Think Multicultural

Last week AdAge published an article basically stating that most marketers still do not understand multicultural markets. If you have a subscription to AdAge, you can read the article here.

The article only reinforces what I have already known about the decision-makers at large U.S. companies with significant ad budgets. Basically, they all know multicultural markets are a big opportunity and important for the success of their businesses, but the next tactical step is not so clear to them. This is evidenced by a statistic in the article that explains who these marketers typically reach out to for help. According to the Heidrick & Struggles / Brandiosity survey, of the 60 companies surveyed:
-58% use general market research firms
-51% use multicultural agencies
-42% use general market agencies
-35% multicultural research firms

While it makes sense to reach out to research firms first, the fact that GENERAL MARKET agencies are so often tapped for help decipher multicultural markets leads me to believe that there is a lot of confusion about multicultural specialists among marketers.

Are we not doing a good job of creating awareness of the 100+ Hispanic agencies, the dozens of African American and Asian agencies, or the countless specialist multicultural research and marketing firms out there? I wonder.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under multicultural, advertising, marketing, hispanic, research, african american, press, asian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.