Culturally relevant advertising: Why it adds value and grows sales

Cultural relevance and diversity in marketing and advertising is more important today than ever before. The pandemic has only amplified the need for marketers to take a second look at opportunities to engage with multicultural demographics -- In fact, a Nielsen study on the automotive industry and multicultural consumers suggested that auto marketers need to look to ethnic consumers first for their road to recovery. There is an ancient Chinese saying that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today. Corporations should be planting their trees wherever they are most likely to grow so they can thrive in the next normal.

The case is even stronger in Canada, where one in five Canadians is foreign-born – this is roughly equivalent to the size of the population of Quebec. And in addition to an already diverse population, permanent residents and international students add another million newcomers to Canada annually. This is a significant opportunity: As a brand, where else are you going to find a defined cohort of a million potential new customers available to purchase your product?  If these prospective customers don’t know your brand from home, they are a segment that is likely open to trying new brands and categories.  Because they’re in a new country, they expect to experiment. Conversely, if they know your brand from home, you have a window in which to drive loyalty before your competitors can build those relationships.

In order for corporations and brands to take advantage of these sales opportunities, it all begins with cultural relevance in marketing communications. On a macro trending basis, the “multicultural minority” is quickly becoming the “multicultural majority”.  Recent AIMM research shows that advertising that focuses on inclusive, insightful messaging outperforms advertising that doesn’t. Some brands have a misguided assumption that you can reach out to cultural communities through your mainstream advertising, but this is simply not the case.  

There is significant value in investing in cultural advertising. The AIMM report shows that if consumers perceive ads as culturally relevant, they are 1.5 times more likely to learn additional information about the brand, 2.7 times more likely to buy a brand for the first time, 50% more likely to repurchase the brand, and 2.8 times more likely to recommend the brand.
The report also found that ads perceived to have high cultural relevance are:

• Twice as likely to enhance brand perception;
• Three times more likely to be effective as compared to brands with low cultural relevance; and
• Three times more likely to lift purchase intent.

We don’t know what the world is going to look like in six weeks, never mind in six months or six years, but we do know that the cultural makeup of Canada is rapidly evolving. Brands are wise to understand these shifts and invest in them in order to stay relevant and visible to new and existing audiences.