Abstract
This paper reports on an exploratory interpretivist study of global millennial consumers' subjective interpretations of ethnic targeted marketing communications in a multicultural marketplace. Although millennials are the most ethnically diverse generational cohort that has ever existed, little is known about their interpretation of ethnicity depiction in advertising and how they draw from advertising imagery to infer their ethnic identity, social acceptance and inclusion in a culturally diverse society. Within the broader context of the global consumer culture, this paper draws on theories of social identity, persuasion and multiculturalism to investigate whether ethnic marketing is still applicable to reach the diverse millennial consumers. In-depth interviews with the photo elicitation technique were conducted with an ethnically heterogeneous sample of twenty-three millennial individuals in the UK. The findings show that ethnic millennials' multicultural identities cannot be primed through mono-ethnic targeted messages, whereas multi-ethnic embedded marketing communications provide a more effective access for the ethnically diverse millennial consumers in the modern society and can potentially be a viable solution towards enhanced wellbeing and lower prejudice. This study contributes to insights into millennial consumers' experience in the multicultural marketplace, the sociocultural meanings of ethnic advertising and the opportunities and challenges of reaching to this diverse audience.
Highlights
Millennials are the most racially/ethnically diverse generational cohort
We argue that the investigation of millennials in the context of the global consumer culture and ethnic marketing research is theoretically and practically meaningful
Our finding suggests that multiethnic millennials' identity integration is complementary to the acculturation process (Berry, 1997) in that multiethnic millennials' cultural integration reflects both a high tendency to participate in the host society and a high degree of preserving their own ethnic cultural identity
Summary
Millennials are the most racially/ethnically diverse generational cohort. Many of them were born and raised in ethnically mixed families with a history of immigration. Millennials have gained a reputation of diversity supporters, showing fairer understanding of race and ethnicity, tolerance, open-mindedness and multicultural thinking (Broido, 2004; Ford, Jenkins, & Oliver, 2012; Nielsen, 2014). They are more acculturated to the globally diverse cultures than any previous generational cohorts (Carpenter, Moore, Dohert, & Alexander, 2012), and many of them are fluent speakers of English, a language that triggers values characteristic of a global, more cosmopolitan and less ethnocentric identity (Cleveland, Laroche, & Papadopoulos, 2015). Millennials represent a lucrative market for global brands active in multicultural countries
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