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by Howard Lichtman, Partner & Co-Founder, Ethnicity Multicultural Marketing + Advertising

What is truly remarkable about Canadian marketers is that while corporations have made major efforts to understand “the Quebec connection”, and allocated the resources to reaching out to that market, they have not applied the same rationale, resources or process to ethnic consumers. One might easily argue that the greatest growth opportunity is with Canada’s ethnic communities.

A recent article in Marketing claimed that depending on the product category, Quebec accounts for 20 to 25 percent of the Canadian market. Even incremental improvements in share, margins and profitability can make a big difference. We can say the same about the ethnic opportunity. The numbers speak for themselves: 6.8 million Canadians, or approximately 20 percent of the population, are visible minorities. (Please note: these are just visible minorities. The actual size of the ethnic opportunity is even larger.) And these numbers will only continue to grow as immigration continues to drive this population shift.

When it comes to Quebecers, the same article stated: “It’s easy to think that the big difference comes down to language. It goes well beyond that. The social-demographic and cultural differences between Quebecers and the rest of Canada have significant influence in consumption decisions. Quebecers satisfy their needs differently. Exploring such differences really can drive decision making about what, if any, opportunities to pursue. The pay-offs that come from taking the time to figure out how your brand can connect in unique ways with Quebec consumers can be huge.”
Re-read the above paragraph and simply change the word “Quebecers” to “multicultural consumers”. The insight is exactly the same. Welcome to multicultural marketing!

In targeting Quebecois, marketers do run the risk of alienating huge portions of their target market through carelessness and inadvertent slights. This is even more challenging when it relates to marketing to Canada’s ethnic consumers. While it is true that second generation immigrants may have acculturated, they tend to keep many aspects of their familiar cultural values while contributing to shaping a new Canadian mainstream. Further, the number of first generation immigrants, in and of itself, is quite substantial. In targeting ethnic consumers, one must consider the diversity within the diversity and understand that even within ethnic communities (i.e. the South Asian community or Chinese community) a broad spectrum of preferences exist due to the lack of homogeneity.

Only a handful of global brands can use their global and national English campaigns for French Quebec without any changes. The same applies to multicultural marketing. Referring again to the Marketing article, “There are times when a concept developed in English can be adapted rather easily, however, generally, the cultural references and the play on words just can’t be directly transposed.”

Even if you can’t create a robust ethnic-specific solution, this shouldn’t preclude you from allocating a portion of your budget to multicultural marketing opportunities. It’s definitely worth it to invest in understanding the size of the opportunity for your specific product/service or category, as well as what it would achieve to receive it. All that CEOs and CFOs are looking for is a well thought-out strategic case for support. With ethnic consumers, the rationale is often easy to provide.

Howard Lichtman
Howard is a Partner and Co-Founder of Ethnicity Multicultural Marketing and Advertising. Prior to founding the agency, he was President of The Lightning Group. Before that he was Executive Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Cineplex on a North American-wide basis, where in addition to traditional CMO responsibilities, he handled investor relations as well as the launch of a number of business initiatives that are now considered mainstream, including screen advertising, in-theatre sampling, place-based media, as well as movie coupon premiums on-pack. He was also the creator of the American Express Front-of-the-Line program.