Multicultural Marketing in 2021: Strategy, Best Practices, and Campaigns

Multicultural marketing is changing the face of the world as Gen Z is a diverse generation. The modern-day consumer belongs to a wide array of cultures, languages, values, and communication styles. Therefore, brands need to adapt to multicultural marketing strategies to target potential consumers. 

According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), multicultural consumers are the fastest-growing segment in the U.S, as 40% of U.S consumers come from various ethnic backgrounds. 

If you are a business wondering how to use multicultural marketing to your advantage, this post is for you. You will learn about the best practices, strategies with examples of how some of the world’s best brands did it. 

What is Multicultural Marketing?

Multicultural marketing is to recognize different ethnicities and cultures in your consumer base. The next step is to use specific aspirations and motivations to enter them into the sales funnel. This marketing strategy further explores the subgroups, including gender, age, sexual identity, disability, and religion of the target audience. 

However, as a brand, you must refrain from stereotyping cultures and gain a genuine understanding of their consumers’ culture. This will help address the target audience’s needs by exploring their cultural and socio-economic background. 

Multicultural Marketing Strategies in 2021

Here are four strategies that help your business tap into the multicultural market. 

1. Developing an All-Inclusive Marketing Model

Modern-day consumers demand diversity in how a brand represents its products and services. Therefore, you must build a multicultural marketing model to connect with consumers through an authentic cultural lens. 

To strike an emotional chord with the target audience, create what appeals to them and identify with their root values. 

2. Exploring Social Networks

Social networks are the best platforms to find a multicultural target audience. If your brand has not explored this avenue yet, it is about to get on board. However, the trick is to determine which social media platform will work best for your company. 

The choice of social media marketing may vary by the target audience’s demographics. For instance, you are a business offering retirement plans. In this case, Facebook and LinkedIn are the best options as you can find working professionals from all age groups on both networks. 

On the other hand, if you are a brand targeting teenagers, social networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok are ideal options. 

3. Creating a Consumer Persona

Determining the needs and wants of your consumers will help create consumers personas. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow you to analyze each marketing campaign’s performance in real-time to learn about your consumers’ behavior. 

You can even align multicultural marketing campaigns to focus on specific demographics, including age, race, gender, cultural background, profession, habits, etc. 

4. Engaging with Ethnic Influencers

Influencers are the celebrities of the digital world. These are individuals with a huge following on most social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. One of the most impactful multicultural marketing strategies is to collaborate with ethnic micro-influencers. 

You will get immediate access to the influencers’ target audience without spending on research and analysis. Most importantly, the word-of-mouth recommendation from these influencers has strong acceptance amongst their ethnic groups. 

Consumers from a certain cultural background usually trust the opinions of the trusted influencers and people from their community. Therefore, leveraging the skills and authenticity of these influencers is the most effective multicultural marketing strategy to promote your brand amongst a diverse target audience. 

Best Practices to Create Multicultural Marketing

Multicultural marketing helps both local and global brands to build a relationship with their target audience. Here are five best practices to launch a multicultural marketing campaign. 

1. Analyzing Data

Analyze historical and real-time data in your data management and customer relationship management systems. This will not only allow you to identify diverse audiences but also establish what appeals to them. 

You can even learn about the time of the day, month, or year a specific group from a multicultural audience is most likely to buy. Knowing when to target each subgroup within your diverse consumer base can help build an informed multicultural marketing campaign. 

2. Collaboration with Focus Groups and Third-party Research

Your internal CRMs only offer limited data based on your past interactions. Therefore, you must seek assistance from third-party research groups to highlight opportunities on a broader scale. You can also collaborate with focus groups to run A/B tests to identify which product traits, visual elements, and product traits appeal the most to each group you wish to target. 

3. Choose the Right Medium

You must choose the right marketing channels to target your consumers. For instance, if you target senior citizens amongst your multicultural consumer base, print media is the best marketing channel. 

On the other hand, TikTok and Snapchat will be effective marketing mediums to target Gen Z. If you are unsure about which channels may work best for your brand, you can ask researchers and focus groups to identify them for you. 

4. Diversity and Inclusion

You must prioritize diversity and inclusion when launching a marketing campaign. This is critical, and you must ensure that a marketing message directed towards a specific consumer group must not offend another. For this, you need a team of decision-makers with multiple voices from different cultures, gender, age, location, and socio-economic background. 

5. Analyze, Learn, Adapt, Execute and Repeat 

Multicultural marketing is not a one-off exercise but an ongoing process. You must constantly analyze your campaign and monitor data to find out what does or does not work. You can learn from the findings, adapt the marketing strategy and re-launch the campaign accordingly. 

This cycle never stops and helps you build a more efficient marketing campaign. You can use this strategy not just based on consumers’ culture but also their language, location, and other demographics.  Remember, it is alright to tweak your campaign’s message slightly and re-execute. 

However, your key savior here is the real-time marketing campaign performance for accurate and abrupt actions. 

Brands Who Got It Right

While several brands have executed multicultural marketing campaigns immaculately, here are 4 of the world’s top brands from different industries to get it right. 

1. Adidas

Adidas’s “Calling all Creators” advertisement is a classic example. The ad began with a roundtable full of diverse and well-known celebrities, including Lionel Messi, Aaron Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, and many others. The idea was to bring the best talent of different domains to the table, talking about how creativity and diversity go hand in hand. 

The ad resonated with the audience as it said creativity is a mindset not bound by borders, race, or gender. Everyone is equal, and we are here to create. This helps Adidas tap into a broad spectrum of a multicultural consumer base with a simple message. 

No gimmicks but a simple notion that it is the mindset that counts irrespective of your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliations, and industries. So, you can see that all you need is a simple idea or a message that can resonate with most of your target audience without sounding too salesy. 

2. Adobe

Adobe is one of the most preferred tools used by creators around the world. They launched an ad in 2020 focusing on the next-gen of Black creators. The ad highlighted the work of 12 black creators with the powerful message in the end “Black creativity cannot be painted in a single stroke.” 

According to Anne Lewnes, CMO and Executive Vice President at Adobe, seeing a creator like yourself is absolutely crucial for the upcoming generation. Therefore, we take pride in celebrating creativity from diverse spectrums on a global scale. 

3. Coca Cola

Remember Coca-Cola’s campaign ad “Together is Beautiful?” This advertisement is a classic example of multicultural marketing as it targets consumers from different ethnicities and walks of life. The original version from 2014 had racially and culturally diverse singers doing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” in different languages. 

The ad also depicted different locations within America, such as New York City’s Chinatown, the Pacific Ocean, and the plateaus in Utah, etc. You can even see a Muslim girl in a scarf, people camping, and a group of friends from diverse backgrounds sitting together. The idea was to portray the face of modern and multicultural America. 

4. Proctor and Gamble (P&G)

Typically P&G ads go an extra mile than just promoting their products. They use marketing campaigns to create powerful storylines and spread messages about having difficult conversations. You will see a sense of equality, diversity, and identity in their ads. 

For instance, their Emmy-winning ad back in 2018 known as “The Talk” was hard-hitting and relevant. The multicultural marketing aspect highlighted “Proud sponsor of Moms” and “Black is Beautiful.” 

This ad depicts the talk about racism every African American mother has with her children. If you watch the ad, it does not shy away from addressing a tough and sensitive issue. It really invites every to join in the conversation and more openly discuss the pressing issues that have been haunting African American families throughout the country. 

Conclusion

Multicultural marketing is the future of brand recognition. Therefore, companies must explore how they can tap into different cultural markets all at once. Thanks to digital marketing that has turned the entire world into a single consumer base. You can use the above-mentioned strategies and best practices to create your own multicultural marketing campaign in 2021 and beyond.

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