E-Commerce Week #4

Business Week Online
Online Marketers Wooing Minorities More
Douglas MacMillan
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081217_930574.htm

With the constant increase in online retailing, more and more people are beginning to use the internet for various products and services, and this increase has led to usage by various cultures worldwide. Marketers are searching for ways to reach out their messages to everyone rather than limiting themselves to certain markets. The increase in the number of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans online, has led marketers to adapt their campaigns to court all of these markets. Studies have shown that there is an increase in the use of internet by these segments and therefore, the importance of making marketing messages culturally relevant to potential new customers has become vastly more important. It is believed that to be effective, advertisers, “can’t just translate their mass-market campaign into another language”, but more so an understanding of different cultures and traditions needs to be established.

Multicultural marketing online has become a popular medium both in its use, as well as being a key factor in being able to distinguish a tracking system for what types of customers are being reached. Marketers have found that cultural groups have already tended to form close environments online, which is seen as an opportunity for marketers to virally spread their messages to these markets. In regards to the future of the multicultural online market, agencies that specialize in multicultural marketing are projecting demand at least to hold steady for the next year which seems to be a promising sign considering the current economic climate. Ultimately, while it’s necessary for advertising to reflect cultures and attitudes of its intended audience, the importance of translating language should not be overlooked.

I found this article interesting because as a designer, in the future this is a topic I’m going to be frequently faced with. It’s much easier to design for a culture that I’m familiar with, but there’s so many more people in the world that your message must reach and as a designer, other cultures and traditions need to be taken into consideration. This article opened up my eyes to the increase in multi-cultural users of the internet, and that is only one medium of design that will need to be considered.