Multi-Cultural Cause-Related Marketing

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It’s an interesting topic to be sure, but I had to confess that I have never written on the subject and I don’t recall ever seeing any studies with regard to multi-cultural in general or Latino/Hispano cause marketing specifically.

In this two-part post I’ll address about the topic of multi-cultural marketing through the case of two ‘Muslim colas.’ On Tuesday I’ll tackle Gabriel’s direct question of Hispano/Latino cause marketing.

Three ‘Muslim colas’ were launched in Europe in 2002-2003, two of which got an astonishing amount of fanfare for their cause marketing efforts and their uncompromising anti-Western marketing positioning. To get a feel for how much publicity they got, just type ‘Muslim cola’ into your browser.

The colas were Mecca Cola, launched in France in 2002 and now headquartered in Dubai, and Qibla Cola, launched in the UK in 2003, but currently in administration (what we in the States call bankruptcy) and presently operating as separate entities in Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both promised to donate 10 percent of net profits to humanitarian causes, notably Palestinian and Muslim charities.

The third ‘Muslim cola’ Evoca, was launched in London in 2003 without any cause tie-ins. All three compete with two more established Muslim colas, Parsi and Zam Zam Colas, both founded in pre-revolutionary Iran and available throughout much of the Muslim world.

It’s hard to draw any conclusions about multi-cultural cause-related marketing from the examples of Qibla and Mecca. Qibla’s founders blame their company’s UK failure on anti-competitive practices from their competitors, presumably Coke and Pepsi.

Without a formal study, who knows which part of Qibla/Meccas’ positioning holds the most appeal for Muslim consumers, the anti-western rhetoric or the cause-related marketing overlay? By contrast Evoca’s positioning is based on the presence of ‘black seed’ flavoring… which draws praise from the Prophet Mohammed himself as a curative… along with the fact that it’s made with natural mineral water.

The failure of the Qibla and Mecca colas in Europe raises a tough question. We know some individuals are more responsive to cause marketing than others. Could it also be that some cultures are less responsive to cause marketing than others?

I think it almost goes without saying that cause-related marketing requires a consumer culture. It’s hard to imagine cause marketing being successfully employed among hunter-gatherer societies, for instance. Likewise, I suspect that if you’re living hand-to-mouth cause marketing holds less appeal than if your situation is more comfortable. So maybe cause marketing wouldn’t do so well in large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance.

Last tough question. Did Mecca and Qibla colas fail in Europe because Muslims there aren’t responsive to cause marketing?

I doubt it. There’s a thousand reasons why consumer businesses fail and cause marketing probably doesn’t even make the list.

Moreover, I did see a study by Mahmood M. Hajjat, PhD, an associate professor of marketing at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. In the experiment Professor Hajjat studied donation amounts in cause marketing and he found that when a company and a cause were a good fit, higher donation amounts lead higher response rates. His test subjects were students who, I presume, were mainly Muslim.

But what about Gabriel’s specific interest in cause-related marketing and Hispanic-Latino audiences?

Of course marketing to multi-cultural audiences can be damnably difficult because…just to take up just Hispanics-Latinos…Spanish speakers in the United States may come from dozens of countries. While Spanish itself is a lingua franca, there are hundreds of accents, and thousands of culturally-specific word meanings.

Considering the 1951-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, Mexican Spanish predominates, especially in the American Southwest. But there are also 3.3 million people born in the Caribbean and 2.1 million people born in South America now living in the United States, according to 2003 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2000 U.S. Census identified 28.1 million people in the United States who speak Spanish.

If you’re a marketer (cause or otherwise) it’s not enough to simply translate campaigns or even ad copy from English to Spanish. Marketing requires not only language translation, but cultural translation.

Puerto Rican food is not Mexican food without the chili!

Case in point: I have two nephews, who along with their father, all speak fluent Spanish. One acquired his skills in Peru, the other in Uruguay and their father learned his in central Mexico. After two years in Uruguay, my nephew returned home to Arizona where he’s a construction foreman. This being Arizona, most of his crew is Mexican. Though they spoke the same language, my nephew had a hard time connecting with his crew in no small measure because they found his accent so perplexing.

But back to Gabriel’s question. If you’re a cause marketer, and Hispano-Latinos are your audience, is there some cause that a good chunk of the H-L audience have an affinity for regardless of their accent?

In an email exchange, Gabriel suggests the answer. Several companies that market to Hispanics and Latinos have taken up the cause of education.

McDonalds has a campaign called HACER which offers scholarships and college tours for Hispanics. Coors sponsored the 2004 tour of Mexican pop band Mana, and donated $125,000 towards college scholarships to kids from the U.S., Puerto Rico and Mexico. The Home Depot has partnerships with the ASPIRA Association, HACU, National Council of La Raza, and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility. Verizon, GM, Kellogg’s, AT&T, Miller Brewing, and others offer college internships, college tours and the like to Latino students.

In June Staples Foundation for Learning granted another $100,000 to the Hispanic heritage Foundation to fund the Hispanic Heritage Teacher Award, which celebrates the contributions of “influential teachers within Latino communities across the country making a positive impact on the lives of Latino youth.”

Of these, the Coors effort is the closest to straightforward cause marketing.

So is education the one appropriate cause that generates affinity across the many Hispano-Latino cultures? Probably not. But the only way to know for sure is to conduct is research and then test your resulting campaign in the H-L marketplace.

If I were to undertake it would probably include some combination of focus groups and surveys.

In Spanish, of course.

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Source by Paul R. Jones