It’s a sensitive subject, but targeting ethnic minorities is the key to success for many marketers – so how do you define an ‘ethnic minority’ and what do you need to consider when doing it? Patricia Macauley, head of cultural diversity at the government’s centre for excellence in marketing and communication, the Central Office of Information (COI), shares her insights.
What is an ethnic minority?
The first challenge is defining precisely what an ethnic minority is – the phrase itself is unhelpful, as it’s often used as a catch-all phrase. The COI sees an ethnic minority as any ethnic group that’s smaller than the majority.
It’s not necessarily about skin colour or race. That’s why we see the Eastern European audiences as ethnic minorities, for example, because they’re smaller than the majority indigenous population.
Yet this catch-all phrase means that many different cultures, faith groups, and groups of people are treated as a single group. We try to dispel this illusion that this is a homogenous group by showing that it contains people with different lifestyles, attitudes, languages, beliefs, cultures, and influences. Once we’ve conveyed that message, we can start to help clients prioritise who it is exactly they’re trying to talk to.
Who is your audience?
In the case of new ethnic minorities, we try to make sure that we’ve got grassroots contact. For Eastern Europeans, say, we know that they’ll rely heavily on support groups and community organisations to learn how to access mainstream services. Our task is to use these groups to understand what’s happening in the community, to bolster our research, and even to bounce ideas around when developing communication strategies.
Tip Don’t just define your audience by ethnicity. Sometimes it is more useful to identify commonalities, because they can serve as a good basis for communication. Unless you understand who you’re talking to, you can’t develop that kind of approach.
How do you reach them?
The other key thing is to understand what engages these audiences in terms of messaging. In my experience, this hasn’t changed: simple, straightforward messages always work more effectively. Then it’s a matter of coming up with a creative way to develop something that resonates.
What works for one audience won’t necessarily work for another. Direct mail might not be suitable, for instance, in a campaign where the focus is on non-English speakers in a community where there are low literacy levels in the mother tongue. This is prevalent in the Bangladeshi community.
Tip Don’t rely on written translations to overcome low literacy levels. Find another way of reaching such groups.
Polish people respond to print
The Polish community, in contrast, are highly literate in their mother tongue so producing printed translated materials for that audience is a sensible solution. For new migrants, though, there is a strong affinity to their own media because they want to keep that closeness in terms of understanding what’s going on back home and in their community.
Online media exerts a powerful influence within the Polish community, with sites such as Gumtree and Facebook proving very popular. And we’ve found that their press is growing at quite a rapid rate. We’re also able to use non-conventional methods to reach them. Since a high proportion is Catholic, we can target this group through the churches.
Tip Find out the places your target ethnic audience frequents both online and offline, and channel your message in these places, whether they’re conventional (press) or unconventional (places of worship).
Find the best channel
Generally speaking, some of the harder to reach audiences we engage with come from a culture where oral communication is the preferred way to get a message across. So even when we’re producing leaflets or other printed material, we supplement that with going out to the community, engaging people face to face, because we know that’s what they want.
Tip The timing of a communication is also key. For instance, we do work around Ramadan. We know that Muslims will be fasting then, so it could be effective to time messages about abstaining from smoking, too. The message would be that, if you can do it for Ramadan, you can do it for the rest of your life.
Avoid stereotypical imagery
As well as timing, any communication has to be careful about the imagery used especially when featuring ethnic minorities in mainstream communications. For example, if we’re using photography, avoid any obvious symbols that tie people to a particular culture or religion. So if, for instance, we want to use an Asian person, we would not go down the stereotypical route of putting a sari, a bindi or a turban on them. We’d advise, just feature an Asian person in western clothing.
Tip Be careful about how you use colours. Red, for instance, is a colour that has different meanings in different cultures. Within Asian communities it’s used for weddings, but in western society it’s often used as a warning. So if you’re sending out a warning message to certain sections of Asian communities, the use of red needs to be considered carefully.
Be open to new ideas
Our expertise has been built up over time and through research. It’s also taught us a valuable lesson: you can’t be bound by convention when dealing with ethnic minorities. You have to be willing and able to try new methods of communication. These can sometimes sound bizarre to marketing professionals.
We often reach out by putting posters up in shops. Our clients say: ‘Why not just put an ad in a newspaper?’ Well, we do that, too. We know where the touchpoints are and target them specifically.
Ethnic media has its own problems, too, as some titles may not be ABC audited. But sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and try something to know whether it works. After years of experience, we now know – audit or no audit – which channels work and which don’t.