Look Before Leaping into Multicultural Marketing
The demographics in Canada and the U.S. are shifting. In Canada, specifically, more than 10 groups represent a significant portion of the population. There are about a million Chinese, a million Italians, a million Southeast Asians, etc.
More and more Canadian marketers are watching these demographics. They’re tailoring marketing programs to them, says Jan Kestle, Founder and President of Environics Analytics. She says the financial services and telecom sectors have taken the multicultural marketing lead in North America.
“What was surprising to me was to see insurance, charity, and retail people, who have smaller budgets, that understand these markets are not only big, but growing,” Jan says about her reaction when attending and speaking at the 2nd Annual Multicultural Marketing conference in Toronto last month.
But she offered a few words of wisdom for any marketer about to embark on a multicultural marketing campaign:
-There are big opportunities, but first you have to think about whether you can justify the campaign
-Ask yourself, how reachable are they?
-How much will it cost?
There are a number of tools out there that marketers could use in targeting diverse populations. Jan’s company has some of them. In particular, they recently developed a product that can take a person’s first and last name and determine the nationality of that person.
Categories: Consumer Marketing, Marketing canada, Multicultural Marketing
Another piece of advice to do a cost-effective multicultural campaign is to cluster the same language groups so that your message can reach target groups in their right language but for a lower cost.