March 24,
2012 by Laura Kina
Marketing to the
Melting Wok: How to Speak to Asians and Catch the “Fastest Growing Racial Group” in the U.S.
A Book
Review (of sorts)
Many Culture One Market: A Guide To Understanding Opportunities In The Asian Pacific American Market by Robert Kumaki and Jack Moran (The Copy Workshop: Chicago, 2010)
Asian spotting is a hard habit to kick. I counted 3 other Asian
Americans at my 20-year high school reunion this past summer in my rural
Pacific Northwest hometown of Poulsbo, WA (think Snow Falling on Cedars but with Norwegians). Psychologists and
sociologists have labeled this tendency to be drawn to others who look like you
as the “Own-Race Effect.” As someone who is also Asian/White, I feel like this
effect is exacerbated. I’m an Associate Professor of Art, Media, & Design
at DePaul University in Chicago and I count 3 other Asian/White faculty in my College
of Liberal Arts & Social Science. I’m also piqued to receive information
about “my people” so when the U.S. Census Bureau announced on March 21, 2012that in the 2010 Census, “Asians grew faster than any other group over the last
decade” I paid attention. With a 45.6% increase, we make up 5.6% of the
population or 17.3 million now and of that group, 2.6 million identified as
more than one race.
I wonder how being framed as, “the fastest growing population”
will translate into representation in positions of leadership and power? Just
because there are more of us, will anything really change or will we continue
to be seen as “model minorities” or invisible and statistically insignificant? Will
we see more Asian C-level executives? Could there be an American President of
Asian descent one day and when will marketers ever stop lumping us with Whites?
l do have to admit that when I’m looking for a good laugh, I
troll through Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like blog and the opening Ivy League contour line drawing in his
2010 Whiter Shades of Pale: Coast to Coast,From Seattle’s Sweaters To Maine’s Mircrobrews of a sporty young woman with
a Harvard sweatshirt, baseball cap, and Democratic Party gear looks
suspiciously like a certain member of my family who still Obeys her Obama 08
t-shirts. But I know we really aren’t the same. Like you know that when you
mess up, a White person might just think, “oops, I made a mistake. I’ll do
better next time.” But for us Asians, messing up brings shame to entire family!
Filial piety lives on for better and for worse. I know that as the number one
daughter in my family (and yes, I said daughter not son) my actions, even as an
adult, supposedly set an example for my younger brothers and for the next
generation, even those not even born. Cultural euphemisms such as “the squeaky
wheel gets the oil” vs. “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” provide
generalizations about Asian belief systems that may or may not still be true
for some of us but we can see differences in areas that we can actually measure
such as our consumption. In the category of food, for example, did you know
that in a 2007 CES study Asians accounted for 8.3% of expenditures on fish and
seafood yet made up only 3.5% of CES households (Kumaki, 170)? Surely you don’t
see most other racial groups buying rice in 25 lb bags and prominently
displaying an electric rice cooker on their kitchen counter on a regular basis?
As an artist and an Asian American studies scholar I’ve thought a lot about
representation but not as much about Marketing with a capital M. Criticizing blatantly
racist media images or complaining about lack of representation is one thing
but what if I really want to reach “my people”? Rice may be rice but Asian
Americans come from such a myriad of different cultures that finding a common
ground can seem to be daunting. How do you even begin speaking to a pan-Asian
American audience? Start by "speaking English," Robert Kumaki suggests, and look
for the “sweet spot [in
the Asian American market] of family, finance, technology or education.”
His 2010 co-authored book with Jack Moran, Many Culture One Market: A Guide To Understanding Opportunities In The Asian Pacific American Market, has some golden tips to cracking this “Melting Wok” market, which the authors consider “low hanging-fruit” for marketers. For the sake of being as “inclusive as possible” they chose to lump Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders into the mix despite what they concede as the “dramatically different socio-economic experiences from the rest of Asian Americans.” Hence the term “APA” (Asian Pacific American) is used in the book and this review even though it is no longer used in the U.S. Census nor in activist and academic contexts in Asian American studies except in a historical sense. Remember that this is a marketing book so there is a constant push and pull between defining a targeted niche market and redefining what really is mainstream. Kumaki and Moran make a case that while some think of the APA market as only 4% (this was prior to the new 2010 stats) that it leans more towards 8% and even as high as 20% of the U.S. market. The book is written in a user-friendly form with a personal voice that draws upon the authors’ years of experience in senior research and management positions and their personal and professional expertise in ethnographic marketing. Their broad generalizations about the APA market are backed up with lists, bullet points and statistics. Each chapter has a series of overt framing questions and end of the chapter summaries, all of which made this topic accessible to me as a non-marketing expert. I could easily see Many Cultures One Market being used in a classroom, corporate or non-profit settings to facilitate group discussions about how to reach APA and cross-over audiences in the U.S.. Being a long time Chicagoan, I really appreciate the regional examples of Asian American marketing such as Chicago’s Chinese restaurants reflecting the latest trends in Asian cuisine and hip interior design rather than staying stuck in a time warp (all I have to say is everyone want to be the next Tony Hu). You don’t have to go to LA or NY to get hand-pulled noodles (go to Hing Kee) and Shanghai soup dumplings anymore and Peking duck chopped up table-side is available nightly at Chicago’s Sun Wah BBQ restaurant.
One doesn’t need to be a big corporation
or even officially in marketing either to ask questions about reaching the
Asian American market. For example, I found myself asking “marketing questions” for my own practice as an
artist, academic, and non-profit volunteer: How can I find a market outside of
my ethnic group or racial experience to be interested in my paintings that are
about specific Asian ethnic groups and locations? How can I get corporate
sponsors to donate to the Japanese American Service Committee "Living our Culture: A Celebration of Japanese American Art and Culture" benefit we are
organizing on June 7th (seriously, please feel free to contact Carol Yoshina at the JASC if you want to be a sponsor or donate goods or services)? How do reach a broader audience to be part of the
ethnic/racially specific non-profit orgs I am involved with? How can I get a
wider range of students to enroll in our Global Asian Studies program? How can my University
do a better job recruiting and retaining Asian faculty, staff, and students? You get the idea.
Many Cultures One Market starts by dispelling some common myths about multicultural
marketing such as the perception that the only way to reach Asians is to run
targeted Asian language ads in Asian-specific media. They caution that this can
too often lead to mis-translation and cite a well-known example from years ago when
Pepsi tried to translate “Come alive with Pepsi.” “The result? ‘Pepsi-Cola brings your ancestors back from the dead.’ That’s one heck of a product
benefit.” It
turns out we are consuming mainstream media just like everyone else albeit
apparently we watch less TV and are more inclined to get our news online and
open direct mail.
Besides
our penchant for seafood and speaking English, the book characterizes APA’s drive towards assimilation
as going up the “APA
Escalator.”
Instead of inscrutable perpetual foreigners, Many Cultures One Market provides cultural snapshots of APAs as interconnected
global tribes that can be characterized as tech-savvy early adapters, family
and community oriented, focused on education, foodies, increasingly
multi-racial and multi-ethnic, entrepreneurial, and over-represented in the
sciences, engineering, finance and medicine. Before you dismiss this as a
little too close to the old model minority stereotype, they do aggregate this
population and point to more complex Yellow Peril history in which the American
“political and legal systems
have constructed barrier after barrier to the creation of an APA community.” I’ll be a spoiler here and go
straight to what I think the point of this book is as outlined in chapter XI. “One Market: A New Paradigm to
Make It Simple”:
We feel there are three basic ideas that can help you define,
both quantitatively and qualitatively, and then reach the APA marketplace:
·
There is an identity to which
all APA groups can relate. It transcends language, country of origin, and even
the number of generations in the U.S.
·
Derived from this identity,
there are commonalities that exist amongst almost all APAs – commonalities
that don’t
necessarily exist among non-APAs.
·
There is a market that can be
aggregated under this identity.
To help you identify and then connect
with the marketing opportunity, we identify three major drives – one is
culturally based, one is physically based, and one is language-based.
Simply put, you have to understand:
The Americanization Dynamic – the cultural driver
The Own-Race Effect – the physical driver
English as a Common Denominator – the language driver
I was pleasantly surprised to see a chapter devoted to “Hapas”
and that the authors gave serious attention to the non-APA crossover market,
which includes parents of oversees adoptees. Vincent Cheng’s Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity (Rutgers University Press, 2004) fleshes out and critiques this
market of parents that are enrolling their kids in martial arts and Asian
language classes in droves and having their kids look for their roots in fan
dance and Disney’s Mulan. The main practical take away for me was in their
closing chapter XVI. “APA Specialists” about ROI on sponsors participating in
APA event marketing and the checklist for “Criteria for Inclusion” that they
offer if you should decide to use this avenue for marketing. From my 20 years
of participating in Chicago’s pan-Asian arts and culture communities, I have seen
this very simple marketing strategy successfully at work. If you place an ad
for your restaurant in our film festival brochure, we will go there. If you
table at our advocacy event, we will consider your company or product friendly
to APAs. If you e-mail us personally, chances are we’ll write you back. If you
send us direct mailers, we may even open up your letter and may not throw it
away. So if you think you have a product or company that fits the “sweet spots”
of food, family,
finance, technology or education, consider reaching out to APA audiences and grab
Many Cultures One Market as a handy
guide to get you started.
