Marketing to the Salad Bowl Melting pot theory of marketing won’t work in the diverse marketplace of today. By John Landsberg, Nov. 2009 A question I toss out to my marketing students is relatively simple: Is the culture in the United States today a traditional melting pot or really more like a salad? Most respond (correctly) that the United States today is really a salad. In the days of our parents and grandparents, immigrants entered the country from all over the world with a goal of becoming more like the dominant culture. If they were from Germany, they soon shed many of their German traditions and learned English. They worked hard to become Americanized and become part of the dominant melting pot. Today, that certainly is not the case. Many immigrants today adapt to certain aspects of the dominant culture, but still strongly retain their existing cultures. It is commonplace today to hear families speaking in a language other than English. A recent Advertising Age article says the upcoming U.S. census will confirm the tremendous diversity in our country today. It notes that when the 2010 census comes out it will show there are 339 million people living in the United States. It also will show, according to the article, “The message to marketers is clear: No single demographic, or even handful of demographics, neatly defines the nation. There is no such thing as ‘the American consumer.’” The “typical” nuclear family of a father, mother and children of the Leave it to Beaver days? Long gone. That Beaver Cleaver family today actually makes up only 22 percent of households. The most prevalent type of U.S. household, the census will show, is a married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households. The census data, which will be released in early 2011, will clearly show marketers that a one-size-fits-all marketing communications program will no longer work. And since most small businesspeople can’t afford a major Super Bowl-type campaign ($3 million per 30-second spot), it means you had better identify your own target audience and focus on it. And when I mean identify your target audience, it should be more specific than ever before. Why? Because you don’t have enough money in your marketing communications budget to hit every demographic. Money spent on consumers who will never buy your product is wasted. As an example, if your product or service is aimed at the youth market, you should pretty much ditch traditional communications outlets. To young consumers, a newspaper as a communications vehicle is about as high-tech as cave dwellers writing on walls. If it isn’t electronic, it does not exist to youth. On the other hand, newspapers can be great vehicles if you are trying to target an older demographic audience. However, if your potential audience is Hispanic or gay, you might want to target communications vehicles aimed at those specific demographics for best results. The bottom line is that statistics are clearly showing that the United States is a salad these days. If you want to be successful in your marketing efforts, you need to focus almost exclusively only on the demographics that will use your product and service and then branch out from that point. You don’t have the money for a “melting pot” campaign.
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