Reprinted from Marketing Magazine issue dated October 13, 2008
First things first. This column is written with two voices.
I am an advertising professional who spends many of my waking hours developing strategy, looking at the big picture and crafting messages that, I hope, will connect with my audience. But I am also a grateful immigrant, who left India more than 30 years ago and spent 15 years working in advertising agencies in London, England before coming to this country.
Both these voices reside in one man which allows me to have some unique perspectives on multicultural marketing.
I can see the picture from both sides and what I see are opportunities lost, messages misunderstood, chances taken without the right amount of time, but also money invested in learning one of the first basic rules of effective marketing - know your audience.
Not knowing your audience is the first great folly of modern Canadian multicultural advertising. The second is not taking the numbers seriously. Statistics Canada and the Census 2006 numbers confirmed something we’ve suspected all along: the Chinese and South Asian communities dominate the changing face of Canada. For marketers, this has important implications for the future of their business.
South Asians are emerging as the community no serious national brand can afford to ignore. They are coming in larger numbers and in five years will outnumber the Chinese community in Canada.
However, the diversity of South Asian value systems, family structures, cultural psychographics and purchasing influences makes it difficult for marketers and their communications agencies to reach them.
Media planners, who have never really had to think outside the box, now need to step out of their offices and check out what’s going on in some of the huge ethnic grocery stores that have popped up in the GTA in the last five years.
I recently picked up six English-language newspapers published exclusively for South Asians and five newspapers in four regional South Asian languages (Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and Tamil). The good news is that the newspapers were packed with ads - from everything from video stores, car dealerships, real estate agents to lawyers, properties for sale, commercial properties for rent. To me, this is a sign of a flourishing immigrant community going about its business of settling into a new country and determined to do well in the future.
Guess how many national brands were advertised in the 11 South Asian newspapers? Only six - two for cars, two for banks, one for an insurance company and one for a wireless company.
This says one thing: the largest and fastest growing multicultural or ethnic segment is really not on the radar for most national marketing companies.
This leads us to folly number three.
While I applaud the adventurous few national brand marketers who ventured into this new territory, too many continue to see multicultural marketing only as a simple creative adaptation. There is a tendency to paint the multicultural market and, South Asians in particular, with one brush. Ads are based on one core national strategy and developed using culturally oriented catch phrases and imagery.
There are exceptions of course. I remember a campaign from one of the “big five” banks targeted at newly arrived South Asians. One ad said: “While you apply for your SIN card, we’ll help you with your first credit card”. Another said: “While you look for your first job, we’ll help you with your first account.” Brilliant, I thought. These ads connect with a need. They reveal the problems every immigrant faces after arriving in Canada. They connect with an audience looking for support, to get on their feet as they begin their new lives in a new country. The messages were simple, sincere and honest.
But too often, agencies are quick to offer a creative solution when, in fact, the client desperately needs a business or a marketing solution for a customer segment that’s so complex it can boggle the mind.
We don’t all look the same. We certainly don’t speak the same language (there are 16 official regional languages in India, plus English), nor do we follow the same faith (seven religions are practiced in India: Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism and Zoroastrian). You clearly underestimate the complexities of this market when you generalize with a single concept across all groups which, to confuse the marketer even further, also includes people from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
These are cultures within cultures. It is a dizzying level of family, religious, language and cultural pillars that drive decision making and choice of brands. There are families that come from deep roots in agricultural and more traditional sources of livelihood. But there is also an aspirational and emerging South Asian immigrant who is highly educated, articulate, secular, westernized, comfortable with new technology and eager to integrate into the Canadian mainstream.
This picture may seem daunting, but there are some relatively straightforward first steps for any marketer to take.
- Start to customize, don’t generalize. Do not believe you can get away by building stereotypes. You may do your brand more harm than good.
- Build a relationship with your ethnic Canadian customers. Acknowledge them as Canadians while respecting them for being different in their culture and value systems.
- Do not be in a hurry. Results may not show in the first year but if you do it right, your ROI will look good by years two and three.
- Review your multicultural agency lineup. Ask the hard question: “You think you know the Chinese market but how much do you really know about South Asians?”
- Spend your resources in gaining knowledge through research.
- Finally, don’t ask your agency to produce an ad campaign for the South Asian market. Chances are you’ll get a creative solution that is merely an adaptation of mainstream ads. The challenge is much bigger than that.
SACHI MUKERJI is the managing partner of Monsoon Communications, the new multicultural marketing division of UpsideDown Communications Ltd.
