Consult multicultural groups before you devise your marketing, says awards judge
The Australian Multicultural Marketing Awards celebrate the campaigns that have showcased diversity in a creative or innovative way across categories as diverse as sport, education, youth and the arts.
Applications are now closed, but you can still get tickets for the event itself, which takes place on November 28th.
Here, judge Professor Steven D’Alessandro gives his tips on how to best market to diverse communities and why multicultural marketing is important for society as a whole.
Successful multicultural marketing campaigns tend to include people from the target market or multicultural group in their team. This is so important that it’s the main criteria in one of the awards categories.
The appeal of a good campaign isn’t limited to a particular multicultural group but includes the wider Australian community. This displays genuine inclusion. Take the Greater Western Sydney Giants AFL team. When they appeal for support during the Eid al-Adha Islamic festival, it shows off the whole city’s diversity. The AFL itself also broadcasts matches in Chinese. Always remember there’s an international payback, too.
Research and consultation with multicultural groups is vital. Qualitative research is useful, as is an understanding of what kind of media each group is consuming. It might be completely different to somebody whose second language is English. Consider attitudes, behaviour and how information is communicated. Take the NSW Government promoting breast cancer screening among communities that don’t talk like to talk about those issues. They had to consider how you go about doing that sensitively and with cultural competence. That’s where consultation can become crucial.
Campaigns to get Chinese Australians to quit smoking is another example. Rather than say, ‘You might get sick’ the message was, ‘You might not be around to see your children prosper.’ Why? Because family values are very important in traditional Chinese culture.
Recognise diversity within a multicultural group – clearly not all people with Chinese or Italian backgrounds are the same. Some of these groups are big enough that marketers need to consider targeting different regions or data groups. For example, most of the people who speak Arabic in Australia are Christians, something many will be surprised by.
Avoid tokenism. We’ve seen examples where large corporate companies have proclaimed that they want to do something for a particular group or during an identified festival, but they’ve produced leaflets and materials that are not even in an appropriate language. If you’re going to do something, do it sincerely.
The TV commercial for Melbourne’s Franco Cozzo furniture store was groundbreaking because it was in Italian but with English subtitles. St. George Bank does a great job of differentiating their Chinese New Year promotions, while there’s been some fantastic apps for Chinese tourists arriving in Sydney.
Multicultural marketing has a knock-on effect for Australian exporters because we already know about the values, customs and languages of different communities in the global marketplace. It gives us a real advantage.
Brands are now thinking more about different multicultural groups at home and how they can sell to them. We now know, say, that while the Australian Italian community is ageing, newly arrived Chinese migrants are coming over as family units. That’s valuable. There’s also an emerging market of people from across Africa immigrating to Australia.
Find out more about the AMMAs by visiting its official website.