Ethnic minorities belong to the consumer group that remains to be both a conundrum and uncertainty to retailers. Ethnic minorities make up one-quarter of US households and spend more than $460 billion a year on retail (pre-recession). Selling to these minority groups that marketers do not really know like the back of their hand will depend largely on how market researchers get to know them for the purposes of business organizations. It is market research that draws a hopefully accurate market profile of existing and potential markets.
To say that race predisposes a variety of attitudes is already a handicap for marketers. To assert that there are so-called racial characteristics that may be assumed is yet another mistake. People behave in unpredictable ways and there cannot possibly be what marketers call ‘racial markets.’ Many factors influence consumers, and most of these are more immediate such as current events, media, and popular culture (that changes by the day). What some call racial characteristics are presumed, even imaginary, attributes that hardly influence consumer behavior.
Another folly is the factor of who becomes the arbiter of these definitions of so-called ‘racial characteristics.’ Many researchers doing racial or ethnic market researchers are “members” of the race or ethnicity that they are studying. Businesses want their ethnic market researchers to belong to the ethnic groups that they research. This is for the intention of better knowledge, comprehension, and communication. This becomes a big mistake because these members of particular races already, maybe unwittingly, have preconceived notions of the ‘race.’
More often than not, these ethnic market researchers are the ones that ‘lump in’ the ethnic groups into racial traits, instead of individual traits. This results in market studies and market surveys that contain many strains of racial bias.
The foremost beneficial purpose of market research is to get to know particular market segments. This knowledge helps marketers understand the needs, wants, and aspirations of market groups. The old argument that identifying ethnic cultures and catering to them is discriminatory and biased is a statement and mindset of bias in itself. This old traditional line of thinking is old-school, reactionary, and not pro-active. The discriminatory tendency starts from the misconceptions and personal prejudices of market researchers themselves.
Via Brand Republic
