How a Multicultural Society changes the way Marketing is done In the US

The United States is a consumer-driven market in which race and ethnicity are blended into consumers’ buying habits and behaviors. When Richard Florida, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, graded the nation’s largest forty-nine metropolitan areas in terms of employment opportunities, concentrations of high-tech and innovative industries, population growth, and general economic vitality and cross-indexed them with a “composite diversity index (CDI)” – which combined higher than average concentrations of immigrants, gays, and artists – he discovered a high correlation between cultural diversity and economic progress. That is, diversity breeds money (Garcia, 2004). For marketers and businesses who have been already trying to catch the trend, there are some strategies they are taking to ensure their competitive advantages:

I. Marketers are digging deeper to understand their target consumers and they have to be more sensitive to the messages they are delivering to avoid offending the minority consumers.

What marketers may bear in mind nowadays is that “like a photographic image made of millions of individual pixels, the more one zooms in on the multicultural market, the more fragmented and blurry the picture gets.” To prevent insulting their target consumers unintentionally or delivering wrong messages which at worst would trigger boycotts and at best would not be perceived as meaningful to consumers, marketers need “in culture” marketing and advertising strategies. That is, speaking to customers in their native language or the language they respond to the most when making a buying decision; being sensitive to ethnic and nationalist sensitivities and not making cultural gaffes; and reaching out to social organizations and civic leaders to make sure that your marketing campaign or editorial slant won’t trigger a boycott by disgruntled community activists (Garcia, 2004).

Actually, some marketers have been developing their database of community tastemakers to help them making decisions concerning what marketing strategies they should take, which channels they should take to deliver the messages, or if some products are meaningful to a specific ethnic group. Marilyn Halter mentioned an example in her book Shopping for Identity: the Marketing of Ethnicity that when Holly Poirier, one of the founders of a marketing agency “Intercultural Niche Strategies,” was doing some researches to see if the agency should take the La Banda (traditional wind music from Italy) project on, she made some initial calls to some of her tastemakers in the Italian community, “and one woman said, ‘You know, my father was a Banda musician and every town in Italy has a village square and every village has a Banda band and, oh my God, this brings back such memories.’” Poirier told Halter, “You knew right there you had to take this project on and eventually we found all these people across the country that felt the same way about this recording, that it reminded them of somewhere in their distant past, about the village life that they had in Italy.” (Halter, 2000)
Marketers may find in some cases that “conflicting conclusions, contradictory data, and inconsistent strategies abound” (Garcia, 2004) when they are doing researches on specific ethnic groups. Whether the conflicting conclusions are about Asians Americans’ concept of money, Hispanic Americans’ preference of language or their perception of seeing a Hispanic American from different countries of origin from theirs in TV commercials. That is the main reason why marketers always need to dig deeper to understand the context of what their consumers really think.

II. Brands need to build deeper relationships with their target consumers – even if the minorities are not as brand-loyal as some marketers think.

As Rupa Ranganathan, senior vice president of ethnic strategy for Strategic Research Institute (SRI), said, “It’s not enough to say, ‘Okay, I’ve said it in a different language,’ or ‘I’ve used a few important cultural cues.’ It’s going beyond language, to where you’re really empathizing and making a cultural connection.” (Garcia, 2004) Although the minority consumers are not so brand-loyal as some marketers think (according to the El Mercado 2005 study, only slightly less than half of Hispanics are loyal consumers) (Morse, 2009), they still would more likely to trust the brands with stronger relationship with (or are more familiar to) them.

III. Marketing strategies are more diverse and grass-rooted in the communities to reach their target consumers.

According to Global Advertising Strategies, a New York-based multicultural marketing consultancy that focuses on Central and Eastern European Americans (CEEAs), CEEAs constitute the third largest US ethnic market, commanding more than $400 billion in spending power. The 20 million Russians, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans living in the US have distinct cultural needs and habits that determine what and how they buy. Just like Latinos and Asians, many are non-English-speaking immigrants and their economic growth rate is outpacing the general population, yet because of their largely Caucasian makeup they had remained largely invisible to US advertisers until companies such as AT&T, Citibank, Verizon, and MetLife finally tried to reach Eastern Europeans after 2000 (Garcia, 2004).

In other words, while it is true that no consumer group, no group of human beings is nearly as homogeneous as multicultural marketers would like them to be (Morse, 2009), it would still be helpful and efficient for marketers to divide their target consumer as demographically as possible. As a result, although some ethnic groups seem to be relatively small (20 million Eastern European Americans, 14 million Asian Americans, or one million Korean Americans), marketers and businesses still pay lots of energy and resources to target these groups.

For example, the Postal Service has gotten involved at the grass-roots level, sponsoring community cultural events in relation to their ethnic-theme stamps, such as ceremonies holding in the Chinatown neighbor-hoods of LA, San Francisco, and New York, in conjunction with the debut of the Lunar New Year stamp. AT&T initiated national campaign creating print, broadcast, direct mail, and community-event-based advertising in nearly twenty languages. Marilyn Halter mentioned in her book Shopping for Identity: the Marketing of Ethnicity that “when a public radio reporter who was doing a story on the Asian-Indian community in upstate New York visited a Hindu temple in Schenectady and asked a few questions, one of the congregants immediately produced the Handbook for Asian Indians, put out by AT&T. She offered the pamphlet enthusiastically, declaring it the best way to learn about her culture.” (Halter, 2000)

IV. Globalized marketing strategy may be helpful in targeting minority ethnic groups in the US. In some cases, marketers need to use media outside of the US to target foreign-born immigrants – they buy more merchandise, spend more on these goods, and buy more frequently than American-born citizens.

For those foreign-born immigrants or as Halter said “newcomers,” they buy what they can afford, but as they adapt the move up the economic scale, they upgrade these items so that both the need and frequency of purchase is greater than in the general marketplace. Yuri Radzievsky, founder of YAR communications, explained: “Rebuilding lives and households, they (the newcomers) will consume goods and services on a scale unprecedented in the modern era. The marketer who speaks to the unique blend of old and new for each of the New American Pioneers will win their acceptance – and business.” (Halter, 2000)

Simply put, after building relationships with the newcomers and winning their trust, brands would win much more businesses as the newcomers earning their social-economic status – and the newcomers would use their word-of-mouth to refer their brands to other new immigrants.

V. Celebrities in entertainment and sports industries with minority backgrounds would gain minority consumers’ support; thus, there would be more popular athletes, actors, singers, designers and artists with minority backgrounds because they can attract people with similar ethnic backgrounds to support them – and spend money on them (and their endorsed products).

Givi Topchishvili, the Russian-born founder of Global Advertising Strategies, pointed out that “race is merely one indicator of the cultural differences – ranging from language to psychographics and a shared history – that truly creates a distinct ethnic group. In today’s multicultural economy, a failure to understand the importance of ethnic identity is a failure to understand the American consumer.” (Garcia, 2004) That is, even consumers of different races or from different countries of origin may share their fondness of and support to a celebrity because of their perceived similarities in skin color or ethnicity.

Take Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese American and rising New York Knicks point guard, for example. He is considered to have changed the stereotypes of Asian Americans that because of their physical limits, it is impossible for them to have extraordinary performances as well as blacks and whites in the basketball playfield. Although Jeremy Lin is not the first Asian American NBA player, when he first got to the NBA, Lin got a letter of encouragement from Wataru Misaka, the first non-white NBA player and like Lin an Asian American, told Lin to “hang in there” (Saffir, 2012). Raymond Townsend, the first NBA player of Filipino descent, “believes Lin’s ascent can not only help other Asian Americans but also young Filipino Americans who want to pursue basketball.” (Pimentel, 2012) An editor was fired by ESPN for using “chink in the armor” in a headline about Lin and a report from a Filipino newspaper The Philippine Star wrote “’Chink’ is a grave derogatory term referring to anyone Chinese or Asian or even Asian-looking.” (Velasco, 2012)

In other words, the success of Jeremy Lin has not only drawn attention from Taiwanese or Chinese Americans. Ethnic Chinese have been in the US in significant numbers since early 1850s, ethnic Japanese and Filipinos since early 1900s, and other people of various Asian descents (Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, etc.) came to the US later (Xie & Goyette, 2004), Lin looks like many of them, has similar upbringing background as many of them, and is the symbol of breaking the stereotypes of Asian Americans, thus it is nature for many Asian Americans to support Jeremy Lin. Not to mention Taiwanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and people in other Asian countries who would wait for the broadcasting of New York Knicks’ games even the games are broadcasted at 3 or 4 pm in their countries and they are more than willing to spend money on products endorsed by Jeremy Lin.

As Guy Garcia said, the new America “is changing how people make money and spend it, where it comes from and where it is going.” (Garcia, 2004) For marketers and businesses in entertainment or sports industries, the phenomenon is telling them: if you got talented Asian, Hispanic, African Americans or people from other minority ethnic groups, they would bring money to you. Sometimes the money would even come from foreign countries where there are thousand times more consumers than the population in the specific ethnic group in the US.

By Angie (Yen-chun) Chen
Student
Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication
Florida State University

VI. References
Garcia, G. (2004). The new mainstream. New York, NY: HarperCollions Publishers Inc.
Halter, M. (2000). Shopping for identity: The marketing of ethnicity. New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Morse, D. R. (2009). Multicultural intelligence. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.
Pimentel, J. (2012). Lin’s rise in the NBA can inspire Pinoy ballers. AJPress Los Angeles. http://www.asianjournal.com/entertainment/83-entertainment/14942-lins-rise-in-the-nba-can-inspire-pinoy-ballers.html >
Saffir, D. (2012). Jeremy Lin Receives Encouragement From Ex-Knicks Guard Wat Misaka, First Asian American in NBA. http://www.nesn.com/2012/02/jeremy-lin-receives-encouragement-from-ex-knicks-guard-wat-misaka-first-asian-american-in-nba.html
Velasco, B. (2012). Jeremy Lin: Too humble for interviews. The Philippine Star. http://www.philstar.com/sportsarticle.aspx?articleid=779372&publicationsubcategoryid=69 >
Xie, Y., and Goyette, K. (2004). Asian Americans: A demographic portrait. http://personal.psc.isr>.