TransCity

(By Adam Hankinson, TBWA\London)

(This article was published in 2002 in the book ‘Thuis in Nederland, Praktisch handboek voor diversity marketing’ in a Dutch translation)

“Britain is proud to be a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith society. We celebrate and draw strength from our diversity. Our Government has placed human rights and race equality at the heart of its agenda…In our politics, our education policies and through the media, we must challenge ingrained racist and xenophobic attitudes and demonstrate that diversity is at the core of any modern, prosperous and genuinely democratic European society.”

(Speech by former FCO Minister of State, Peter Hain, at the conference against racism: ‘All different, all equal’, Strasbourg, 13th October, 2000.)

Today, the United Kingdom is one of the most culturally diverse countries in Europe. Black and Asian ethnic groups make up around 6% of the population, of which the three largest ethnic groups in Britain are Indian, Pakistani and Black Caribbean, numbering 930,000, 580,000 and 531,000 respectively.

As the number of whites in the UK remains almost static, ethnic groups are undeniably thriving, growing at a rate of 2% to 3% a year. In fact, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) estimates that by 2020, ethnic communities will make up 10% of the UK population.

In some areas of the country ethnic minorities are rapidly becoming the majority. A recent study by Interfocus, predicted that by 2011 blacks and South Asians are set to outnumber the white population in half of all London boroughs as well as the cities of Birmingham and Leicester. The CRE also predicts that 40% of urban people under 25 will be black or Asian within this time period.

Over the last year or so there has been some Government and major institutional recognition of this, as initiatives such as the Cultural Diversity Network (CDN) manifesto has committed major broadcasters to set about improving the representation of ethnic minorities in television. Since taking over as director-general of the BBC in early 2000, Greg Dyke, has put much effort into increasing the number of black and Asian people on screen. His multi-million-pound campaign to sign up more ethnic presenters and entertainers, aims at tackling what he describes as the corporation’s “hideously white” image, which was, until recently out of touch with the racial diversity of modern Britain. Similarly, marketers have to re-evaluate their efforts at communicating with ethnic minorities if they want to keep up with what is dubbed as the fastest growing market segment in Britain.

As a target market, ethnic minorities are big business; 25% of ethnic households earn over £30,000 a year, 90% of the 83,200 independently-owned neighbourhood shops in the UK are owned by members of the ethnic community. 23% of Britain’s doctors, 50% of pharmacists, 13% of travel agents, 13% of service industry managers, 24% of restaurant staff and 27% of London Underground staff are of ethnic origin. Indeed, second and third generation Asians living in Britain have been described as the “new middle class”. They are, on average, more technologically shrewd than whites, the rate at which they start up businesses is much higher than whites, they are upwardly mobile, with a high standard of education and high disposable income. Above all, they normally see themselves as British rather than Asian.

A recent study by Interfocus, predicted that by 2011 blacks and South Asians are set to outnumber the white population in half of all London boroughs as well as the cities of Birmingham and Leicester.

One only has to look at the recent explosion of specialist ethnic media in the UK to see this reflection of the importance of ethnic minorities in British society:

There are around 200 press titles, of which there are over 100 Asian publications. The label of ‘ethnic’ here is extremely loose though, because as mentioned by Pranay Bhimjiani “these titles are effective in targeting the Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Arab, Chinese and Afro/Caribbean communities, although Jewish and Irish communities are less well catered for.” There are a number of English-language papers, including The Asian, The Asian Age and Asian Times. The publishers of Asian Times, the Ethnic Media Group (EMG), also publish the weekly tabloid Eastern Eye (a ten year old title targeting a younger audience), which is the nation’s best-selling Asian newspaper, with circulation figures of 35,000. Des Pardes, which targets the Punjabi community, also enjoys a high circulation of 30,000.

Specialist language titles are widely available for all the South Asian, Arab and Chinese communities, as well as niche youth magazines, which are also available for the Asian and African/Caribbean communities. The black population has an equally strong print media as Asians, catering for its own communities’ needs, with publications such as The Voice, New Nation and Caribbean Times.

There are five principal Asian radio stations, the largest of which is Sunrise, based in Greater London, which commands a respectable audience of 300,000, according to RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research). Manchester’s ASR (Asian Sound Radio) and Birmingham’s XL both reach approximately 250,000 people. The largest Afro-Caribbean network is Choice FM, based in London and Birmingham.

It is reported that the competition for customers is fierce, with 30 ethnic TV stations, of which there are between 15-18 Asian TV channels, up from just five a couple of years back. This expansion of niche programming has been particularly helped along through the advent of digital television and its considerably lower broadcasting costs. Also, the fact that a channel can launch with just 25,000 subscribers, means that the targeting of programming can be extremely precise.

Zee TV, the largest Asian TV channel, carries Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali news amongst its varied programming of soaps, sitcoms, ‘Bollywood blockbusters’ and cricket. It currently has 190,000 subscriber households in the UK and Europe, and is constantly launching more specialist channels such as Music Asia and Alpha Bangala (a Bengali language channel). Monica Dalton, chief executive of Zee TV UK, explains that; “We have lots of local programming, and we’ve taken care to be interactive with programmes that respond to letters and queries from viewers.” It is this interactive nature of the medium that underlies its current popularity and burgeoning potential for reaching ethnic communities.

B4U (Bollywood for you) and Star TV are the other major channels targeting the British Asian community, while Sony SET broadcasts straight from India. Other more specialist channels include Prime TV, which is highly regarded among the Pakistani community, and Reminiscent TV, which caters for Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu and Hindu communities. In contrast to this wide Asian choice of channels, there are only two “black” cable TV channels in the UK – BVTV and the Afro-Caribbean channel.

Household penetration of satellite and cable TV is far higher among the South Asian population than anyone else, particularly among Indians, where one in two households have access to it, compared to one in four white households. The UK black population also has a somewhat higher access to satellite and cable than whites, which reflects their younger and slightly more urban location with better access to cable services. Consequently, television is an area of vast potential in the ethnic-marketing arena, even if the vast proliferation of Asian networks has meant that penetration of most channels is rather limited.

The Web has recently emerged as an essential medium for reaching ethnic communities. This is an area where the black public has particularly benefited from the fact that English is almost always their first language, or is at least understood well, as opposed to the South Asian and Chinese communities who encounter larger language and cultural barriers. When one considers that a thorough survey conducted by the newspaper New Nation, found that a staggering two-thirds of the black community feel that mainstream media in the UK have no relevance to them, it seems this online mode fills a considerable hole in the market. In fact, one in three black Britons have a PC at home and 15% have an email address. Within the Indian population, this figure raises to almost one in two, whereas only one in approximately five whites has a computer.

Blacknet.co.uk, which has been running since 1996, lays claim to 100,000 audited page impressions par day and acts as a fundamental mediator of many areas of black society, from news and sport to recipes and entertainment. It has also acted as such an efficient recruitment agent that it has been used by the Government to market the New Deal for job seekers. BlackBritain.co.uk claims to get half a million page impressions per month. This has been heaven scent to advertisers such as the Army, who have used the site to increase black recruits, and Monster who have offered 6,000 jobs online, as well as the likes of Virgin and WHSmith, which have used it as an effective e-commerce portal for CD’s and books.

Ethnic communications have not exactly been readily embraced by the advertising landscape in Britain. Agencies have tended to think ethnic media is hard work.

But ethnic communications have not exactly been readily embraced by the advertising landscape in Britain. Agencies have tended to think ethnic media is hard work, and they have only recently began breaking out of the somewhat entrenched view that ethnic communities can be reached more easily through mainstream media. Race for Opportunity research describes the situation: “The reluctance of many to deal with the race issue, coupled with a view that it may be counter productive to segment a market based on ethnic origin alone, has up until now, meant that most companies have yet to grapple with the question of how to market successfully to this important and growing audience in the UK.”

Of Britain’s 59 million inhabitants, 3.6 million are non-white and nearly fifty percent of them live in Greater London. Compared to the US, where almost 80 million people describe themselves as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino or Asian, this seems like a fairly insignificant number. Consequently, in America there has been much more demand for companies to develop multiethnic marketing agendas. For example, AT&T, Coca Cola, Nabisco and Sears have all run dedicated marketing campaigns that specifically target up to ten ethnic minority markets. Because companies in Britain have generally not perceived this level of exigency for well-developed multicultural marketing plans, there has been inadequate strategic insight into the nature of the ethnic marketing market, which has put the UK some way behind the US in this discipline.

The intriguing fact is that the ever-increasing combined spending power of ethnic minorities in Britain has been currently put between £12-£15 billion annually. Considering that the majority of this ethnic audience is pre-family or in the early stages of one, this potentially represents enormous market muscle, which businesses seemingly cannot afford to ignore anymore. Black and Asian people generally drive the same cars, shop at the same supermarkets, eat similar food and wear similar clothes as anyone else in Britain, so they just want some more evidence in their own media that more mainstream brands are recognising them as an important consumer group.

A problem is that although most media formats are available to marketers for targeting niche ethnic groups, over 90% of ethnic media are not audited, unlike mainstream media, which can understandably be somewhat of a deterrent for some advertisers. Hence, specialist Asian channels, such as Zee TV, are not measured by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB). Similarly, the National Readership Survey (NRS), which provides the most comprehensive estimates of the number and nature of the people who read UK newspapers and consumer magazines, gives media planners and buyers little guidance about using ethnic publications for their campaigns. This poses an apparent problem with the accountability of ethnic media, and advertising agencies will prefer to spend their clients’ money where there is clear answerability.

In planning marketing campaigns, brands have been nervous about targeting ethnic groups, because even the most comprehensive consumer research tools, such as Target Group Index (TGI), which is the world’s leading provider of consumer goods, media and marketing research surveys run by British Marketing Research Bureau (BMRB), do not, by and large, cover ethnic minority consumers separately. It is apparent that although there is a wealth of specialist ethnic media, it is very hard for advertisers to plan campaigns with confidence.

Popular ethnic magazines such as Pride, which are equally stylish black magazines as, let’s say, the more mainstream high-ad rate Arena, are normally excluded from major advertisers’ agendas, even though it is a lot cheaper to place ads in them. This is not because the industry is racist or even anti-racist, but because advertisers see the market in purely colour-blind terms. Mainstream magazines are used because the advertising industry is ruthless and does not want to miss out on any possible consumers that it may risk losing by opting for the ghetto marketing approach.

But looking at the other side of the coin, a clear advantage that some clued-in marketers, such as the likes of BT have picked up on, is that Asian press tends to have a much higher pass-on-readership due to the larger average size of Asian households. The average number of residents in Pakistani and Bangladeshi households is 4.5 persons and for Indians it is 3.7, in comparison to whites’ average 2.4 people per home. The right advertisements in appropriate ethnic titles can trigger the kind of encouraging word of mouth that mainstream titles will find very hard to deliver.

Asians tend to make use of their media in larger communities too, which means that they are more loyal to their TV and radio channels and programmes. Zee TV does well out of this community-sense as it attract over 1 million viewers in around a third of all Asian homes in Europe, despite its number of subscribers. With this community sense in mind, the country’s first regional terrestrial channel – called MATV, has recently been launched in Leicestershire, the county with the highest concentration of Indians within the UK.

Because ethnic minorities are a thriving, growing market in urban centres, it is easier for marketers to reach them en mass more effectively. Outdoor media and direct mail can be used to good effect.

Consumer marketers have taken some confidence from public service strategies at targeting ethnic groups. All the Armed Forces have tried to increase their representation of ethnic minorities through coherent advertising campaigns. The Army, for example, has faced criticism in the past because only 3% of its ranks were from ethnic minorities. Last year, in a high-profile recruitment drive, Operation Kenya, the Army used the likes of Naseem Hamed to promote themselves as a “dynamic, modern, youth organisation that offers diversity.” Also, the Navy ran a campaign targeting parents of potential recruits, saying that the Navy was something to be proud of.

The Home Secretary, Jack Straw told the Metropolitan Police that it should recruit an extra 5662 officers from ethnic minority backgrounds over ten years, to meet targets set by the Mcpherson Report on the unfortunate racial-oriented death of Stephen Lawrence in 1998. Already since then the Metropolitan Police has ran successful campaigns to get rid of any stigma of black and Asian people joining the force.

As mentioned by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, there are more and more black and Asian celebrities in mainstream ads, with the likes of Meera Syal, Ian Wright and Frank Bruno appearing recently. By now, the power of marketing has caused these celebrities to be seen by most Britons as established British characters, and not as ‘ethnic minorities’. On this note, “ordinary Britons of colour are now believed to wash clothes, use sanitary towels and go to the Halifax.” The Halifax has just run a very successful campaign using a likeable, bespectacled black employee who sings along in an appealing manner.

While some marketers, like Halifax and the Armed Forces, attempt to reach a collective ethnic populace, such as Indian or African communities, in blanket style, they rarely go as far as distinguishing between the various sub-communities, like, for example, Punjabis and Bengalis from India, or Nigerians and Jamaicans from Africa. This is something that there is huge scope for and has paid off for those companies that have dared to invest in it, such as British Telecom.

BT has, for the past three years, led the way in communicating with the various ethnic communities. It has seen a massive increase in the uptake of its telephone and internet packages among Asians, since it introduced a telephone helpline offering information about its range of deals in a number of South Asian languages. The service was famously marketed using humorous radio advertising campaigns, print campaigns in the corresponding languages of five Asian titles, as well as its television exposure through Cricket World Cup sponsorship, which ultimately resulted in up to 1,500 calls to the helpline each week.

As mentioned by Carol Lamey, advertising manager of BT Retail, “Talk Together is a relevant product for Asian communities because they make a lot of international and local calls, so it makes sense to tap into their individual cultures.” In the past, companies would just put a black face in their ads to make themselves look good, whereas now they are coming round to the realisation that they need to do this to get results, for themselves as well as the consumer. By communicating directly with ethnic consumers, companies are not only guaranteeing themselves a larger voice, but also increased loyalty among the specified groups. Marketers in the past have worried that such fragmentation stimulates divisions among communities, but in truth, people like to be recognised as part of their community, so fragmenting communications in order to reach various niches acknowledges the existence of them and their buying power.

With certain products such as specialised beauty treatments and hair products, this makes sense, because of the differences in the nature of skin and hair across races. Mintel reveals that black women spend four times as much on hair treatments and products as women of Eastern descent. In fact, the ethnic cosmetic and toiletries market is expected to grow in value from £77.2m in 1999 to £177.8m in 2004. For such products, it is not hard to spot the benefits of advertising in more culture-specific publications such as Black Beauty, Hair and Pride. For example, the September 2001 issue of Pride, a magazine for women of colour, contained six beauty and hair ads targeted specifically at the black community. Apart from music and some fashion, other products are generally absent though.

Because ethnic minorities are a thriving, growing market in urban centres, it is easier for marketers to reach them en mass more effectively. Outdoor media and direct mail can be used to good effect, with the likes of hair care brand Dark and Lovely having run a campaign on bus shelters in targeted areas. Western Union also promoted its global money transfer services through poster sites as well as distributing branded bandannas at last year’s Notting Hill Carnival.

In certain arenas, especially in youth fields of music and sport, brands hold deeper meaning for certain groups of ethnic minorities. For example, the UK garage dance music scene which has its roots in black underground club culture, or street basketball which used to be more of a ghetto activity played by impoverished blacks, have now made their way into the UK mainstream. They still hold certain badges, such as baggy clothes and africanised jewellery, as well as proud-to-be-black-attitudes that identify them with the black community. On the other hand, the process of acculturation causes parts of this culture to become so ingrained in the mainstream, that they are also acquiring more luxurious paraphernalia, usually associated with the white middle-class. Paul Castro, founder of the black entertainment website Blackserve.co.uk, says “You’ll find that more Moet & Chandon is drunk by blacks at garage clubs than at Ascot.”

Ethnic media is comparatively cheap – therefore an influential group such as blacks is cheap to target, especially since they are acting as iconic models for many other groups too. Paul Castro remarks that “there are simply so many people out there who are acolytes of the black ‘look’” . This is precisely why black culture cannot be underestimated as to the part it plays in the ascension of ‘street’ sports brands such as Tommy Hilfigger, Nike and Adidas. In the fashion industry this is a well-established strategy. For example, Armani has used the fashionable model Oluci, whereas Ralf Lauren used Tyson Beckford.

FUBU, now known as the ultimate urban sportswear brand in Britain, has used a long list of ‘cool’ international black icons including the likes of LL Cool J, Will Smith, Lennox Lewis and celebrity DJ’s such as Funkmaster Flex. Evidence of this mainstream iconisation of blacks can be seen in the way that the brand’s strategic targeting of the black market, has rapidly enabled FUBU to become huge among the mainstream in Britain. Other brands, such as Gap have also increased sales dramatically since they started using hip blacks. Diesel has recently run an effective advertising campaign using purely funky Black/Caribbean models in their own social environments, whereas Nike has been running its clever ‘Ball Control Dance’ using stylish black sportsmen.

The usage of both blacks and Asians to promote mainstream products is not that new a tactic, but compared to the US, efforts at communicating with ethnic minorities are at quite a nascent stage in Britain, despite the huge range of ethnic media available. In spite of the obvious problems in the past with the lack of auditing of ethnic media and lack of previous consumer research into ethnic minority markets, it seems that these issues are now beginning to be given more consideration as companies realise the huge potential that these markets hold for their services.

The ever-expanding ethnic media landscape through the proliferation of the net and interactive television has opened up a great opportunity for niche marketing. The web and cable TV are helping to bring specific ethnic communities together, and have already been used effectively as avenues for job recruitment, health advertising and increasing the image of ethnics in public services. Consumer brands are just awaking to the potential spending power and huge diversity of ethnic minorities in Britain, and the scene is set to largely build on what was started by advertisers such as BT, HSBC and Virgin.

Nwankwo and Lindridge sum it up succinctly ;

“Ethnic marketing may prove to be the dominant paradigm for seeking competitive advantage in niche or saturated markets and/or for developing customer intimacy in new markets.”

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References

1) Office of National Statistics (ONS) – (2000)
2) The Sunday Times, (14th January 2001)
3) Pranay Bhimjiani, Ethnics respond to tailored adverts – Brand Strategy (3 September 2001)
4) Richenda Wilson, ‘The Race Is On’, Marketing Week, (12 October,2000)
5) Richenda Wilson, ‘The Race Is On’, Marketing Week, (12 October,2000)
6) James Curtis, ‘Think Ethnic, act ethnic’, Marketing (7 May, 2001)
7) Mintel, Special Report, Ethnic Lifestyles, 1999, and a survey of 2,100 Britons by Peoplescience.com
8) Race for Opportunity (rfo) research (2000)
9) Race for Opportunity.
10) Special Report, Ethnic Lifestyles, Mintel (1999)
11) Mark Bainbridge, the Army’s first civilian marketing director, Marketing (10th February 2000)
12) Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Are ad men out of touch with black consumers?, The Independent (13th March, 2001)
13) Pranay Bhimjiani, Ethnics respond to tailored adverts, Brand Strategy (3 September 2001)
14) James Curtis, Think ethnic, act ethnic, Marketing (7th May 2001)
15) The Black Beauty Products Market, Mintel (30th November 1999).
16) Richenda Wilson, The Race is On, Marketing Week (12th October, 2000)
17) Facing up to Race, M&M Europe, (November 2000)
18) Facing up to Race, M&M Europe, (November 2000)
19) Nwankwo and Lindridge. Marketing to ethnic minorities in Britain. Journal of Marketing Practice (1998) Vol. 4. No. 7

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