Ethnic marketing to the global millennial consumers: Challenges and opportunities

This paper reports on an exploratory interpretivist study of global millennial consumers' subjective interpretations of ethnic targeted marketing communications in a multicultural marketplace. Although millennials are the most ethnically diverse generational cohort that has ever existed, little is known about their interpretation of ethnicity depiction in advertising and how they draw from advertising imagery to infer their ethnic identity, social acceptance and inclusion in a culturally diverse society. Within the broader context of the global consumer culture, this paper draws on theories of social identity, persuasion and multiculturalism to investigate whether ethnic marketing is still applicable to reach the diverse millennial consumers. In-depth interviews with the photo elicitation technique were conducted with an ethnically heterogeneous sample of twenty-three millennial individuals in the UK. The findings show that ethnic millennials' multicultural identities cannot be primed through mono-ethnic targeted messages, whereas multi-ethnic embedded marketing communications provide a more effective access for the ethnically diverse millennial consumers in the modern society and can potentially be a viable solution towards enhanced wellbeing and lower prejudice. This study contributes to insights into millennial consumers' experience in the multicultural marketplace, the sociocultural meanings of ethnic advertising and the opportunities and challenges of reaching to this diverse audience. 1. Introduction Millennials are the most racially/ethnically diverse generational cohort. Many of them were born and raised in ethnically mixed families with a history of immigration. Millennials have gained a reputation of diversity supporters, showing fairer understanding of race and ethnicity, tolerance, open-mindedness and multicultural thinking (Broido, 2004; Ford, Jenkins, & Oliver, 2012; Nielsen, 2014). They are more acculturated to the globally diverse cultures than any previous generational cohorts (Carpenter, Moore, Dohert, & Alexander, 2012), and many of them are fluent speakers of English, a language that triggers values characteristic of a global, more cosmopolitan and less ethnocentric identity (Cleveland, Laroche, & Papadopoulos, 2015). In the US, Millennials represent the largest generational cohort that has ever existed, reaching more than 80 million people with a total buying power that has exceeded the Baby Boomers' (Thomas, 2013). In the UK, millennials stand for almost 25% of the population and are expected to reach 17 million by 2019 (Inkling, 2015). More than 20% of them are of an ethnic background other than White British, the Asian or Asian British being the most dominant group (Mintel, 2016). Given this di