The New Age of Ethnic Marketing - Brief Article

Brandweek, March 19, 2001

Kiss me, I'm Irish American." It's the kind of T-shirt or bumper sticker one might expect to see today, at a time of unprecedented ethnic diversity when immigrants have gained a level of acceptance bordering on chic. Particularly to those of us born in the U.S., the monikers Korean American, Russian American or Polish American--to say nothing of Kuwaiti American, Armenian American or Botswanan American--carry certain positive associations such as language, culture and history.

For marketers, these demographic and cultural shifts represent tremendous new avenues of growth. Catering to groups who seek to reinforce their ethnic identities, businesses have either extended their products or created distinct new lines--everything from travel and financial services to supermarket brands, toys and greeting cards.

This rich vein of material is the subject of Marilyn Halter's Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (Schocken). A research associate at Boston University's Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Halter explores the reasons underlying the impetus to reclaim our roots and its effects on the marketplace.

"Though a crucial component of the rationale for the creation of ethnic pride groups and related culture-specific practices may be to protest against the ills of consumer society, the new ethnics demonstrate that they are nonetheless deeply tied to consumerist practices," Halter writes. "In effect, the market serves to foster greater awareness of ethnic identity, offers immediate possibilities for cultural participation and can even act as an agent of change in that process."

The following excerpt, culled from chapters Nos. 3 and 4, begins with a discussion of "The New Ethnic Marketing Experts" and later delves into the cultural appeal of ethnicity itself. Halter provides several examples of the multiethnic marketing strategies conducted by various research groups for clients including Bank of America, AT&T, Mitsubishi, Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, J.C. Penney and the U.S. Postal Service. She also analyzes the work of successful in-house marketing teams from companies like Hallmark and Mattel.

"Multicultural marketing means approaching consumers through their complex cultural affinities ..." she writes, quoting a researcher from YAR Communications, New York. "It means that, by your knowledge of what is important to them, you are not merely an interloper who is trying to make money from them, but a kindred spirit who knows their hearts--and is really one of them."

Halter is a member of the history department and the American Studies program at Boston University. She is the author of Between Race and Ethnicity and the editor of New Migrants in the Marketplace. She lives in Lakeville, Mass.

The fluctuating demographic trends in the United States over the last three decades have inspired the initiation of entirely new kinds of businesses and services created to reach a culturally diverse consumer base. The increasingly fragmented market not only calls for advertising campaigns tailored to specific groups, but also requires a determination of which media are most effective in such initiatives.

More and more, consumers themselves are expressing culturally distinctive desires, needs and wants in their shopping habits, and these demands as well as patterns of product loyalty prompted consulting, research and communications firms to begin specializing in multiethnic niche marketing. Some cater to specific ethnic groups such as the California-based Hispanic Market Connections (HMC) or the even more narrowly focused Talkline Communications Network, an agency in the business of reaching Jewish consumers with the amusing motto: "It takes more than gefilte fish to reel in the Jewish market." Others have a broader scope and provide expert population and zip code breakdowns nationwide.

When such agencies do specialize, they usually focus on one of the primary "New American" umbrella groups: Hispanics, Asians or African Americans. Still another approach is that of Muse Cordero Chen & Partners (MCC&P), which seeks to design promotions that find a "zone of commonality" that centers on similarities rather than differences. Instead of the traditional monoethnic message, MCC&P develops crossover advertising in a process they call "transcreation."

The most sophisticated target marketers understand the limitations of too wide a scope for their multinational constituencies. A crucial component of their staff training is to develop an awareness of the complex intraethnic variations among both the Hispanic and Asian segments and to pass this knowledge on to their clients. For instance, although both Cubans and Mexicans are classified as Hispanic by virtue of their common language, in reality their socio-cultural histories and patterns of settlement in the United States are quite divergent and demand differentiated marketing approaches.

When marketing specialists at the Bustelo coffee company determined that Mexicans and Central Americans, compared with all other Hispanics, preferred instant coffee to espresso, they developed television commercials depicting their instant varieties to broadcast in Chicago and San Francisco's Bay Area, urban centers with substantial Mexican American communities. Bustelo's market research is so refined that the company has even tracked how tastes in coffee drinking change when people relocate. For example, Mexicans who move to Miami or to New York tend to pick up on the espresso and specialty coffee trends, and subsequently their consumption of instant coffee declines.