Marketers may be striving for increasingly sophisticated segmentation in campaign and engagement programs, but they’re often missing one of the big levers influencing consumption patterns and brand affinities: Cultural background.
Marketers all know consumers exhibit distinct passion points, behaviours, affinities, purchasing patterns and geographic singularities that influence their product and brand choices.
But did you know cultural background and heritage can also play a significant part in the day-to-day lives of Australian consumers?
As marketers work to build segmentation models that help to engage consumers in personalised ways, they’re often looking to demographic data, recency, frequency and even psychographic insights to understand and respond to nuances in consumer behaviour. Yet they’re missing a trick if they haven’t also factored in cultural influences, values and affinities into the mix.
Cultural phenomena, such as individualistic versus group ‘face’ factors, societal expectations and the foods of our childhood can all play a substantial role in consumption choices, as well as perceptions of specific brands and their distinctiveness and differentiation markers. Just think of luxury versus value-based brands, for example, and how a consumer who comes from a cultural background that appreciates quality or strives for status may choose Louis Vuitton or Chanel over a value-based brand.
Or take a case from the FMCG space: Breakfast choices. While a first-generation Hong Kong consumer may continue to prefer congee for breakfast, a second-generation consumer could be choosing to eat cereal. By contrast, consumers of European descent may eat pastries and a fifth-generation Australian Vegemite. And that’s just the first meal of the day.
To help shine a light on these important yet too-often ignored cultural influences, CulturalPulse asked three consumers of diverse ethnic backgrounds to share a day in their lives in order to highlight the differences a cultural background can make to everyday consumption choices, habits and brand affiliations.
Our 3 respondents are:
Marcia Percival: First-generation Brazilian, 45-54 years old, residing in Australia since 1998. Languages include Portuguese, English and Spanish.
So Young Greenberg: First-generation Korean, 35-44 years old, residing in Australia since 2011. Languages include Korean and English.
Xi Yidan: First-generation Chinese, 25-34 years old, residing in Australia since 2008. Languages include Chinese (Mandarin), Wuxi dialect, English and basic Cantonese.
