QUESTION: How can PR professionals capitalize on the buying power of diverse minority groups?
ANSWER: For many PR executives, the act of reaching out to diverse groups is often lost in translation - both literally and figuratively - but recent compelling numbers
hope to kick-start a new trend in the communications profession: embracing oft-underrepresented minorities on all levels of practice.
Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations: Understanding and Targeting America's Largest Minority (Poyeen Publishing) has taken steps to coach PR managers on the
benefits of appealing to America's largest minority group. Hispanics are projected to have a buying power of $700 billion in 2006, and the book's 19 writers (all are experts in
the Latino market) offer five steps to reaching this target audience:
- Acknowledge the diversity of the U.S. Latino markets.
- Identify which segment(s) of the market you wish to reach (for example, first, second, third generation).
- Determine the characteristics of the targeted segment (such as age, area of residence, income level, language fluency).
- Collaborate with market experts to identify specific strategies and tactics.
- Formulate in-language and in-culture marketing and communication strategies specific to the targeted segment.
Though these steps do not translate exactly to other audiences, they can be loosely applied to another minority group: African Americans. According to Packaged Facts, a
division of MarketResearch.com, African Americans are an increasingly affluent subset of the population, with a projected buying power of $762 billion. Despite this
healthy-sized pocketbook, marketers and public relations professionals still don't target that sector with the proper knowledge of and vigor for their consumption habits.
"Having roughly the same purchasing power as Hispanics, African Americans tend to be left behind when it comes to marketing and advertising because Hispanics are expected to
have more rapid population growth," Don Montuori, publisher of Packaged Facts, said in a press release. "Marketers would be wise, however, to tap into the African American
segments that outpace their Hispanic counterparts, such as those with incomes greater than $50,000; owner-occupied households; married-couple families; and African American women-
all sectors which offer huge potential in the consumer goods markets."
For yet another overlooked group in the marketplace - gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) consumers - PR executives must realign their communications efforts to
capitalize on their projected $641 billion buying power in 2006. Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts used the buying power statistics as a business tool to
provide marketing communications counsel to Fortune 500 companies in their strategies to reach the gay consumer market.
According to Wesley Combs, president of Witeck-Combs Communications, "In today's competitive marketplace, it is no longer prudent for a leading corporation to ignore the buying
power of the gay market. Marketers that do risk leaving market share on the table for others to capture."
While this statement holds true in the case of any diverse population, PR managers still face the challenge of effectively targeting consumers who don't fit into a majority
category. Following the steps laid out by Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations offers a solid starting point, but corporate communicators - and agency professors who are
increasingly required to speak to the profession as a whole instead of focusing on one specialized niche - must take more steps to develop a more worldly perspective, so to speak.
And it's not a matter of the age-old lecture on hiring applicants with diverse backgrounds; it extends to the practice itself.
"It is not so much the profile of the profession, but rather what we know about diverse constituencies, communicating to diverse audiences, and doing that through diverse
channels," says Frank Ovaitt, president and CEO of Institute for Public Relations. "It really has to do with the whole value of diversity and how we perform as public
relations people."
Contact: Frank Ovaitt, 703.568.5611, [email protected]; Wesley Combs, [email protected]; Don Montouri, 212.807.2661.