Marketers are increasingly tapping data-driven insight to inform customer segmentation and personalisation that drives more engagement through the funnel. Yet many still haven’t harnessed the powerful nuances that can inform and drive stronger results across multicultural consumer customers.
With up to 30% of Australians born overseas, the opportunity to engage multicultural consumers is a significant one for brands. Yet many marketers lack nuanced knowledge on the journeys, behaviours and key attributes multicultural consumers exhibit, limiting their ability to identify and target marketing and communications accordingly. Many don’t even know how important multicultural consumers are in their existing customer bases and therefore how to attract more of them.
This is something the team at CulturalPulse is seeking to rectify through its AskGenie AI-based technology and cultural smarts. And as can be seen from its work helping secure 1.48 million ticket sales and 31 sellouts to away team games at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, it’s a powerful data and insight set delivering commercial results.
Using AI to understand multicultural audiences
AskGenie is proprietary customer analytics technology built by CulturalPulse to help brands better identify and value their multicultural customers The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool acts as a profiling platform, identifying and enabling brands to target under-represented or over-represented demographics across 7500 segments using aggregated data on cultural nuances and attributes.
The AskGenie algorithm has been 12 years in the making, taking its cues from CulturalPulse’s work on more than 1250 projects across 2500 community groups. It’s also grounded in compelling research on cultural distinctiveness, including the Hofstede framework for cross-cultural communications. This identifies several value dimensions with substantial bearing on how different cultural communities behave and operate, such as individualism versus collectivism, and power distance ratios.
By codifying behaviours and attitudes across multicultural groups, CulturalPulse has been securing 20%-50% lift in conversion rates on average for its clients.
For CulturalPulse CEO, Reg Raghavan, a key objective in building such as tool is to help brands understand the make-up of their own customer bases and significance of multicultural communities within them.
“AskGenie allows you to wash your customer or employee database, decode names and unique cultural attributes (e.g. birthplace, ancestry and language), and crossmatch it with our proprietary data to produce actionable insights and cultural growth opportunities for customer acquisition and retention.” Raghavan explains. “This could be tracking or feeding into your creative or disseminating and amplifying communications to particular groups. It’s secure, reliable and provides instant access to new audiences in a way that hasn’t been considered before – even by the largest brands in Australia.”
One example of AskGenie in action has been across grassroots sports participation. A 2019 report by Deloitte found children with multicultural backgrounds are 20% less likely to participate in organised sport. Using AskGenie’s capabilities, sports organisations have been able to identify high-value customer growth and retention segments, measure marketing and communications efforts, and create multicultural-specific customer journeys. This contributed to a 12% increase in sports engagement among multicultural communities in 2020.
“Once you wash your data with AskGenie, you immediately see a cultural snapshot that can be at various layers such as continent level, country level, and is codified with many layers across ancestry and language level,” Raghavan says. “Data can also be used to look at customer churn, not just acquisition. You’re able to see time series, so you can compare month by month and different data sets such as your leads, customers, employees and different levels of databases.”
Engaging FIFA Women’s World Cup multicultural fans
More recently, AskGenie has powered colossal multicultural community engagement with the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 tournament.
“While organisers knew the Matildas games would sell out, no one knew how to drive bums on seats for the non-Matildas matches. This was a multicultural marketing challenge,” Raghavan says.
CulturalPulse’s starting point was recognising the cultural nuances in behaviours worth tapping into. For example, in selling tickets to consumers with Colombians ancestry and heritage, the team knew it was dealing with a high word-of-mouth community that often buy tickets late and usually as a group.
“We used this information to generate the right sales structures,” Raghavan explains. “We had a group sales program and talked to the leaders to build trust early to spread the message earlier and try and drive some of that virality before the absolute late stages.”
Key results included 1.48 million tickets sold to away team matches, 267% of CulturalPulse’s group match target and 146% of its stretch target.
“Our model and technology, developed over 12 years, helped to create one of the greatest events in Australian history,” Raghavan adds.
Cultural nuances
While results are apparent, Raghavan acknowledges targeting the 200+ cultures represented in Australia’s multicultural make-up continues to be thrown in the too-hard basket by many marketers. This is where AskGenie can be such a useful tool.
“The beauty is you can cluster group behaviours and attitudes based on not just the six dimensions [of the Hofstede Index] but broader dimensions and the migrant experience,” he says. “The second challenge people often say is everybody is an individual and they’re all different. That’s true if you look at the world through the eyes of individualism lens, which certainly is the way Australia, the US and the Western rationalist’s mind views this. But there are a lot of common traits, behaviours and values cultures have that can be grouped together. This can make it a lot easier for marketers.
“We’ve codified all those dimensions into 7500 multicultural profiles across Australia. These traits and behaviours also transcend Australian borders and exist in other countries where this has been tested.”
A specific example Raghavan points to is male baby boomers who live in capital cities. “Commonly, a lot of personas and profiles will bucket male baby boomers. Yes, there will be some geographical and financial differences. But the life experience of an Anglo Celtic baby boomer and an Arabic, Indian or Korean baby boomer is very different,” he continues.
“You can actually cluster the experience of those baby boomers who are multicultural. They would have come post-White Australia policy and would have worked very hard and probably experienced difficulty with English proficiency.
“They would have ridden the recession, experienced high interest rates, and gone through that curve. They have equity in their homes and share the purpose of investing in their children’s education so they can have better lives in this new country. How does this manifest now? They’re more likely to live in multi-generational homes.”
In fact, in a large piece of work for a global property development company, this is exactly what CulturalPulse found. “There are duplexes and large two-storey homes, for example, being purchased in the outskirts of Sydney for some of those demographics,” Raghavan says. “Jumping in a caravan and travelling around Australia, or going further north to the Central Coast or Sunshine Coast, is not part of that persona when looking at it from a group perspective. These are the nuances our system takes into account.
“I’m a big fan of the publication, Starts at 60. However you only need to read a few articles to know those are not going to resonate with some multicultural baby boomers.”
Identifying higher net worth through the funnel
Building culturally oriented audience profiles can also illustrate distinctions between Chinese millennials, Italian generation X consumers, or Indian baby boomers against population sizes and notably, their value to brands.
“Through these insights, you can see whether they’re under indexed and what strategy you can use to target your high growth segments down at city level,” Raghavan says.
For example, funnel analysis which looked at conversion likelihood for the CulturalPulse’s property developer client showed Chinese Aussies are less likely to come in as leads, particularly through the website and social media. However, those that do convert are of a higher net value.
“We found Chinese customers were twice as likely to convert, however the property developer found that their base is under indexed for these customers at the top of the funnel,” Raghavan says. “Using data and insight can inform a range of activity, such as looking at customer journey mapping to identify those breakpoints in the funnel collateral, website, product descriptions and so on.”
For Raghavan, these results demonstrate culture as a powerful segmentation variable underexplored by brands. This is why CulturalPulse is working hard to scale out its AskGenie platform to ensure more brands harness the power of cultural insights for growth.
“Culturalpulse is activating today’s Australia,” Raghavan adds. “This technology is now being scaled and we’d like to invite all our clients and partners along the journey to continue its expansion to deliver greater value to Australia and then globally. We’ve had early adopters build and test the platform and we’re looking for customers across all industry verticals to benefit as we lead the way in global multicultural insight driven marketing.”
