O'Brien (PRWeek): Are you getting a sense now, or is this something that is going to occur in the future, that the general market approach to marketing is going to bring together all of the groups? Like how are we going to reach a younger generation that might be more of an integrated generation?
Franco (Cox): Now the economy is slowing down, it helps. Marketing is becoming more mainstream. We first said, "Ok, let's segment and divide everything." And now because there are so many different segments that we want to target, we're seeing, at least at Cox, that our general market campaigns are also inclusive to other segments as well. The reality is, I just read today, that 25% of the kids under five in the US are Latinos. It's going to becoming more general market. Those kids are going to school and learning and living in a very diverse environment. Budgets make things smaller. I think it's going to eventually become mainstream.
Swygert (American Cancer Society): That's an interesting point. We were actually looking at different market segments the other day and lining up the general market and African Americans and Hispanics and we were looking at women and what's important to them. And there were so many common themes that we stepped back and said, "Couldn't we just do one campaign that targets all women and all mothers?"
Franco (Cox): You're still going to have the uniques of each segment and you can't put everybody under the same umbrella, but I think that the key marketers are going to understand the budget constraints and are going to start to look for similarities. What is the umbrella?
Brown (Lagrant): We have to be careful with saying that our teens and our youth are going to live in this happy homogenous society to where they're not going to recognize race. I really think that that's not true. Being that we target the African-American consumer market, we know that there are still a lot of issues that not only adults face, but that the teens and the youth face. And they're growing up in this skeptical society that it's not a fair society. So even if we have marketers who think that, you do have kids out there who have access to more resources than a lot of other kids. They might be living in an area in the suburbs where their world is a little different to the kids who are still living in the urban center. Those kids in the urban center are not having the same resources, they don't have the same opportunities, the same education or anything else that is brought to them versus those African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic kids who might be mixing more with other kids in other areas. As marketers, we do have to sometimes step back and not say that everything is going to be easy for us to do and target this next generation. There are still a lot of things out there that will impact the next generation coming up to say, "Why are you still targeting me like that? This is not who I am.” I agree with what you said that it's opening the world up for people to look at other people's differences and to see that we are all just people. At the same time, I think that the next generation behind us, they have so much access to information that they know everything when it happens. And when things don't go right, they know that when it happens.
Beatty-Gonzalez (American Heart Association): I think you can look at influencers, like music for example. Some of those in the entertainment world are going to cross over. African-American entertainers often times are very well received by the Hispanic [community]. There are things you can do to reach groups and strategies you could use that can influence multiple audiences. You still have to look at how you're messaging to them, but they may be able to reach them with that message just because of who they are.
O'Brien (PRWeek): When you looking at the Census trends, the largest slice of consumers is not going to be white. What becomes, then, the general market?
Franco (Cox): My point is "What is general market now?" Every campaign we do, there is all the different segments. In 10 years, it is going to be totally different. So we are going to start looking for commonalities. How can we do it? Instead of just doing a TV spot, we're going to be inclusive and have things that are common to all of them. Still targeting the communities and doing community outreach that is specific for each segment. But general market: what is it?
Sim-Krause (GolinHarris): I think the most success we've had with different client campaigns is if they have a big general market campaign, but we integrate ethnic messages to that campaign, and it's customized for each specific ethnic market. It's very successful when we do that.
Toro (Fleishman): We're doing the same with AT&T. It's complicated, but then you tailor the messages and each one receives that message that really resonates with their culture and how they're going to respond to the brand.
Sim-Krause (GolinHarris): For example, with CSR campaigns they choose specific nonprofit groups for the corporations to give to, within the ethnic groups and those are very successful.
Guang (InterTrend): An encouraging sign is we've also seen some clients actually have Hispanics driving the overall campaign because the product or service is really high index against that ethnic group.
Franco (Cox): We've found by control testing, it doesn't suppress response rate if we use that as a base, so we can do that.
Sim-Krause (GolinHarris): Wade, you brought up an interesting point, which I was kind of milling over earlier. Hispanics have critical mass. What is the percentage in the US population?
Toro (Fleishman): 15.1%. 45.5 million.
Sim-Krause (GolinHarris): Asian-Americans have 4%. So sometimes we've gone into companies and they say, "OK, the Hispanic market is much more important because they have 15.1%. So 4%, let's think about next year." But they haven't seen the purchasing power. So the Asian population is 4%, but for Toyota's customer base, 10% is Asian, so that says a lot. If as a regular corporate executive would just look at this, on a surface level, it just takes a lot to educate and to build and cultivate the internal champion you were talking about. I'll be very interested to hear some tips on how you do that.
Santos (Delta): It makes me wonder—and I'm not stating this as a fact—just as a comment, if minorities are going to be the ones leading all marketing and all advertising and all PR in the future because of cultural aspect. We understand our culture plus the general market. It would be an interesting trend to see if that happens in time.