From dim sum to doughnuts: people in today's global village are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than by their age or generation
Baxter, David. Marketing Magazine. Toronto: Jun 3, 2002. Vol. 107, Iss. 22; pg. 16 Abstract (Summary)
 

The reality of the marketplace is that consumers are defined by more than their age or the cohort they were born with. The consumer population of Canada has a diversity that is both wide and deep. One dimension of this diversity is ancestry based. Over five million Canadians, 18% of the population, were not born in Canada. Three per cent of the population identify themselves as part of the aboriginal population, and 15% identify themselves as being part of a visible minority.

Contemporary marketing is, fundamentally, multicultural, as consumers live in a multicultural world. Multicultural marketing concentrates on learning about consumers rather than imposing definitions on them. Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when marketing could rely on sloganistic assumptions such as "generational," "ethnic" and "life cycle" uniformity. There may be generational, ethnic and life cycle aspects to a market--one may even argue that consideration of these is a necessary part of marketing research--but one cannot argue that consideration of these aspects alone is sufficient.

Generational marketing has recently been the flavour of the month, with attempts to explain two-thirds of everthing on the basis of the era when people were born. The worst, but not the only, excess of generational marketing has been its obsession with the so-called "baby boom generation," the people born between 1947 and 1966. Generational marketing assumes that everyone within a generation, as they supposedly shared their formative years, is part of a unique "cultural" group that spans a 20-year cohort.

In reality, there is no similarity in consumer behaviour between a 54-year-old wine-loving heterosexual herbalist from Halifax and a 37-year-old gay vegan oil-patch worker from Hinton, Alta., yet both are supposedly part of the same baby-boom market. A 20-year generational cohort is far, far too wide to draw any practical conclusions about market behaviour.

So is a one-year cohort. Tommy Chong of Up in Smoke fame, Gordon Lightfoot of "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" fame, Frank Mahovlich of Hockey Night in Canada fame, Paul Martin of "Finance Minister" fame, and Lucien Bouchard of "Oui" fame were all born in 1938; Joe Clark and Margaret Atwood were born in the following year. No one can seriously argue that a single marketing program would capture the attention of all these peers.

People today are much too specialized in their values, interests, priorities and consumer preferences to be described by the era--be it a 20-year generation or a single-year cohort--when they were born. Marketing based on generations makes as little sense as marketing based on astrological signs.

Life cycle marketing, in contrast, holds that generations are not unique, that all behaviour can be predicated by a person's age: It does not matter who you are, but merely how old you are. The limitations of both generational and life cycle marketing are most clearly shown when those who argue that the baby boom generation is uniquely defined, turn around and argue that as they age their behaviour will follow life cycle patterns similar to those of previous generations.

The reality of the marketplace is that consumers are defined by more than their age or the cohort they were born with. The consumer population of Canada has a diversity that is both wide and deep. One dimension of this diversity is ancestry based. Over five million Canadians, 18% of the population, were not born in Canada. Three per cent of the population identify themselves as part of the aboriginal population, and 15% identify themselves as being part of a visible minority. Only 64% of the Canadian population has a single ethnic origin, with 11% of British ethnic origin, 9% of French ethnic origin, and 43% of single ethnic origin other than British or French. Of the 36% of the population with multiple ethnic origins, 27% have at least one ethnic origin that is neither British nor French. Six and a half million people in Canada have some knowledge of languages other than English or French.

At first glance, this ancestry-based diversity may seem to offer support for what is often termed "ethnic" marketing, of approaching consumers as though their consumption patterns were solely defined by their ancestry. As with life cycle or generational marketing, ethnic marketing grossly oversimplifies the factors that determine consumer behaviour: people, especially people in the global village, are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than they are defined by their age or their generation.

What does determine people's consumer behaviour is their uniqueness in terms of the combination of their heritage, ancestry, age, education, income, life experience and, fundamentally, their values--what they believe in. Consumer behaviour is culturally defined, where culture means values, interests, life styles, beliefs and aspirations. In effective marketing, it is as important that someone is a vegan as it is that they were born in the 20-year period after the Second World War; that they crave power tools as it is that they were born in Guangzhou; that they are fiscal conservatives as it is that they are 26 years old.

Marketing must not only acknowledge the cultural foundation of consumer behaviour, it must also acknowledge that people are multi-, not mono-, cultural. Consumers actively belong to many distinct groups of shared interests, moving fluidly back and forth across the myriad of cultural layers that define contemporary society. At one moment a person's behaviour will be largely influenced by an ancestral context, in another by a peer context, in another by a career context and in another by chance. Today's consumers comfortably switch from hockey to hoops, hip-hop to classical, dim sum to doughnuts, rap to the Rankin Family, without the need of boundaries or borders.

An icon of current consumers is Wide Mouth Mason, a world-class rock band of Saskatoon origin that cannot be categorized by their geographical origins (Saskatchewan), age (in their twenties), music (rock), ancestry (European, Chinese and South Asian) or the fact that a recent tour was sponsored by a condom company.

The fluidity of multicultural consumers does not preclude market research. In fact, it requires it, as marketing must return to the old rule of "know your customers." Rather than imposing definitions of baby boomer, or senior, or ethnic, it is necessary to look at the attributes of the product to be marketed, at the dimensions of the consumer market and find the match.

Certainly, the foundation of marketing projections will be stages of the life cycle, cohort and ancestry, but upon this foundation must be built a usable marketing structure derived from consideration of cultural attributes such as values (non- or conspicuous consumer), tastes (vegan or hoover), beliefs (tree hugger or tree harvester), interests (bungee jumper or couch potato) and attitudes (risk seeker or security seeker).

Out of the ever-increasing diversity and fragmentation of consumer markets, market researchers must find either product niches defined by the overlap of cultural vectors to separate the geeks from the groovers or the common threads that link across cultural settings to unite the geeks with the groovers.



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