Internal Conflicts Slow Multicultural Marketing

The stats are clear: the face of the U.S. consumer is changing rapidly. The discussions internally among marketers on strategy are plentiful. However, a new survey has found that the conflicts within organizations over multicultural marketing are slowing these efforts.

Just over half, 51%, of marketers claimed that they have a multicultural marketing initiative in place, according to an August 2015 survey from the CMO Council and Geoscape. When breaking that stat down by industry type, 80% of B2B marketers say they do not have a multicultural marketing initiative in place compared to 67% of hybrid organizations (B2B and B2C).

Even with 51% of marketers staging multicultural initiatives, 32% described the efforts as “experimental. Another 36% claim it was a strategic move and 27% said it was “mission critical” for their organizations.

The reasons given by companies for not having such initiatives was that it simply wasn’t a priority (36%), insufficient budgets (34%) and having a total-market strategy in place that would address multicultural marketing (26%), the survey found.

Support from the corner office is lacking. More than half, 55% of respondents, reported a lack of buy-in from the CEO and 60% said the board of directors is not on board. It’s the marketers that truly get that multicultural marketing should be a priority, with 66% getting support from the CMO and 70% from brand management.

“Although marketing seems to understand the importance of multicultural efforts based on these numbers, without support from the top of the organization, marketing will be fighting a losing battle in terms of organizational commitment and budgets to execute on these initiatives,” the CMO Council wrote in the report.

That lack of support equates to a lack of budget dollars with 54% of those surveyed reporting only 0% to 10% of the overall marketing budget is allocated for multicultural marketing and only 14% reported more than 25%. When determining how much to allocate to multicultural marketing, 53% said it was based on growth goals, 49% on ROI and 48% based on the number of multicultural consumer targets. One respondent wrote in, “what’s left after everything else,” according to the CMO report.

“Without making this critical area of marketing a priority, companies risk missing out on not only immediate sales, but also a lifetime of revenue that could be generated by building loyalty from these consumers,” the CMO Council wrote in its report.

Despite the fact that marketers understand the importance of a multicultural marketing strategy, the lack of support and dollars is hampering efforts. Even so, marketers reported in the survey that multicultural marketing efforts will continue to increase in importance, with 16% expecting significant increases, 37% anticipating it will increase in importance somewhat, 33% see things remaining steady and just 2% saying it will decrease in importance. The picture changes dramatically, however, with those organizations that market to individual segments (8%) of respondents. This group considers multicultural marketing mission critical and have a strong commitment from the CEO that is backed by budgets.