Challenges and Opportunities for Ethnic Marketing

Will ethnic marketing become more or less important in the future?

Many people may start by thinking that globalization means averaging everybody. My view is that this is exactly the opposite of the reality, because globalization infers that you have access to much more information that you can compare and so on. I don’t see that people are going to subscribe to a standardization approach whereby everybody is supposed to be the same and behave the same way. On the contrary, we have already seen traces of people that want personalization, customization, individualization, and technology assists in achieving these ambitions. So I believe that ethnic marketing may become even more relevant in the future, even early on.

Paulo Rita

It’s growing in importance.

Kim Fam

More important. Sure you can develop a campaign and then you can see it in English or see it in Malaysian or see it in Chinese or click and click and click the different divisions, so you can do that easily … But it’s not just a matter of translating opportunities or messages. You can adapt it. Like if it’s a message in Chinese I wouldn’t know what it is saying, so it won’t affect me.

Michel Laroche

In terms of whether the importance of minority ethnic groups is going to disappear–no, it will never disappear …. What we need to understand is: what social roles are operational and when will ethnicity play a role in how those consumer needs are satisfied in terms of consumer wants, whether it’s worthwhile to develop a separate marketing strategy. I think there are cases of companies that should, but I would advocate other companies go the other way and say–let’s try to identify the similarities and let’s focus on that. For example, when it comes to high technology products, culture doesn’t matter that much. Take your Samsung TV, why should it look different, like, in different cultures? Maybe colours have different meanings and maybe the pricing will be a little bit different, but it’s going to be essentially the same product.

Mark Cleveland

If it was not for race, the internet would contribute to reduce migrants’ acculturation problems, because they would be able to improve their English and learn about the ways of the host country, before they actually migrate to that country. So it can be argued that the importance of understanding different ethnic groups for marketing purposes is likely to be reduced through technology. Hence the MEGs become less important in that sense.

Chankon Kim

Our parents teach us their values and attitudes, what is good, what is acceptable behaviour, the aesthetics of life. Perhaps we don’t forget those things regardless of whether we migrate to another country or stay in our home country. Ethnic groups will remain different from other ethnic groups.

Ikuo Takahashi