As the world becomes smaller and your audience more cosmopolitan, they inherently become more cognizant about how they differ from other audiences. And that is when you pounce.
1. The category is: billion-dollar ideas. The answer: a diamond-shaped patch of material that allows you to move with freedom from Warrior II to Triangle (yoga poses). The question: what’s a gusset?
Will also accept: which seam ties together ancient India, Ayn Rand, Vancouver’s Yaletown, Goldman Sachs, and the outline of a human female’s labia majora? Or: What’s the holy grail of ethnic marketing?
Will not accept: “multicultural marketing.” (Even if you put quotation marks around it.)
2. On the morning of February 14, when I was supposed to send this column to my editor, Wikipedia had defined “multicultural marketing” as “the practice of marketing to multiple audiences that are each descendant of a different ethnicity” – in contrast with ethnic marketing, “the practice of marketing to one audience of a certain ethnicity.” By lunchtime, the three-sentence definition had been updated nine times, with the latest proclaiming that “multicultural marketing can also be defined as ethnic marketing.” (The citation included a paper prepared by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.) In either case, the goal remained: “to find cultural touch points such as language, traditions, celebrations, religion and any other concepts that may be relevant to the particular cultural audience.”
To that definition, consider adding: “don’t take this too literally. It’s one thing to open an ‘authentic’ El Salvadoran pupuseria in Kensington Market. If you want to pursue high-level ethnic marketing, though, you need to turn those pupusas into Korean tacos.”
3. It’s not for nothing that the famously divisive Conservative strategist Jason Kenney’s “Building the Conservative Brand in Cultural Communities” campaign was referred to internally as “Very Ethnic.” Really, it’s an epiphany. Kenney, who embraces the nickname “curry in a hurry”—and happens to work as Canada’s Immigration Minister—goes to exceptional lengths in drawing this distinction. Canada is not multicultural—as we learned in school—but “ethnic” and “very ethnic.”
And I guess it’s not for nothing either that Marketing‘s March 12 feature story “The Visible Majority” (pg. 53) concludes: “In the future, multicultural marketing will just be called marketing.”
Ethnic marketing, on the other hand, is kindling for brands like Kenney that thrive on finding cultural wedges. Such wedges seem counterintuitive to the earnest “multicultural marketing” advice that’s been optimized for Google searches, emphasizing tactics like “conscientious” and “sensitivity” and “everything to lose.” (Always boxed in quotation marks.) Lululemon, which perfected the aforementioned gusset, blows the quotation off these expressions. It seems to me that you need to be a mad genius—or just plain mad—to riff off cultural wedges. But then who did you ever reach with non-ironic quotation marks?
4. If you’ve ever put the words “ninja” or “guru” on your business card, feel free to skip to the next section. As the kind of person who likes to think he’s been around—full disclosure: I fall sheepishly into the demographic “Anthro girl”* —I hold a special kind of terror for Lululemon’s preternatural savvy. Where any kind of conventional ideas about marketing suggest that a brand only jump the shark as a last-ditched effort, the entire premise of Lululemon begins in a mid-air Pincha Mayurasana overtop a pool of snapping hammerheads. Translation: Lululemon sells yoga to whitebred North America by specifically stripping away all that was authentic about yoga in the first place.
Like Kenney’s brazen approach to courting “very ethnic”—he’s attacked Amnesty International and banned the niqab at swearing-in ceremonies—Lululemon has come to feel like a deliberate exercise in how far you can push a piece of culture out of its original context. The company’s very name is a gag about the way Japanese people can’t pronounce the letter L. While those who practice “multicultural marketing” might call this “racist,” others call it very direct engagement with the audience. By the time CNN, the Times and the Globe attempted to sell newspapers last month with headlines like “Does Sexing up Yoga Spoil the Zen?,” Lululemon had already begun stamping “Who is John Galt?” onto its tote bags. That is to say, Lululemon has effectively turned self-identified progressive cosmopolitan white ladies into carriers for what the casual outsider might think of as the antithesis of Indian yoga. Maybe this is ethnic marketing. But maybe “metamorphosis marketing” is a better way to think about the practice.
5. We like to think that this began with Elvis Presley, who may have been the first American to really figure out how to sell black music to white people. Of course, it was Bill Clinton who launched a television campaign in which African Americans proclaimed: “we’re voting for us!”
The New World was built on an implicit knack for stripping apart Old World authenticity. (And please think hard about what is meant by “Old World.”) Marketing Jesus to the Inca, Catholic missionaries literally redrew murals of the Last Supper, putting a platter of roasted guinea pig at the centre of the table. When necessary, they’d add more dark pigment to the Jesus than they did not in their paler markets. There’s an opportunity right now if you can make a reasonable approximation of shark fin out of cat meat. Or a call-to-prayer app that doesn’t go off while I’m eating my Korean taco.
* – The customer for Urban Outfitters’ older sister Anthropologie is magnificently defined by Kara VanderBijl: “As an Anthro girl, you are in touch with the people of the world. You wear the fabrics that they have made with their hands, and although this blouse cost you half your week’s wages while it gave them approximately one dollar, you feel like you are one with them.”
Chris Koentges is an award-winning writer based inVancouver. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve and Reader’s Digest.
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