June 2020, Google searches for “Black-owned businesses” reached peak popularity, a value of 100 on Google Trends, the highest a search term can register. Revenue at some Black-owned businesses grew by double digits virtually overnight. Then, by 2022, one Boston-area Black-owned business reported that online shopping sessions had plummeted 57 percent and total orders had dropped 39 percent from their peak.

The same pattern repeated for AAPI-owned businesses in 2021, and search data shows LGBTQIA+-owned business searches spike each June during Pride Month.

The businesses didn’t get worse over the years, and the customers definitely did not stop caring.

What changed was the context, and context, it turns out, is everything.


Context Changes What the Brain Treats as an Option

The brain does not evaluate businesses, causes, or communities in isolation. It uses the surrounding environment, including what is in the news, what people around are talking about, and what feels urgent and alive, to determine what is worth acting on right now.

When the environment changes, the calculation changes with it. The world around you just stopped reminding you to act. People don’t just stop caring.

Yet the tools built to channel that caring rarely account for it, designed instead around the assumption that:

Label it.

Badge it.

Add a filter.

The rest takes care of itself.

The science says something more specific (and more demanding) than that. Three distinct bodies of research explain what is actually happening and why most tools built around identity get it wrong.

The brain is constantly making quick judgments about what belongs to “someone like me.” It does this automatically, using past experience and context, often before you are even aware of it. Psychologists call this identity-based motivation (IBM) (Oyserman, 2009).

When something feels consistent with who you are, you move toward it. When it doesn’t, you are less likely to notice it, consider it, or act on it, even if it is right in front of you.

This shapes three things: what feels possible to you, what feels natural to do, and how quickly you do it.

IBM is context-sensitive, which is the key to understanding both the surge and the drop. The same person will behave differently depending on what is happening around them. When a cultural moment makes an identity salient, whether a protest, a wave of violence against a community, or a Pride Month campaign, the pool of people treating certain businesses as live options expands dramatically.

When the moment passes, so does the context.

The identity fades into the background, and so does the behavior.

Kamaal Jarrett, founder of Hillside Harvest in Boston, described it plainly in an interview with the Boston Globe:

He was naming, without the language of psychology, exactly what IBM predicts.

Being told to support something is a different cognitive experience than choosing something because it feels like yours to choose.

The first produces a transaction. The second produces a habit.

In June 2020, Yelp added a ‘Black-owned’ filter to its platform. Searches for Black-owned businesses immediately increased by more than 12,000 percent compared to the year before. By March 2021, that growth had dropped to 480 percent above baseline; still significant, but falling fast (Yelp Local Economic Impact Report, 2021).

EatOkra, an app built specifically to connect people with Black-owned restaurants, started 2020 with 40,000 total downloads. By late 2022 it had reached 475,000 and kept growing (Salon, 2022; Axios, 2021).

Yelp had more listings, more users, and more infrastructure, yet EatOkra's results told a different story.

Research on something called identity relevance helps explain the difference. It describes whether something feels genuinely made for you, not just available to you (Reed, Forehand, Puntoni, & Warlop, 2012).

The brain is not only asking, “Is this an option?”

It’s also asking, “Was this built with someone like me in mind?”

A filter added to a general platform is an accommodation.

An app built from the ground up for a specific community, by people from within it, tells you that you belong there.

Those are different messages, and according to identity relevance research, that difference changes whether a behavior feels natural and repeatable or whether it requires a cultural moment to happen at all.

IBM explains why behavior tracks cultural moments.

Identity relevance explains why some tools last and others don't.

Yet even when a tool is built for a community and holds attention beyond the cultural moment, there is still a bigger question.

The answer comes from a concept called network homophily.

It’s a well-documented pattern in sociology where people naturally form connections with others who are similar to them. Research has found that race and ethnicity create the strongest divides in personal networks, stronger than age, religion, or education (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). Most people’s social circles are largely made up of people who look like them, live near them, and move in the same spaces.

This matters for business discovery because word of mouth travels through those networks. A great restaurant gets recommended to the people in your circle. If your circle is largely made up of people similar to you, the businesses built by communities outside that circle are less likely to reach you. Not impossible, but structurally less likely.

Algorithms make this worse.

Fewer referrals means fewer reviews. Fewer reviews means lower algorithmic visibility. Lower algorithmic visibility means fewer new customers. The cycle feeds itself. Quality is not the variable; findability is.

A study by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, UC Berkeley, and Washington University found that simply making Black-owned businesses easier to find online significantly boosted their demand, without a cultural moment or a solidarity campaign driving it (Luca, Aneja, & Reshef, 2023).

The customers were always there. The desire was always there. The problem was never the quality of the business. It was that the systems people use to discover businesses were not built to reach across communities. That gap has nothing to do with the quality of what is on the other side of it.

A great ice cream shop owned by an LGBTQIA+ couple is a great ice cream shop. A great Vietnamese restaurant owned by a first-generation immigrant family is a great Vietnamese restaurant. The category should be what brings people in, not what limits how far a business can grow, and not the only reason anyone showed up.

The tools that last are not built for the spike but for the Tuesday in November when nothing is trending, and no one is watching.

That means three things in practice.

IBM is context-sensitive, which means the context has to do the work. A tool designed around a specific community, one that assumes you rather than accommodating you, does not need a cultural moment to feel relevant. It already feels like yours (Oyserman, 2009).

Research on ethnic entrepreneurship found that businesses from underrepresented communities hit a ceiling when their only customers are people already motivated to support them (Aldrich & Waldinger, 1990). The tools that actually help are the ones that introduce great businesses to people who would never have found them otherwise. The identity context makes the discovery richer, it should not be the only reason someone showed up.

As AI-generated recommendations become the default across most platforms, research on consumer behavior shows that people increasingly prefer human experts over algorithms for subjective, emotionally resonant decisions (Castelo, Bos, & Lehmann, 2019).

An algorithm can tag a business; it cannot vouch for it.

Someone who knows a community, who has been inside these spaces, who understands what makes them worth finding? That person can.

One builds trust. The other builds a list.

It always does.

The question is what exists when it passes.

The customers are always there. The desire is always there. The gap has never been in the quality of the businesses or the willingness of people to support them.

It has always been in the infrastructure between them.

Aldrich, H., & Waldinger, R. (1990). Ethnicity and entrepreneurship. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 111–135.

Axios. (2021). Black-owned businesses see slowing but continued support one year after George Floyd’s death. Axios.com.

Castelo, N., Bos, M. W., & Lehmann, D. R. (2019). Task-dependent algorithm aversion. Journal of Marketing Research, 56(5), 809–825.

Luca, M., Aneja, A., & Reshef, O. (2023). Does revealing race increase demand for minority-owned businesses? Working paper, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444.

Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity-based motivation: Implications for action-readiness, procedural-readiness, and consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 250–260.

Reed, A., Forehand, M., Puntoni, S., & Warlop, L. (2012). Identity-based consumer behavior. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 29(4), 310–321.

Salon. (2022). EatOkra aims to be the next Amazon for Black-owned food businesses. Salon.com.

Yelp Local Economic Impact Report. (2021).