Which Minorities Do We Forget When We Say 'Multicultural'?
In 2021, the ANA's Multicultural Excellence Awards added a new category, recognizing important work in marketing to "Rising Multicultural Segments." The inaugural winners in the category highlighted the power of marketing to reach a wide variety of communities, elevating representations of their members and even contributing to their bodily safety.
Here's a brief look at each one with a link to the full case study.
Harley-Davidson
In 2018, Canada changed its laws to grant Sikh men an exemption to its requirement that motorcycle riders wear a helmet while on the road. The requirement had made it difficult for Sikhs to wear the turban mandated by their faith as a sign of humility and respect. However, once they were allowed to go helmetless, they faced serious risks to their safety.
Motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson recognized the community's need and responded with a groundbreaking piece of technology: the tough turban. Drawing inspiration from stories of Sikh men wearing chain mail into battle underneath their turbans and drawing on the kind of technology used to create bulletproof clothing, the company designed a turban that would resist impact, bringing in a Sikh consultant to advise on the project.
The project yielded benefits that went beyond altruistic satisfaction. Research indicated that, following the project:
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87 percent saw the Harley-Davidson brand more favorably.
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86 percent saw the brand as more innovative.
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83 percent saw the brand as more inclusive.
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85 percent were more likely to consider buying a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Sephora
In addition to being home to a sizable community of Sikhs, Canada is home to a large indigenous population. Indeed, indigenous peoples make up five percent of the total population and that group is growing at one of the fastest rates in the country.
Despite being abundant, these indigenous peoples are often underrepresented in the media. Beauty brand Sephora Canada sought to change this, with a campaign that showcased the beauty abiding in indigenous stories, songs, and traditions. Among the people the campaign featured were Inuk throat singer Shina Novalinga.
In undertaking this work, Sephora Canada lent not just visibility to the indigenous community, but also concrete professional support. It partnered exclusively with indigenous production talent, from wardrobe, to styling, to music, to photography.
The campaign scored impressive results. Indeed, its launch video proved to be Sephora Canada's top-performing piece of content on social media in 2021, achieving an engagement rate of 5.59 percent. Nor was the campaign's success limited exclusively to social media; it also garnered 28.5 million earned media impressions.
Lipton
Social media wasn't the only channel that marketers used to reach rising multicultural segments in 2021. Lipton, for instance, capitalized on podcasts. The company's Lipton Yellow Label tea was popular with Arabs in their native lands, but sales of the product in Canada and the U.S. were hampered by the fact that Arab immigrants were unaware that it was available in their new country. To simultaneously boost awareness of the product while also promoting visibility for this often-overlooked group, Lipton launched a podcast series that shared uplifting stories of Arab immigrants who had made a positive impact on their communities.
This audio effort proved fruitful for Lipton. In five weeks, the nine-episode series garnered over 20 million impressions and over 193,000 views at a cost of $0.14 per view.
Elevate Communities
Together, these winners of the ANA's 2021 Multicultural Excellence Awards highlight the important work that marketers are doing to reach and elevate the visibility of communities that often get overlooked, even as we strive to become more inclusive and embrace diversity.
Sikhs, indigenous peoples, and Arabs might not be the first groups that the word "multicultural" brings to mind, but that makes it all the more important to shine a spotlight on their values, experiences, traditions, and accomplishments — to widen the aperture through which we come to recognize the unregarded other. And that's work in which twenty-first-century marketers have a critical role to play as some of the most influential image-makers and conversation-shapers on the planet.
It will be exciting to see how those marketers work on behalf of "rising multicultural segments" in 2022 when the ANA confers this year's Multicultural Excellence Awards.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Morgan Strawn is a senior manager of editorial and content development at ANA.