The Face of The Mainstream
Would you say that your work on multiculturalism can be used as a lens through which cleavages underlying the mainstream demographic can be displayed?
I am going to interview the director of the US census bureau for the Advertising Research Foundation. The 2010 census is going to confirm that these emerging majorities – Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other groups that used to be on the periphery – have moved to the center economically and culturally.
When I wrote The New Mainstream there was no measurement of the new mainstream because there was no perceived need to measure the commonalities or differences across ethnic groups.
What’s happened since then is that the critical mass of these groups now represents such a big opportunity; with this emergence of multicultural audiences driving growth in what used to be called the “general market” or the “old mainstream”, companies are saying, “Wow, we’ve got to invest in research to understand this.”
I was involved in a million-dollar study at Warner Brothers, another one at Time Warner and there are others going on everywhere now [exploring this]. For the first time there’s qualitative validation and measurement of these markets and how these different consumer segments interact with each other, how they interact with media, how they relate to brands, how they use media differently from other groups, as well as similarities between them.
As you move through different age segments, as you move through different ethnic or racial segments, you’re going to find overlap, and other places where there are schisms. There are places where certain messages or realities or attitudes or behaviors do not play across different groups, but in other cases they do. That three-dimensional view of the market is increasingly where things are going and it’s why I get tapped by everyone from Time Warner to Pepsi to the Ad Research Foundation — because it’s finally impossible to ignore this.
Some would have it that increasing multiculturalism lends itself to greater fickleness among consumers. What’s your take?
A few years ago, you would go to a portal and it would have a certain identity and serve you certain kinds of content. Now, everybody makes up their own portal. Blacks, Hispanics and other groups increasingly zigzag between brands. It’s not so much that they’re fickle, it’s that they will use brands, media and entertainment as components to assemble the world that reflects them, their interests and the people around them. That world can be very diverse and very multidimensional or it can be more specific — it just completely depends on who you are.
For that reason brands have to work extra hard because they can’t assume that once they have someone they’re going to keep them. They have to earn that connection every day, every click, every show, every book, every minute.
At the end of the day, is it easier or more difficult for businesses to tailor marketing strategies to appeal to the new mainstream, as compared to the old mainstream?
I’m tempted to say it was easier in the old days because everything was simpler in the old days. Look at a few episodes of Mad Men if you want a peak at what that was like. But that day is gone. I think the only question that’s relevant to companies now is do they want to grow their business in the world that exists? What they definitely can not do is pretend that it’s business as usual or apply the old approaches to the new reality, they won’t be in business for long if they do that.
