The IPA has today (23rd March 2010) published
The marketing opportunities for advertisers and agencies in multi-cultural Britain; a report designed to provide the advertising industry with an update on the rapidly expanding multi-cultural landscape of the UK; both as a potential employer and a market place.
Highlights of the report:
• Multi-cultural communities will become increasingly visible and more influential as they rise up the business and corporate ladder and become budget holders.
• Targeting diverse groups should be on the agenda of every UK brand and marketer, or they will risk losing out on a potentially lucrative new market.
• Responding to the needs of a diverse, culturally-rich group will require understanding of the cultural, religious, identity and ethnicity issues embedded within these groups
• As migration into the UK rises, it is predicted that ethnic media outlets will continue to thrive because of the lack of relevant content offered by main-stream media.
This interim report by the IPA’s Ethnic Diversity Forum* also provides an overview of population data as well as an outline of Black, Asian and Eastern European media and explanations of the complexities of marketing to different cultures. It includes a foreword from Trevor Robinson OBE, Founder and Creative Director of Quietstorm, and chapters from Saad Saraf, Founder and CEO of Media Reach and Sanjay Shabi, Director of CultureCom, MediaCom.
Says Trevor Robinson, OBE, Founder and Creative Director, Quietstorm: “The UK as a market is a cultural melting pot that we in adland need to understand if we are to attract the very best talent, and communicate effectively to UK consumers. I therefore hope that our practitioners will read this report and use it to help change the advertising industry for the better.”
Says Saad Saraf, Founder and CEO of Media Reach: “The UK is now truly a multicultural country, and will continue to flourish in the face of diversity. If we don’t recognise that people are different we are not going to get anywhere. Business is about engaging people and more so in the current financial downturn. We’ve got too many products and too few customers. When people have a choice and prices are falling, that’s when marketing mavericks look at segmentation and precision marketing. The industry needs to quicken its pace to catch up with the changing face of the new society, or risk getting left behind. Not only do we need to accept it, we need to understand and embrace it.”
Says Sanjay Shabi, Director of CultureCom, MediaCom: “For any agency involved in communications planning, amongst many other things, it is crucial for them to be suitably informed about every aspect of the UK population. This includes ethnic groups who continue to be a growing and who are a dynamic audience. This latest report is an excellent starting point for agencies and marketeers, providing rich guidance on the considerations required when understanding the UK's main ethnic communities and the media that serves them.”
The report is free to IPA members and costs £15 to non-IPA members, and is
available to download here.Read Saad Saraf's opinion piece on targeting the multi-cultural communities, written for the IPA newsletter,
here.
*In 2003 the IPA Ethnic Diversity Forum published its first major collaborative work on ethnic diversity which looked at the employment, portrayal and economic value of the ethnic minorities. View the report here. A sequel to this report will be published on its tenth anniversary in 2013.
In terms of attracting talent, the IPA continues to monitor the ethnic makeup of its membership through its annual Census, and to search for talent through its careers programme and its two online tests: a copy test at www.ipacopytest.co.uk and a self-assessment tool: www.diagonalthinking.co.uk