It’s More Vital Than Ever for Marketers to Target Ethnic Consumers, but With an Approach That’s Updated for the 21st Century
At the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency in “Mad Men,” Pete Campbell urges a client to “take a look at the Negro market.” In the TV show the year is 1961. It’s a reminder that the push to understand and target consumers on the basis of their ethnic identity goes back decades.
Throughout that history, multicultural marketing advocates were hamstrung by the relatively small number of minority consumers and media outlets with national reach, as well as a lack of corporate expertise. There was little infrastructure for execution or metrics of evaluation and, of course, there was the issue of discrimination.
These issues remain, but to a far lesser degree. Changes in demographics, marketing tools and corporate expertise have made multicultural marketing more relevant than ever. In fact, multicultural marketing, particularly targeting Hispanics, has grown at a faster rate than overall marketing in the past 10 years .
Read the entire article at Ad Age.