Global marketing strategies and multicultural implementation planning

¶ … Multicultural Marketing in Practice: Analyzing Color and Packaging Design Tailored to Multicultural Perspectives

Today's global environment is changing the nature of business as we know it. As more and more cultures join the international economic environment, the need for multicultural marketing is becoming more crucial than ever. Both in domestic markets and those abroad, multicultural groups are increasing their overall consumer power, and successful international firms are beginning to adopt strategies for differing marketing techniques to meet the needs and desires of targeted cultural groups. Vadillez (2012) presents a comprehensive and interesting evaluation of how multicultural marketing can even be extended to include color and packaging design in order to make products more visually appealing to particular cultural target markets.

Multicultural marketing is a growing trend. It can be seen first in how American firms are adjusting their domestic marketing strategies here in the United States. According to the research, "as the general population in the U.S. continues to become more diverse, with ethnic Americans of African, Asian, and Hispanic descent making up 25%, the days of one-size-fits-all marketing are gone forever" (Stachura & Murphy 2005). Today, American the environment is filled with growing minority voices that are demanding products tailored to their needs. Modern firms cannot neglect the growing consumer buying power of minorities in the American economic market. In fact, $1.3 trillion in sales is attributed to minority group purchases, which makes up about 18.5% of income generated through contemporary sales here in the U.S. (Stachura & Murphy 2005). In such an environment, "the U.S. is experiencing a growing number of ethnic consumers who express their unique cultural identities" (Cho et al. 2004 p 6). Modern firms need to adapt marketing strategies that will tap into to these growing minority markets with ever-increasing consumer power.

Part of this strategy involved adjusting products and marketing campaigns to meet the needs of very specific target groups within the larger market. Multicultural marketing strategies must focus on "targeting and communicating to ethnic segments based on their own cultural framework" (Stachura & Murphy 2005). They must be tailored to the experiences and perceptions of individual minority groups in order to prove successful in implementation. This would increase the overall research and development going into more specified marketing plans. Moreover, these strategies need to be diversified, as to now to alienate other cultural groups. It is clear that "what may be appealing to one culture might have the opposite effect on another" (Stachura & Murphy 2005). As such, firms are expanding their campaigns to include a number of specific plans to target multiple cultural markets.

There are a number of ways that firms can tap into this growing trend, as shown in the article to be analyzed in the context of this evaluation. The article written by Valdillez (2012) focuses on utilizing color packaging and brand imagery as a way to tap into multicultural marketing. Here, the research suggests that "the package is the medium through which a product image is created. Yet, a package can be interpreted differently across cultures and can develop an unwanted product image" (Valdillez 2012 p 10). Thus, it is important for organizations to not only understand what messages their packaging is sending to multicultural markets, but also what characteristics in terms of packaging are in demand for particular cultural markets.