Minority to mainstream?

Kia’s campaign for the Niro EV embraced the natural tension within multi-generational households.

This story was originally published in the 2023 fall issue of strategy magazine.

Multicultural marketing, for the most part, has fallen under the near-exclusive territory of banks, telecommunications companies and niche CPGs. Newcomers typically need their food goods and phone/financial services upon their arrival in Canada, so it makes sense that these groups have been the biggest spenders in the multicultural arena. 

However, “multicultural advertising gets, at most, 10% of the marketing dollar, which is extraordinary when you think that Toronto and Vancouver are 57% and 55% visible minorities, respectively,” says Gavin Barrett, co-founder, CEO and CCO of multicultural agency Barrett and Welsh. “The way the marketing dollar is being proportioned and distributed – these demographics are being underserved.” 

Barrett, along with eight other agency heads, established the Multicultural Marketing Alliance of Canada (MMAC) in 2015 to increase understanding of the discipline, set standards and establish best practices. Their efforts must be working because, in parallel with a steady growth in immigration rates, marketing among brands in categories outside of the usual suspects appears to be on the rise. More companies in auto, retail, consumer electronics, alcohol and fashion are choosing to no longer ignore multicultural audiences, investing in advertising that speaks to different ethnicities and cultures. 

Some of the more recent examples include Kia Canada, which created Chinese and South Asian versions of its “Modern Times” campaign that played off the natural tension of how people in a two-generation household adapt to life in Canada. Samsung Electronics tapped South Asian influencers to speak to target audiences, as it did in its award-winning “Capture Your Journey” campaign. H&R Block is in the midst of a three-year strategy that targets newcomers and established immigrants separately, which includes “Block Game” and “Movie Night.” And Sephora has gone all-in, with an inclusive approach embodied in its North American “We Belong to Something Beautiful” brand platform.

For “Capture Your Journey,” Samsung tapped Indo-Pakistani Canadian group JoSH the Band in a content series.

The argument by the numbers

With an aging population and stagnant birth rates, immigration is the main driver of population growth for the country, according to Statistics Canada. In 2022, the number of Canadians rose by an unprecedented one million. Canada’s population reached 40 million this past June, with permanent and temporary migration accounting for nearly all growth recorded in 2022 (96%). 

In addition, Statistics Canada projects that, by 2041, the South Asian population could rise to five million, the Chinese and Black communities to three, and the Filipino demographic could surpass two. “Immigration was – and continues to be – a growth strategy for the country,” says Bobby Sahni, co-founder and partner of Ethnicity Matters. “Because of that, immigration and multicultural marketing needs to be a growth strategy for every company as well.”

With such numbers, it’s difficult to see why every brand isn’t directing their marketing dollars and messages to court these audiences. Between established multicultural communities and newcomers – immigrants, refugees and international students – the influence of diverse communities is inevitably impacting the foods we eat, the content we consume, the music we listen to, and the make-up of leaders across politics and business. Says Sahni: “The established multicultural perspective, the newcomer perspective, the impact on the general mass market: that trifecta of opportunity is the way to look at the market.” 

Different brand approaches

Barrett points out that the spending behaviour of newly-arrived and tenured immigrants differ. “Newcomers are fickle consumers because they have to base decisions on budget,” he says. “When you’re settled, you can choose the brand that works for you [so there’s] massive influence.”

That may be true in a general sense, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to every category. Take a tax company like H&R Block. While new clients can be acquired when people experience a life transition that changes their tax situation – getting married, having a baby, getting a new job – the company relies, in large part, on attracting those who have never filed Canadian taxes before, but need to start.

“We find that once somebody has filed their taxes for the first time, it’s hard to get them off that method,” says David Loria, director of marketing and business development for H&R Block Canada. “The lifeblood of an organization is the ability to acquire new clients, so first-time filers are a really important cohort for us and newcomers are a large part of that.”

While H&R Block has long-served new Canadians, its current strategy is to target newcomers and established immigrants in a more sophisticated way, speaking directly to their concerns. Its Chinese-language “Block Game,” for example, tapped into the anxiety that established communities have around missing an important detail in their tax submission. And for a newcomer South Asian audience, its “Movie Night” featured a young immigrant couple startled by a text asking if they had started their taxes. Loria is currently working with Stradigi on the next iteration in time for the tax season. 

H&R Block is in the midst of a three-year strategy that targets both newcomers and established immigrants separately via the “Block Game” campaign.

Loria stresses the importance of companies putting in the work at ground level, too. To that end, the company holds regular workshops across its locations to demystify the Canadian tax filing process. And to further ease the complex task of filing taxes in a non-native language, many of H&R Block’s tax experts across the country speak the languages of their communities. 

But tax filing isn’t the only complicated task for a newcomer. Buying household appliances, with their jargon around specs and functionality, can be equally fraught. To that end, in September, the consumer electronics division of Samsung started displaying QR codes alongside products at Best Buy and Visions Electronics that, when scanned, provides a menu of options in multiple languages (English, French, Mandarin, Spanish, Punjabi, Filipino and Arabic) to ease confusion in the retail space. 

Steven Cull, senior director and head of mobile product management, services and strategy for Samsung, says that the consumer electronics division is taking the lead on how the company will communicate across retail so that the QR codes, if successful, can be rolled out across its mobile phone displays as well. Cull says the strategy to focus on multicultural comes from the top, and is rooted in data. “We spent a lot of time in the early cycles, in 2018 and 2019, really understanding who our customers are, and where the new opportunities were,” he says.

Research showed that a number of Asian newcomers were arriving in Canada with older and international Samsung devices, so the goal was to make consumers aware of the ability to upgrade their devices and where to do so. With its “Level Up” campaign in 2018, it targeted Chinese and Filipino communities via WeChat, in-language media channels and influencers. “We actually saw a significant increase in traffic to our website, and 97% of the traffic that we drove to the website with that campaign were all first-time visitors to our site,” says Cull.

Samsung’s multicultural marketing efforts – which include activations around cultural holidays such as Lunar New Year and Diwali – aim to find moments that will resonate with diverse audiences, such as targeting international students who were homesick around Mother’s Day in 2021 and creating a cricket campaign in 2022 that had the unintended effect of generating interest from Korean and Chinese audiences as well.

In the beauty space, Sephora views multicultural marketing as just one way to connect with diverse communities. The brand made a commitment to have 25% of its products come from BIPOC-owned brands by 2025 and established an ongoing partnership with the Native Women’s Association of Canada, among other moves. Earlier this year, it introduced its “Sephora Illumination powered by Colour iQ,” a proprietary shade-matching technology featuring over 140,000 shades. 

“The aim of our multicultural marketing efforts is twofold – yes, we want to ensure all Canadians feel seen and celebrated and connected to our brand, whether they’ve been here for two or twenty years,” says Allison Litzinger, SVP of marketing for Sephora Canada. “However, our purpose runs deeper – to foster a more open, progressive and accepting world of beauty by celebrating our differences.”

Finding the budget (and the ROI)

For all marketers looking to build their brands, it comes down to budget. “When we implemented our new marketing strategy for newcomers, we found that it was actually costing less out of our marketing budget to acquire a newcomer client than it was a conventional Canadian client, so the ROI was just there,” says H&R Block’s Loria. “We are definitely far outpacing [Canada’s] newcomer growth… which was year-over-year… around 15% and 20%, so it’s definitely paying dividends.”

Meanwhile, at Kia Canada, director of marketing Michael Kotpke, thinks about investment differently. When it came to its latest Niro EV campaign – which tapped into how newcomers establish themselves, as well as the high demand among ethnic communities for tech – no sales target was identified. “Based on the investment we made in terms of time, effort and dollars, what we saw in terms of impact, the level of engagement, the qualitative feedback we received – that’s where we’re seeing the benefit,” he says.

As a growing challenger brand, Kopke says the team determines, from one product to the next, who the message is intended for. “Is it mass? Is it targeted? Is it a high-income audience? It depends on the brief and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. But the budget is the budget, so you do have to be a bit surgical,” says Kopke.

Indeed, how can anyone ignore the benefits of targeting these communities? Sahni points out the composition of multicultural households tend to be larger in size, which means a greater opportunity for more consumption, across a variety of categories. For the companies that protest they don’t have the budget for multicultural marketing, Sahni advises: “It’s not about outspending the competition; it’s about outsmarting them. You don’t need big budgets for big insights. You don’t need big budgets for big ideas.”

Sephora is creating “a more open, progressive and accepting world of beauty” through its multicultural marketing platform, “We Belong To Something Beautiful.”

The challenges, the outlook

While some brands were previously already invested in multicultural marketing, it was George Floyd’s death and the resulting globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement that finally compelled corporate Canada to take notice of long-overlooked consumer segments.

“What changed in 2020 was that the conversation we were having about multicultural marketing was elevated from the brand manager or the director of marketing or even the VP of marketing to the CEO, CFO or CMO,” says Sahni. “The importance of diversity and inclusion became an executive and board mandate versus a brand manager mandate.”

Yet, interestingly, marketing efforts targeting the Black community – which, within itself, is diverse – hasn’t taken off the same way it has for South Asian and Chinese ones. Sahni says: “The focus on Black Canadians in particular is something that corporate Canada has not figured out.”

For all these advocates, multicultural marketing needs to be part of the mix. Loria says marketers need to treat these communities the same as any consumer segment, and emphasizes the importance of curating content specifically for them. Litzinger wants to not only see marketers put their dollars towards campaigns that drive impact, but ensure teams, partners, consultants and vendors represent the people they speak to. And if this is the direction it’s all headed, competition among brands to reach these diverse segments will become even greater, and breaking through the noise will become a bigger challenge for marketers – a move Cull welcomes.

Sahni observes the common denominator among companies that are successful at multicultural marketing is the commitment from the C-Suite, and even the board, to understand that newcomers are the future of Canada and this is where the growth will come from. “This is not a short-term strategy; this is business as usual, forever.”