ABSTRACT

Unabating mobility of populations across national frontiers has become as much a hot and challenging issue globally as it is to Britain. Peculiarly to Britain, its adventurous history, especially in Africa and Asia, positioned the country as a magnate for people from the erstwhile colonies. The consequence is that Britain is discernibly multi-ethnic and multicultural, demographically. Coupled with the shifting contours of colour, the concept of creed, ethnicity and culture is the heterogeneity of the market system, evoked and orchestrated through marketing aphorisms. Exacerbated by the growing population of immigrants from far-flung territories, the resulting ethnoscapes requires that marketing must keep track of the behavioural signals and attitudinal attributes overtly or covertly emitted by these groups. Therefore, attention is now, more than ever, focused on ethnic marketing and the imperatives of developing successful marketing strategies to serve the needs of ethnically diverse markets. In this regard, ethnic marketing is gaining space in contemporary marketing literature as marketers struggle to cope with the increasing diversity of markets. However, as both conceptual and empirical boundaries are pressed, the inadequacies of conventional marketing paradigms are constantly exposed.