Natalie Myers

Look Before Leaping into Multicultural Marketing

October 23rd, 2008

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.

Natalie Myers

About Natalie Myers

Natalie Myers writes for MarketingSherpa’s Great Minds and Content Biz newsletters. She covers a broad array of topics for Great Minds, regularly interviewing thought leaders and experienced marketers about innovative or highly successful marketing strategies. For Content Biz she focuses specifically on online subscriptions models, including anything you pay for to read, listen to, watch, rent (as in Software as a Service models), etc.

She writes blog posts about topics relating to her beats, including useful information from interviews that doesn’t make it into an article.

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  1. December 27th, 2009 at 10:36 | #1

    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.

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