Massive demographic upheavals are changing the societal identities of American consumers and disrupting the effectiveness of traditional marketing techniques. The so-called mass market is dissolving into smaller groups of consumers who express distinctive ethnic, age-related, or lifestyle values by what they buy and how they buy it. Consumers in different subcultures speak different languages, read different magazines, watch different networks on TV, and buy in different places. The lesson for marketers is clear -- a single marketing campaign may no longer effectively reach a broad spectrum of consumers. Marketers and advertisers hoping to attract large numbers of American consumers must build relationships by mirroring the values and multiple identities of various groups. Marketers need tools to link their efforts to consumers within several subculture communities. Marketing and Consumer Identity in Multicultural America presents strategies and tools for marketers seeking to reach these emerging subcultures. Chapter 1 introduces the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America and its impact on marketing. Chapter 2 introduces the seven key shifts from traditional thinking that marketers must make to thrive in a multicultural world (e.g., from "market segmentation" to "market identification"). Chapters 3 through 7 profile five key subculture groups -- the elderly, Latinos, African Americans, gays and lesbians, and Asian Americans. Chapter 8 profiles several emerging groups, and chapter 9 is a comprehensive summary of marketing attitudes and techniques that are critical to success in this new multicultural environment.

In America today, you can connect to your ethnic heritage in dozens of ways, or adopt an identity just for an evening. Our society is not a melting pot but a salad bar--a bazaar in which the purveyors of goods and services spend close to $2 billion a year marketing the foods, clothing, objects, vacations, and events that help people express their (and others') ethnic identities. This is a huge business, whose target groups are the "hyphenated Americans"--in other words, all of us. As immigrant groups gain economic security, they tend to reinforce--not relinquish--their ethnic identification. Marilyn Halter demonstrates that, to a great extent, they do it by shopping. And their purchasing power is enormous. How has the marketplace responded to this hunger? Instantly and wholeheartedly: tweaking old products and inventing new ones; launching new brands in supermarkets, new music groups, vacation itineraries, language courses, toys, greeting cards, et cetera. This nexus of business and ethnicity is already seen as the hottest consumer development of this decade, and Halter is uniquely qualified to describe its origins, the exponential growth of products and advertising, and the phenomenal sales of items from salsa to Chieftains CDs. She addresses her subject with an abundance of anecdotal evidence, telling examples of ethnic marketing, and interviews with entrepreneurs (many of them immigrants) who are vigorously seizing the opportunities offered by the business of ethnicity. Shopping for Identity is provocative, intriguing, and farseeing, illuminating an important aspect of our contemporary way of life while validating the yearning we all feel for connection to our roots.

Because American consumers transmigrate between social identities in expressing their values and affiliations, marketers must apply transcultural marketing methods and offer a cultural values proposition to build long-term customer relationships. This unique book weaves these topics into profiles of 9 influential American subcultures currently shaping their members marketplace choices.

Global trends in emerging ethnicity - and also in global marketing - make this an especially timely book. Marketing in a Multicultural World is the perfect volume for scholars, students, and professionals in marketing and race and ethnic studies.

​This volume includes the full proceedings from the 1998 Multicultural Marketing Conference held in Montreal, Canada. The focus of the conference and the enclosed papers is on marketing to various ethnic groups in both a US and global context. It presents papers on various multicultural issues across the entire spectrum of marketing activities and functions including marketing management, marketing strategy, and consumer behavior. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.​

Communicating with the Multicultural Consumer highlights demographic changes impacting the consumer marketplace in the United States. Growing multiculturalism creates both new opportunities for marketers as well as new challenges. With a balance of theoretical and practical perspectives, this text explores how to develop successful campaigns targeting Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Complete with current examples and case studies, it addresses the key issues that must be kept in mind when creating effective communications programs for ethnic consumers - from marketing mix elements to cultural norms and values. Communicating with the Multicultural Consumer is an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in specialized courses dealing with ethnic advertising or marketing. It is also an effective supplementary text for introductory advertising, marketing or mass communication courses, and would be useful to advertising practitioners - whether on the client side or within the advertising agency.

An economic revolution is transforming America: the New Mainstream. In this groundbreaking book, Guy Garcia explains how Americans will eat, work, play, learn, and spend money in the twenty-first century -- and why any organization that ignores the lessons of the New Mainstream is doomed to fail. Led by the growing statistical and buying power of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, the New Mainstream is a loose coalition of minorities who have been forced to forge their own identity in American culture -- even as they use and consume goods and services targeted to the general public. This shift in consumer buying power is not only transforming how products are developed, marketed, and bought, it also illustrates that diversity is the driving force of American capitalism. As Garcia shows, The New Mainstream is both a wake-up call and a road map to this new economic reality.

As populations become increasingly mobile and production is globalized, countries and regions around the world are becoming multicultural in social composition. Such multicultural market environments call for new marketing concepts and methodologies as well as empirical research into the implications of multicultural diversity for marketers. These important issues are addressed in this detailed volume, which examines critical multicultural marketing issues at various geographic national, regional and global levels.

This comprehensive title is among the first to extensively use newly released 2010 U.S. Census data to examine multiculturalism today and tomorrow in America. This distinction is important considering the following NPR report by Eyder Peralta: “Based on the first national numbers released by the Census Bureau, the AP reports that minorities account for 90 percent of the total U.S. growth since 2000, due to immigration and higher birth rates for Latinos.” According to John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has analyzed most of the census figures, “The futures of most metropolitan areas in the country are contingent on how attractive they are to Hispanic and Asian populations.” Both non-Hispanic whites and blacks are getting older as a group. “These groups are tending to fade out,” he added. Another demographer, William H. Frey with the Brookings Institution, told The Washington Post that this has been a pivotal decade. “We’re pivoting from a white-black-dominated American population to one that is multiracial and multicultural.” Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia explores this pivotal moment and its ramifications with more than 900 signed entries not just providing a compilation of specific ethnic groups and their histories but also covering the full spectrum of issues flowing from the increasingly multicultural canvas that is America today. Pedagogical elements include an introduction, a thematic reader’s guide, a chronology of multicultural milestones, a glossary, a resource guide to key books, journals, and Internet sites, and an appendix of 2010 U.S. Census Data. Finally, the electronic version will be the only reference work on this topic to augment written entries with multimedia for today’s students, with 100 videos (with transcripts) from Getty Images and Video Vault, the Agence France Press, and Sky News, as reviewed by the media librarian of the Rutgers University Libraries, working in concert with the title’s editors.

This volume includes the full proceedings from the 1996 Multicultural Marketing Conference presented by the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) and Old Dominion University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The focus of the conference and the enclosed papers is on marketing to various ethnic groups in both a US and global context. It presents papers on various multicultural issues across the entire spectrum of marketing activities and functions including marketing management, marketing strategy and consumer behavior. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.