By Christian Filli / LatinWorks
As we see every year, 2012 started with lots of predictions, resolutions and good intentions. The marketing industry is no exception, as we hear perspectives from many experts across different disciplines and specialties about what will and won’t happen in our industry. This is always fun reading and often inspires at least a few minutes of reflection. The challenge, however, is to put our new year’s resolutions into practice. As soon as we get back to our routine, making any significant change becomes increasingly difficult, and we settle for doing business as usual.
A recent NYTimes.com article reminded me to stay committed to one of my own resolutions: listen to people. The article highlights the fact that more than 18 million Latinos answered the question about race by checking the “other” box in the last census. It proceeds to conclude that this is “an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them”. It’s an interesting assessment and I agree. Despite the fact that the question presents a list with 15 (that’s right, fifteen) race alternatives, 36% of the total Latino population still has opted for “none of the above describes me”. This is not a minor finding, and I dare to predict that this type of sentiment will gradually spread across a broader portion of the population in the U.S., well beyond the Latino community. Why? Because the country is progressively becoming more diverse in many aspects and traditional segmentation systems are failing to provide an accurate portrait of real life.
Census officials are probably struggling with this because a big reason for having a census in the first place is to eliminate ambiguity. But we’re likely to see more and more ambiguity if we continue to ask the same questions over and over. What happens if that 36% grows to 51%? Or 75%? At what point will someone decide to modify the questions? Should we even still care about splitting the country by race or ethnicity? Are those real indicators of how people think and behave?
It’s becoming apparent that trying to predict future trends in the same terms as we have understood the past is as futile of an exercise as comparing apples to carrots.
Another great piece of evidence showing a dramatic shift in how people view themselves is a 2011 quantitative research project conducted by my team at LatinWorks. We asked 1,200 people to answer a series of self-identification questions that went beyond the traditional questions of origin and language, in order to get a deeper understanding of how people are relating to culture. The experiment had a startling outcome and helped debunk the acculturation model. First of all, we discovered that growth and diversity has already created sub-segments within each one of the three typical acculturation buckets (unacculturated/bicultural/acculturated). Second, asking new questions helped us realize that sometimes there are greater similarities across acculturation levels than within one particular bucket. In other words, acculturation does not necessarily determine attitudinal or behavioral patterns. Consequently, we should question whether it’s still an effective segmentation tool.
Below is a sample question that we used in the study (What team would you root for if your country of origin played the US during an important sporting event?) and the impact it had throughout the spectrum of respondents (based on levels of acculturation). The shades of grey indicate similarities and differences in comparison to the levels of acculturation, demonstrating that people within a particular acculturation bucket (e.g. bicultural) don’t think all the same way.
The message that consumers are sending us is clear. As much as we love putting people in boxes to make our lives easier as marketers, the reality is that people are a lot more multi-dimensional and fluid today, their vision of the world being a lot broader. They’d rather not be labeled.
We need to move away from self-limiting tools and obsolete definitions. We must be creative in order to understand and connect with the human truth, graciously allowing standard methods to fade while adopting/inventing new ones.
Is this a simple task? Certainly not. But even if it may feel as though someone is pulling the rug from underneath our feet, we will most likely be better off in the long run.
I remember sitting in a focus group last year and hearing a 17 year old Latino named Marco react to the “bicultural” label: I don’t think of myself in those terms, I just am.
Let’s embrace the ambiguity of today’s evolving cultural marketplace, along with the richness that it brings. Let’s listen to Marco.
