Multicultural Market Research
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Interviewing Service of America (ISA)
15400 Sherman Way, 4th Fl.
Van Nuys, CA 91406
Ph. 800-289-1044
Fx. 818-756-7489
www.isacorp.com
Download the Multicultural Market Research Section of the Multicultural Marketing Source Book (294 KB)
Multicultural Marketing Research: We’re Getting Closer and Closer, But We’re Not There Yet
Michael Halberstam
President, Interviewing Service of America
Multicultural marketing research has always lagged behind general market marketing research. There are many reasons for this and they have been hashed and rehashed. Rarely, until the 1980’s was any population other than English speaking residents surveyed in the USA. African American’s became marketable to a great extent during the 1960’s. It took almost 20 more years for Hispanic American’s and 30+ years for Asian American’s to be recognized as segment’s worthy of the expenditure of advertising and marketing dollars. Although, still not quite equally representative in these expenditures, most would agree that money is being spent, to a much greater degree, in all segments.
What does this mean for marketing research? Looking back, I remember conducting mall interviews and focus groups in the Tri-Sate NY area in 1978 when nothing was done electronically. For the most part, our respondents were Caucasian with a smattering of African Americans. In the mid-1980’s with the advent of CATI telephone data collection as well as the refinement of RDD high-density sampling, we were able to conduct bilingual Spanish data collection in a cost efficient manner. Suddenly, we were getting requests every week for bilingual marketing research!
The 2010 Census data shows that the Asian American and Hispanic American populations both grew over 40 % in the past decade. The population of a state like California is now over 37% Hispanic. The face of America is changing rapidly and dramatically, but are marketers and market researchers keeping up ? Already in place are a slew of excellent multicultural Advertising Agencies, PR firms, marketers, as well as a small number of market research firms who have a passion for the market and the vision of what it is becoming. The strong growth of many of these agencies over the past 25 years is testimony to that vision.
Again, I ask the question, what does this mean for marketing research? As we continue into the next decade, we now have the tools necessary to conduct multicultural, multilingual marketing research with incredible speed in any language necessary. Imagine for a moment that you are company that wants to know about the shopping experience of a group of people who shop at your stores. And, you wanted to conduct this in Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Today, right now, market researchers are able, via smart phone technology, to have shoppers take pictures and send back survey data while still in the store shopping! I-Pad technology allows us to provide real time, in store survey data. We are getting regular requests to build and maintain multilingual online panels for use among our clients base. This is now, not the future and continues to grow rapidly.
Social networking, mobile technology, better online panels with Flash technology along with the new Census data will make the future an exciting time for multicultural market research.
Since 1983 ISA has conducted multilingual, multicultural research in 67 languages for a wide array of industries such as CPG, automobile, health care, entertainment, media, political, utilities, colleges and universities and government agencies.
Contact information:
Interviewing Service of America (ISA)
15400 Sherman Way, 4th Fl.
Van Nuys, CA 91406
Ph. 800-289-1044
Fx. 818-756-7489
halberstam@isacorp.com
www.isacorp.com
