The Multicultural Marketing Equation by Florida State University.

In the Spring of 2006 Florida State University under the leadership of Felipe Korzenny, Ph.D. – Professor and Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication conducted a multicultural online consumer research study with approximately 3000 respondents. About 1000 questionnaires each were completed by Non Hispanic Whites (NHW) and Hispanics (H); and almost 500 each by African Americans (AA) and Asians (A). The main purpose of this study was to assess the degree to which multicultural marketing efforts can aim at cultural commonalities or whether these efforts must be culturally targeted.

This study addresses the ongoing debate in marketing about the merits of directing programs to the common denominators across cultures or having specialized efforts directed to individual cultural groups. The issue is very much like the globalization vs. localization controversy. Should one take precedence, or should both coexist? Clearly, consumers of different cultural groups in the United States experience similar influences just by living in a larger common cultural context. However, these consumers still come from different perspectives and worldviews that should impact the way in which they behave in the US marketplace.

The study analyzes media behaviors, media related attitudes, consumer influences, brand identification, category purchase expenditures, values, and other important marketing related variables across the four largest cultural groups in the US.

The Multicultural Equation:

The multicultural equation, the balance of targeting by commonalities and/or targeting by specific cultures, has varied across the segments of this study. In some segments the commonalities appeared to give a strong message, which was then illuminated by cultural differences. In other segments, although there were some similarities across groups, they were by far outweighed by cultural differences. In summary, the response to the main question for this research is–cultural differences by far are the strongest elements in the multicultural equation. Even if commonalities in some segments are strong, the cultural differences found in the attitudes and values segments suggest that there is no easy one-dimensional path across cultures.

To view study CLICK below (Adobe Acrobat Reader required):
http://hmc.comm.fsu.edu/FSUAOLDMSMultiMktg.pdf