The Tricky Trade of Multicultural Marketing

You may have come across every marketer's foremost and favorite marketing tip: ''Get into the shoes of your customer first, and then sell to him.'' This advice has worked wonders for marketers who have implemented it by becoming members of their target audience. It is important for an organization to speak to its customers directly in order to sell their products or services to them successfully.

And now, a new wrinkle can be added to that old advice. With customers increasingly coming from a wider and wider variety of countries and cultures, the time for multicultural marketing has truly arrived! Marketers know that they ignore these new potential customers at their own peril. No longer can they afford to ignore the surging numbers and buying power of these cultures. Mass marketing is gradually being replaced with multicultural marketing efforts to focus on these highly lucrative and diverse groups.

Multicultural marketing is about targeting various ethnic segments and speaking their cultural languages. Simply translating your advertisements into a local language or packaging your products showing faces from the ethnic population is not enough. Understanding the cultural nuances and customer preferences and integrating them into your communication is what is truly required for successful multicultural marketing campaigns.

In fact, multicultural marketing can help organizations stand out in competitive and niche markets, helping them to develop “one-to-one” rapports with minority ethnic groups.

The concept of multicultural marketing has, however, been slow to take off. Here are a few reasons why:

Lack of knowledge of other cultures amongst marketers and a back-of-the-mind apprehension towards dealing with unfamiliar cultures
Fear of losing existing customers who may look elsewhere once the organization shifts its marketing focus to other groups
Assuming that the same sort of communication does the job with ethnic customers also
Lack of interest on the part of an organization to include other groups in order to expand its consumer base, which may occur because it doesn’t see a sizeable market for the other groups

Organizations that shy away from adopting multicultural marketing, though, may soon find that their messages are being misinterpreted by some ethnic groups, resulting in losses for the organization, damage to its reputation and brand image, and increased competitor threat.

How Does One Become a Successful Multicultural Marketer?

Use the right language and the right cultural perspective for reaching your audience.
Understand your consumers’ mindset adequately to understand what motivates them.
Find out the marketing media most accessible to them before finalizing your marketing program.
Respect your customers’ culture and analyze the results of using images, language, jargon, or slang before employing them in a market. What clicks with one consumer group may have the opposite impact on another group. Pre-test your marketing initiatives before going all out with them in the market.

Collect adequate information about your customer group to communicate with individuals in the group on a personal level to make your messages more effective. Conduct local background checks before talking to a customer group. Surveys can be very valuable in creating and analyzing your marketing efforts.
Most importantly, live the life of your customers before marketing to them.

Online Multicultural Marketing

An IDC report predicted that more than one billion people had gotten access to the Internet by the end of 2007. Thus, the Internet can be an extremely effective tool for reaching your customers in any part of the world.

Your career as a multicultural marketer can earn you a name and fame if you keep the following tips in mind while you target your customers through web media:

Use websites in multiple languages to reach multiple groups of customers from different cultures.
Customize images and content used in the websites for each target group.
Preserving your brand is important. To ensure that you do so, make sure you give the same look, color, and feel to each page on your website.
The site should be user-friendly, and customers should find it easy to navigate through. Ensure that the web pages load quickly or else your customers will move on to some other site.

Developing individual marketing strategies and messages for each customer group or culture is impossible and uneconomical. However, it is important to acknowledge the distinct mindsets and buying behaviors of individual groups. If you can bring this balance to your marketing initiatives, you will be in high demand as a multicultural marketer.

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The Tricky Trade of Multicultural Marketing