What makes America so great isn’t its healthcare system or its car manufacturers. It’s that proverbial “melting pot” of cultures that make our America culture so rich and diverse at the same time.
In the U.S. alone, more than half of all families with children will be multicultural by 2025, according to a 2009 report by information and media group The Nielsen Company. As this population grows, it will gain economic clout. Between 2009 and 2012, the buying power of Hispanic and Asian Americans is predicted to increase 40%, reaching more than $2 trillion.
With Latinos representing 14 percent of the U.S. population and $686 billion in purchasing power, we have now reached a stage in America where companies are really sinking their teeth in multi-cultural marketing. Gone are the days of bi-lingual advertising and signage, with its obvious pitfalls in poor translation. People of all walks of life coming from two or more cultural identities are accepting and identifying themselves as “Bicultural” or “Multi-Cultural” and with that assume a new set of criteria for how they absorb information and messages from companies trying to get their business.
It’s not a secret that the demographics are changing hugely, and what is considered a majority or a minority population is going to be in flux over the next five to 15 years,” says Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed II, who teamed up with Stefano Puntoni and Peeter W.J. Verlegh from Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands for the research. “It is incumbent on marketers to address these differences.”
To do that, marketers need to get a grip on the complex issues that contribute to people’s sense of identity. “This involves trying to understand their culture, their upbringing, and the symbolic cues they identify with and how that relates to their self-esteem,” says Reed.
It also involves being able to, as Reed puts it, “drill down and discover what it means to possess this ethnicity” — which is what the professors set out to help marketers do. Their research — a three-part study of immigrants living in the Netherlands — underscored, among other things, how verbal and visual “cues” in advertising that are incongruent with a consumer’s ethnic identity can negatively influence buying decisions.
Companies attempting to design bicultural marketing campaigns walk a fine line, Reed states. “They have to construct persuasive communication in a way that does not trivialize on the basis of ethnic affiliation, but does not become so watered down that it doesn’t speak to either dimension.”
As the research suggests, people with dual identities are acutely aware of marketers trying to reach out to them on the basis of cultural identity. If the marketer overdoes it, the message smacks of pandering and can be dismissed as a calculating attempt to profit from cultural values and heritage.
“The challenge to marketers,” states Reed, “is to calibrate the ad [in such a way] that the dominant identity is reinforced with more subtlety. The idea is to pick one identity and develop symbolism that is not center stage so it doesn’t get on people’s radar and trigger an offensive reaction.”
Not all products purposely created or altered for a multicultural audience are successful. Although the international food aisles in local supermarkets are growing, there are many products, like a Latino wine or a shampoo for Asian-American women which fail because the product does not respond to a real customer need.
Nowadays, with different minority cultures exerting more influence into the mainstream and urban hubs mixing things up, multiculturalism is becoming Bicultural 2.0. In the words of a young Cuban-American posted in Diestepedia: “To believe that our entire society is anything but multicultural is outdated. In the new world with modern technology, I’m not limited to two cultures.”
