All Articles Tagged "asian"
Crossing Cultures and The Line: Is Multicultural Advertising Effective?
by Makula Dunbar
When thinking about advertising, the process behind showcasing a great product or service to mass consumers seems simple. First off, it helps to actually have a great universal product. Second, it’s strategizing and creating either a funny, identifiable or emotional message. Lastly, it’s placing the ad on TV, radio, print or the World Wide Web. Sound about right? Not exactly.
In actuality, advertising can be complex. Add a cultural approach to the equation, even more so. Unfortunately, a three-part checklist won’t do the trick. If only each and every consumer was one in the same, what an easy task it would be to get messages across. However, with an estimated U.S. Asian population of 15.5 million and a Hispanic population of 48.4 million, there’s no denying ethnicity and culture is a prevalent staple in everyday life—that deserves recognition.
“The number of corporations that do specific ethnic advertising is still relatively small,” says Burrell Communication co-CEO Fay Ferguson. “Making communications programs beamed at these audiences is not only necessary, but critical.”
McDonald’s Corporation —one of Burrell’s long-standing clients — is an example of one that outsources, allowing the agency to create advertisements for the African-American community.
Hard to Reach
With recent studies, advertisements and agencies pushing cross-cultural communications, it’s a blur as to what multicultural tactics are even effective. Should agencies stretch one message or slogan across cultures without alteration? Should advertisers reach out to individual ethnicities tailoring their brand so that’s it’s culturally relevant? Is it absolutely necessary for advertisers to reach out to every market?
“It’s definitely important for companies to understand that the Latino community is growing. The Asian community is growing as well and if they don’t tap into these communities, they’re going to find themselves in a very small segment in the actual market,” said Alfonso Covarrubias, creative director at multicultural advertising agency Maya.
Multiracial Groups Better Off than Blacks, Still Segregated
To those singing praises of what a desegregated melting pot America is today, Pamela R. Bennett, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, says we haven’t come as far as they may think. Although the growth of multiracial Americans suggests greater racial tolerance, there is still racial segregation among these groups, her new study has found.
Using where people live as a symbol of their social status, Bennett studied the residential location of people who identified themselves with more than one racial group when filling out their 2000 and 2010 census forms. For both years, Bennett found that the social position of multiracial groups falls between blacks and whites, but multiracial groups have their own racial breakdowns. There was a lesser degree of segregation among people who are both black and white when compared to those who only identified as black; yet the black-white multiracials appear to be more segregated than Asian-white or American Indian–white multiracials across various segregation measures.
“For patterns of segregation in 2000, taking socioeconomic status into account does not change that picture,” Bennett said. “So while some scholars and activists view official recognition of multiracial identities as a movement toward the deconstruction of race, I caution against such an optimistic narrative for now.”
While it isn’t necessarily surprising to the black community that those mixed without any African ancestry would be higher up on the social totem pole, it knocks a bit of steam out of arguments suggesting multiracial people are a sea of harmoniously blended faces all subjected to the same issues.
Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.
