David Burgos and Ola Mobolade
In their effort to embrace cultural nuances, many brands are inadvertently alienating consumers and missing big opportunities, the authors of a new book on marketing to minorities tell Jo Bowman
David Burgos has more than a decade’s experience in market research and before that served in the Peruvian Navy. Yet it was only seven years ago, when he moved to the United States, that he realised something important about himself, or at least about the way many in the international business world regard him. “I didn’t know I was Hispanic before I came to the US; before that I was just a guy in Peru,” he recalls.
With a rich racial heritage he describes as a quarter Spanish, a quarter Peruvian and half Palestinian, Burgos is well placed to assess how American brands go about communicating with the growing number of non-white consumers in the US, and to minority communities elsewhere. Now head of multicultural practice at Millward Brown, he and Ola Mobolade – managing director of Firefly Millward Brown – have teamed up to explore what works and what definitely doesn’t in brands’ attempts to reach out to multicultural, or what might be called “ethnic,” communities. Mobolade, who was born in Nigeria, grew up in the US and obtained a degree in African American Studies, says that many American brands, the majority of which see their future growth in emerging world markets as something very different from growth in their home market, approach marketing in ways that are often outdated and at times deeply flawed.
“When you talk to marketers about multiculturalism, they tend to focus mainly on the differences … they overlook all the similarities,” Mobolade says. So-called minorities already make up a majority of the population in some US cities, and the same is expected to be true of the entire country by 2045. These are no longer “new arrivals”: 63% of the US Hispanic population and 33% of Asian Americans were born in the US. They may have grown up with a perspective on the world different from that of their white neighbours, but this is only partly a function of race. It’s a similar story in Canada, where Asians represent more than 30% of the population in cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
Yet much of the marketing adapted for minority ethnic or religious communities draws on tired stereotypes focused almost exclusively on race and religion – unmissable musical cues, for instance, or religious imagery that Burgos and Mobolade say ends up looking very much like every other ad targeting the same minority group, or – even worse – causes offence by appearing contrived or patronising. “Assuming Hispanics are all one way, and that their diversity comes in their difference from the white mainstream, is flawed,” Mobolade says. “And opportunities are sometimes missed to reach across those racial, ethnic lines.”
“Ethnicity is just one of the many factors that define who consumers are, and it is certainly not always the most relevant,” says Burgos. “Religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, income, life stage, values, politics, and many other variables can play a crucial role as well – this is just the human nature of consumers. It’s getting increasingly hard to say you can define a typical Hispanic or black consumer. But marketers often put all ethnic consumers in the same bag.”
Intelligent targeting
The pair based their book on analysis of Millward Brown ad testing databases, focus groups with consumers, lifestyle segmentation studies, and in-depth interviews with marketing experts and academics around the world.
They say that producing sensitive and effective marketing campaigns that work across racial and religious boundaries means not casting all the colours of the rainbow in your ads, but placing a greater emphasis on market research and attention to multiculturalism in all its forms early on in the process.
“The good news about resolving this industry-wide problem is that there’s an established precedent for addressing the diversity of an ethnic group in marketing … there are no campaigns that rely on a broad-stroke depiction of white consumer behaviour. Instead, marketers have always targeted various sub-segments of this group to convey a focused and relevant message.”
“Do research! It helps you not only to understand the minority segments in your market, but also how these segments might be influencing the mainstream.”
“Through research, you determine which attitudes are salient to consumers within a category, and you understand their priorities and speak to them in kind. It’s really a case by case approach.”
Brands need to determine whether and to what extent race, ethnicity, religion and all the other variables are important to consumers at the time they’re considering buying specific types of products. “The concept of intelligent targeting doesn’t invalidate the role of ethnic marketing – it merely practices discretion in how and when it’s applied,” the authors say.
“All good advertising is targeted to someone,” Mobolade says. “That might be busy moms in the suburbs concerned their kids aren’t getting what they need but need something easy [to prepare]. It’s specific, but it doesn’t front-load the role of race.”
In the case of something like a skincare brand, different ethnic groups or other communities may indeed need not just a different marketing campaign but a different set of products than another group. But often, truly multicultural marketing that takes into account relevant racial, social and religious issues at the beginning of the planning process can cross those boundaries effortlessly. The result: more efficient advertising that appeals to a greater number of people.
Beer brands have traditionally done a good job of targeting consumers across ethnic groups by focusing on a fundamental truth that their consumers share, pretty much regardless of race, the authors say. Other mass-market brands such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are starting to think this way too. “Beer companies focus on the ‘guys will be guys’ message, and do it well,” Burgos says. “It’s based on basic human insight.”
New market opportunity
The authors say that US-based marketers have been impeded by their acceptance of the notion that they need a multicultural or specialist ethnic marketing agency to target minority groups, and a general agency to handle the rest of their communications – usually the vast majority of it. The historic role of agencies for minorities – to give minorities some visibility in advertising that tended to ignore or exclude them – is no longer as relevant. Mobolade says it’s become received wisdom that specialist agencies have a monopoly on insight into certain ethnic groups or minorities, when in fact race or even religion isn’t necessarily at the forefront of those consumers’ personal identities. The fact that multicultural marketing might be allocated five to seven per cent of a total campaign budget to reach roughly a third of the national population is also problematic. “We would contend that the US approach to multiculturalism does have something to learn from what’s going on abroad,” she says. “Siloed definitions aren’t so neat anymore. The general market is multicultural.”
Emerging markets tend not to have this system of separate agencies and so are not held back by it. Nor do they tend to be as fearful of discussing race and religion as is often the case in western Europe and the US. “In India, people are much more willing to talk about it, especially about religion … they’ll even make fun of stereotypes,” Burgos says. “People want their diversity to be recognised.”
Lessons for new markets can be learned in others, the authors note. They point out that in Peru there’s experience of multicultural marketing of the kind that is increasingly going to be needed in a market like China. In China, a country where race and language are virtually homogeneous, socio-economic diversity and migration from rural areas to cities drive multiculturalism.
Revolution
The need to segment and identify communities according to race, religion, language or any other defining factor could soon be a thing of the past if the pace of social media development and digital marketing continues to accelerate. As marketers seek to target their messages to individuals rather than loosely defined consumer groups, they will be looking, Burgos notes, at what individuals express about themselves to determine the best approach.
“Interestingly, Facebook does not even ask users whether they belong to any specific racial or ethnic group,” he says. “This task relies on the users themselves. Rather than trying to figure out if somebody is African American or Hispanic, Facebook only uses the information that the users chose to provide in their profiles. The rationale behind this approach is that users are likely to share only the information about themselves that they consider important. If race or any race-related topic does not come up spontaneously for one user, that means that race is not top-of-mind for that user, and companies should not attempt to force the racial factor in their communications to him or her. Instead, they should pay attention to the variables the user did talk about – like being gay, for instance.”
In the social media world, it’s users themselves who create what we might call advertisements, and push them out to people they think are likely to have similar needs or interests, people who may well be from the same ethnic group, religion or socio-economic group as they are – but then again, may not.
“If a young Pakistani American woman finds out that a beauty brand has just launched a new line of beauty products featuring colours that complement her skin colour, it is likely that she will forward that information, probably adding some comments of her own, to other Pakistani American users within her list of Facebook friends. Chances are that the message will be relevant to its receiver in several layers: as a woman in general, as a person of colour, as a millennial, and perhaps as a person whose religion has certain rules around the use of make-up products that are different from those of the mainstream woman, to name a few.
Approaches like this have the opportunity to effectively address the biases that labelling often generates. And diverse as consumers are, digital platforms like Facebook open the door for the development of more surgical targeting that can be relevant to consumers on many levels. Indeed, it also represents a big opportunity for transcultural communications whose core message is relevant to consumers across different ethnicities because they are founded in a basic human insight or need.”
David Burgos and Ola Mobolade are the authors of Marketing to the New Majority.
