Marketing to an Asian Diaspora in the US

Asian diaspora have a unique cultural sensibility that makes them a marketing challenge. The “hook” for businesses targeting them is supposed to be the nationalism in their sense of identity.  However, pinning down what nationalism means to diaspora can be difficult.

Diaspora have roots in a particular culture even while situated in a different one. This is significant since messages are always received in a cultural context. With the right approach, you can get a loyal diaspora market whose sense of identity can work for you.

But if you aren’t careful, you can also restrict the size of that market unnecessarily by using cultural cues that exclude others with a slightly different sense of identity—something that happens often when businesses target large groups with considerable diversity within them.

To avoid that in diaspora marketing, you have to find out which types of emigrants can be customers in the first place.

Targeting Your Markets

In their article on diaspora marketing in the Harvard Business Review, Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict E.M. Steencamp segregate diaspora into four types. Of these, they identify ethnic affirmers and biculturals to be most promising for businesses targeting emigrant markets.

Ethnic affirmers are emigrants whose identity is tied to the ancestral homeland. Biculturals, though, are people who feel for both the ancestral homeland and their current host: they move easily between the two and suffer no conflict for it.

Ethnic affirmers are then enthusiastic supporters of products from or related to the homeland. Biculturals, while not as ardent, are nevertheless sufficiently tied to the lure of their heritage to be viable consumers. Furthermore, biculturals tend to be affluent (and educated).

By contrast, the other two types of diaspora, assimilators and marginals aren’t considered viable markets: the former because they’re more entrenched in the communities and cultures of their host country (and are thus better treated as “local” markets) and the latter because they’re on the economic margins, i.e. they lack the resources to become consumers of the company’s service/product.

Making a Relatable Message for Both Types

When Morbie first started, we made a common error for businesses marketing to diaspora: we pitched the cultural appeals too strongly. It quickly garnered us a market among ethnic assimilators, but it also made our messages a little more difficult to consume for the biculturals.

For example, in filling our marketing with terms taken from the consumers’ homeland, we were making an appeal to their nationalistic sentiment. However, we were also assuming comprehension of the terms we used. It ostracized those who weren’t entrenched enough in their homeland’s culture to understand them at a glance.

So by going too heavily “Filipino” in our marketing, we ended up sending an inadvertent message that we were only for the “exclusively Filipino,” marginalizing biculturals. The ideal should be to strike a mean between the two diaspora types: to find a medium for the message that both can accept, in other words.

The solution? Identifying what influences a community and what affects it.

Affect vs. Influence

Influences are cultural notes that can be used as “hooks.” They work because of the lure of the homeland and the sentimentality of heritage. Affecters, on the other hand, are things that touch the diaspora directly in their environment. The former should then be the meat of the message while the latter show how best to word that message, given that both ethnic affirmers and biculturals occupy and are affected by the environment hosting them.

For example, in marketing to Japanese diaspora based in NYC, you could use Japanese values and concepts for the cultural “hook.” But the language you use to communicate these references can’t be exclusively or even primarily Japanese. It should be English – not just any English, but NYC English.

You should use NYC idioms, the language that now affects your target market and which they use to affect their surroundings as well. You should reach out to them not merely on Japanese sites but also on US ones. You should link holiday promotions to festivals like Tanabata and emphasize not the ethnic aspect of customs like tanzaku, but rather their more universal ideas—ideas like romanticism and desire.

In effect, you will inscribe the ideas of one culture into a message while using the language of another.

Cultural Concession

By making concessions to both the cultures influencing a diaspora community, you expand your market reach by making the message more widely comprehensible. Striking a mean between one identity and another without actually sacrificing one for the other means that consumers don’t feel compelled to make a choice when it comes to allegiances of culture.

In the end, diaspora marketing should be about the allure of heritage and the homeland. It’s marketing that makes good use of the oft-nostalgic draw of the place the diaspora come from.

But if it’s to be smart marketing, it should take something else into account: the power of the place where the diaspora already are.

Melissa Olsen – Guest Contributor Melissa Olsen is the marketing director for Morbie, an online platform for sending e-load to the Philippines. She is currently based in Fort Worth with her family and often contributes to various business sites on the topic of marketing. Get in touch with her through Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.

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