ABSTRACT

The increasing diversity of the global marketplace drives marketing efforts across numerous countries, cultures, and subcultures. The marketer’s challenge is to make advertisements relevant to as many people as possible, without offending or alienating others who might “mistakenly” see the ads. In the process of creating targeted advertisements for multicultural marketplaces, marketers look for meaningful characteristics by which to divide a single heterogeneous market into separate homogeneous consumer segments that may be courted more effectively. Almost without exception, these characteristics have been those that are relatively rare within the overall market and that are meaningful to the individual consumer. Distinctiveness theory (e.g., McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976; McGuire, McGuire, & Winton, 1979) provides insight into why such numerically rare but meaningful consumer characteristics have been so successful as bases for segmentation as well as into how targeted advertisements work.