The August 2008 isue of the German business magazine Business Spotlight includes an interview with TransCity’s René Romer. Excerpts from this interview can be read below.
Are demographic changes reflected in marketing in Europe?
Demographic changes are often not yet reflected in marketing in Europe. Too many marketers are not yet fully aware of how the huge demographic changes that have taken place in the past few decades impact the market. Most still consider the average consumer to be white, so they develop and implement their marketing and communications concepts accordingly. Nevertheless, ethnic marketing is gaining ground in Europe today. Or at least, targeting people with ethnic-minority backgrounds is gaining ground - whether these consumers are targeted from an ethnic marketing, a diversity marketing or an urban marketing strategy. One major brand that targets youngsters with ethnic-minority backgrounds in Europe is Nike. For Nike, insights of ethnic-minority youngsters in Europe’s major cities are essential when developing pan-European marketing and communications programs. Another example is the Dutch health insurer Agis, which has opened service centers in Turkey and
Morocco for its Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch clients.
What reasons do you see for resistance to ethnic marketing?
While it is the profession of marketers to open their eyes and to look ‘outside’ at what’s happening in the market, we still find that too many decision makers often make decisions based on their own experiences, their own lifestyles and those of their children. We also find that, in market research throughout Europe, ethnic-minority consumers are rarely selected as respondents, although it is a very easy start for every marketer to simply include consummers with ethnic-minority backgrounds as an integral part of their focus groups or respondents in quantitative research. Insights coming out of this can easily be used to make sure that the increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse European population is better reflected in marketing and communications concepts, including concepts for the mainstream market. It is certainly not our experience that marketers are unwilling, it is just that ethnic-cultural diversity is not top of mind for most marketers.
How do you approach diversity marketing?
At TransCity, we often start focusing on the common grounds of the diverse population. What do ethnic Germans, Dutch, British or French have in common with the local migrant populations from Turkey, India, Algeria or Suriname when it comes to your products and services? Are we able to develop marketing and communications concepts based on those common grounds rather than on the differences between communities? If we can do that, including people with ethnic-minority backgrounds can sometimes even be done on a cost neutral manner, although in communications we still have to compile a media mix that is more diverse than the media mix most advertisers compile today.
On the other hand, developing new marketing concepts based on the insights of specific communities with ethnic-minority backgrounds, can also be very effective. In the United States, the Home Depot launched a Hispanic paint line of 70 different colors, capturing the richness of colors influenced from Latin America and the Caribbean. In Europe however, most major brands do not yet develop new marketing concepts to better reflect the ethnically and culturally diverse market: the initiative often is taken by new business start ups in fields like telecom, banking and other areas.