When will Canada catch up?

December 17th, 2014 | ACA Team,

By Howard Lichtman, Partner, Ethnicity Multicultural Marketing & Advertising

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In the United States, driven by market forces and a desire for increased revenue, American corporations have embraced multicultural marketing with a passion. For years, they have worked with best of breed multicultural agencies—experts in either the Afro-American or Hispanic ethnicities.

What has changed recently is the Americans’ approach to multicultural marketing. It’s not that they have abandoned creating specific messaging aimed at Hispanics, Afro-Americans, Asians or others. The “evolution” is that both multicultural and main stream agencies will work together in a more integrated fashion from the beginning. Coke calls it “Total Marketing”. At a recent Association of National Advertisers’ Multicultural Marketing and Diversity conference, Toyota called it “T2” standing for the “Total Toyota” model. There are no longer separate creative briefs, separate media plans, and separate production and media budgets and completely separate go-to-market strategies. All of their agencies, including the multicultural experts, are sitting around the table working together from the beginning of the process. For Toyota, “T2” is not a new business entity, as each agency retains its own identify, staffing and perspective.

Clorox is thinking multicultural much earlier in the process and shunning a separate and siloed approach. Kraft doesn’t go as far. They utilized Total Market Advertising on a case-by-case basis, depending on the appropriateness of the specific category.


Howard Lichtman’s partner, and co-founder of Ethnicity Multicultural Marketing + Advertising, Bobby Sahni, will be teaching a brand new ACA course on multicultural marketing on January 28, 2015 in Toronto. Course attendees will gain valuable skills, knowledge and confidence to better enable them to craft and execute a comprehensive multicultural marketing strategy that takes the guess work out of the process and gets their companies real results. Learn more


One would expect that with Canada’s multicultural mosaic, we would embrace the Total Marketing approach ahead of the American’s melting pot world perspective. Perhaps it is our historic identification of the Quebec marketplace being separate and distinct in terms of a need for messaging that has inhibited the evolution of Canadian ethnic marketing. The Quebec population is about 8 million. One in five Canadians or about 7 million are foreign born. In fact, it is the immigrant population that is growing in size on an annual basis, with projected immigration numbers at 285,000 for 2015. That number does not take into account the over 200,000 international students or the hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers. Not only is the ethnic population large, so is their buying power. Recent studies indicate that Chinese Canadians ($53.4 billion) and South Asians ($51 billion) alone spend approximately $104.4 billion annually. They are the Canadian equivalents of the Hispanic and Afro-American opportunity in the United States. If you are a corporation looking for growth, it can only come from acquisitions, innovations, or more effective multicultural marketing.

But before corporate Canada can embrace Total Marketing, corporations must first embrace “M2”—multicultural marketing. That requires dedicating a sufficient percentage of marketing dollars to the multicultural opportunity. If the size of the market is 20% of the population, are you devoting 20% of your budget to multicultural marketing? For most corporations, the answer is no. For several more astute marketers, the evolution has already begun.


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.