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When targeting an ethnic group, understand its culture and deliver on your ads’ promises
Hollie Shaw, Financial Post Published: Friday, October 26, 2007
Big business often falls short in marketing to Canadian immigrants, who represent an ever-widening piece of the demographic pie in large cities across the country.
It’s not that advertising in this country is whitewashed: Consumers routinely see visible minorities in television and print ads. But Old El Paso commercials featuring sombrero-clad people at a fiesta are aimed at selling Mexican-style food to the assimilated masses, not to immigrants from Mexico.

But that’s changing.
Prasad Rao, partner at Toronto-based agency Rao, Barrett and Walsh, says the new style of multicultural marketing targets groups in their first language and resonates with their cultures.
“Canada celebrates multiculturalism,” he says, “but in marketing, we celebrate homogeneity.”
Marketing to the assimilated leaves out a large percentage of the multicultural population, Mr. Rao says. “[New Canadians] understand the messages, but they are taking away something completely different and it is not relevant to them.
“We all go through the same experiences, but how you approach them is very different based on your culture.”
Melting-pot marketing can substantially weaken the message. When banks came out a few years ago with no-haggle mortgages, “haggling was viewed as very painful [to consumers], and it was viewed as great main-stream product,” he says. “This makes sense to an assimilated Canadian, but to South Asians and Chinese, negotiation and haggling are a very important part of a purchase decision.
“They think, in fact, that if you do not haggle, you do not get a good deal.”
Mr. Rao, whose company uses geodemographic mapping of postal codes to target ethnic consumers, has helped rework campaigns for companies who missed their target market with their ad concepts.
One for Unilever NV’s North American launch of Sunsilk shampoo, a prominent brand in South Asia, was reworked after research showed two basic points of the proposed ad would not resonate with intended consumers. The original concept featured a gay male hairdresser and his female client, a confidante. “We studied the [target] consumers and came up with two conclusions: South Asian women do not generally have a sort of therapist-type relationship with their hairdresser, and [homosexuality] is not out in the forefront or really acknowledged in the [culture]. So a gay hairdresser was not someone they would really build a relationship with.”
Mark Weisbarth, president of advertising agency Due North Communications, said marketing to ethnic groups is often seen as riskier because it is difficult to gauge the return on investment.
“Ethnic marketing is, at the end of the day, another form of segmented marketing, and, as you segment a market, it gets increasingly expensive to support each customer. It is the reverse of an economy of scale, so you better know that it is going to pay off.”
Any targeted advertising effort must be supported by a business at the service level, Mr. Weisbarth notes.
“Customers can go into a store and find that nobody speaks their language. If you are gong to do ethnic advertising, you better be prepared to go all the way and give the service.”
Retailers that include Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., Costco Wholesale Canada Ltd. and Hudson’s Bay Co. have stocked a growing array of ethnic products in the past two years to drive sales and foster loyalty. The practice is also being followed in earnest at Wal-Mart Canada Corp., which has been releasing targeted cultural marketing in multiple languages for several years.
Wal-Mart recently released a set of six TV commercials for the Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and South Asian markets.
“This is truly the future of retail [marketing] in Canada, especially in the urban markets,” says Andrew Pelletier, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada, who notes the retailer tries to carry goods targeting the demographic clusters in which it operates. He believes targeted ethnic marketing will become even more important in the next decade.
Immigration accounts for 70% of Canada’s population growth, and by 2017, about half of all visible minorities in Canada will be South Asian or Chinese, according to Statistics Canada. In 10 years, it is projected visible minorities will make up 19% of the population of Montreal, 49% of Vancouver’s and 51% of Toronto’s. In the rest of Canada, the figure is projected to stand at 9%.
“These three areas account for about 70% of the GDP of Canada,” says Mr. Rao. “Suddenly, this puts the markets in a whole different light.”
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=c65ec9ee-42c8-48d4-baa4-7eea83d80292&p=1