Immigration has always had a significant impact on Canadian retail despite – or even, because of – relative neglect by conventional retailers. Largely left to themselves, ethnic communities have proven fertile ground for independent retail sprout – without mainstream help, thank you very much! Drive through any area that’s home to an ethnic community and it’s easy to spot entrepreneurial mom-and-pops satisfying cultural needs: specialty groceries, bakeries and restaurants, clothing shops, barbershops and hair salons, remittance services, and more. Customers are served in the comfort and context of their own culture and language.
Recent large waves of immigration from Asia (India, Philippines, China), the Middle East and Africa are causing more Canadian retailers to sit up and take notice. It seems there are business opportunities to be had! Not only in offering multicultural consumers the items they grew up with, but ultimately, in converting them to Canadian retail customers. It’s worth noting that big cities are no longer the immigrant magnets they once were. According to the 2021 census, as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal become less affordable, immigrants are shifting away from previous patterns of settlement in large cities, choosing instead to live in Canada’s smaller urban centres. The Atlantic provinces have seen their immigrant numbers nearly triple.
No stranger to multicultural marketing, Canadian Tire is pointedly targeting these newly arrived groups. A recent engaging and empathetic campaign in Hindi, English and French was designed to connect and convert by featuring an Indian family encountering Canadian winter for the first time, and of course, discovering the solutions they need to enjoy it at ‘Canada’s Store.’
Retailers, you should be optimizing your brands with new strategies to welcome the country’s newest consumers through your doors. Understand that you’ll need to navigate carefully to help newcomers over the hurdles, while you avoid the pitfalls. Here’s a thought starter: To attract specific ethnic customers, why not take your cues from them?
“Multicultural Marketing: The BIGGEST Growth Opportunity”
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble
There are numerous cultural factors to consider when making a play for ethnic segments, including the basic challenges newcomers face from the get-go. Beyond the obvious language problem, they find the Canadian shopping experience different. They may not understand products or labels. And they’re often bewildered by the amount of choice on-shelf. It’s important for retailers and brands to offer clarity and lead them through the customer journey.
Cultural Values and Behaviour
Where people in individualistic cultures like Canada and the U.S. make purchases that reflect self-interest, people from collectivist cultures – those placing more importance on society as a whole than on individuals, such as India, China and Korea – are more likely to buy products endorsed by their social circles. Their cultural preferences extend from product packaging to store layout, design, and more. By incorporating familiar cultural themes, colours, symbols, and terminology into your retail experience, you help bridge the gap from old world to new and build higher consideration. Discount grocery banner FreshCo has proven more far-sighted than many, having gone all-in a few years ago with Chalo! FreshCo, a strategic ethnic offshoot devoted to BC and Ontario’s large South Asian populations. Signifying ‘Let’s go!’ in Hindi, Chalo! speaks directly to its audience through culturally relevant theming throughout store and marketing communications efforts.
Not all colours are equal
In Western society, we often associate colours with specific retail contexts – discount yellow, anyone? – and tend to view most colours as being relatively free of negative associations. Choice often comes down to individual preference. So why not splash your retail store vivid red? If your goal is to create feelings of excitement, passion, urgency or love, you’ll score big with North Americans. Similarly, Chinese customers will feel the attraction of luck and happiness. But Middle Eastern segments may get spooked by what they perceive to be an atmosphere of danger or caution, while customers from former Eastern European Bloc countries may associate your red with communism. Not the ideal colour choice? It depends. And what could possibly go wrong with say, having store employees dress in green uniforms to evoke freshness? If you’re trying to woo Indonesian customers, you might be suggesting that your employees will be dragged away by the Queen of the Sea! Not all Indonesians interpret it that way. Colours are perceived as differently across the world as they are across regions within countries.
Beware the Broad Brush
It follows that generalizing about ethnic segments is a deep no-no. Understanding that customers of the same ethnicity can have little in common with each other is key. In Asia and the Middle East, social status sharply divides the shopping experience – people of elevated status are choosy about where they spend their money and expect top-shelf perks. Accustomed to being doted on by multiple store employees, they consider whether they’ll be offered complimentary food or beverages (and of what quality), whether there’s an exclusive parking area, or whether they’re obliged to rub shoulders with regular people – many are used to private shopping. It may not be feasible to enhance your retail experience to this degree, but it’s important to be attuned to different mindsets.
Customer Service Rethink?
Consider adapting your customer service and store policies. Haggling is not the norm in Western cultures, but in many cultures, it’s an expected part of the transaction ritual. In fact, it can even be awkward NOT to haggle. In some countries, customers in major retail stores routinely bargain for discounts. You might empower your employees to provide discounts when asked – this helps to make ethnic customers feel special and win them over. Beyond hiring employees who speak target languages, it’s a good idea to teach staff a variety of cultural basics, and to display flexibility when communicating with new Canadians. Speak slowly, avoid slang and jargon. Nodding your head in one culture can have the opposite desired effect in another. Clearly, employee training is important in creating new and lasting customer relationships.
Make Room for Family
Speed- and efficiency-loving North Americans appear to drag their kids to the store for lack of options to leave them at home. It’s a trial of patience best avoided. The flipside: multicultural family shopping trips. Latin Americans families tend to shop more frequently than the average Canadian or American. They also enjoy the ritual of preparing meals and sitting down to eat together on a daily basis more often. Like their Latin American counterparts, Indian households are far more likely to enjoy full-on family buying trips, a gaggle of kids and relatives affectionately in tow to discuss, approve, veto, or otherwise participate in every purchase. Worth observing, it’s a dynamic reflected in the important role ethnic retail stores play as informal gathering spaces for social interaction and cultural connection. Could mainstream retailers create a form of this experience for their ethnic customers? (Or, for that matter, all customers? Witness the malls of yesteryear as they reinvent themselves into places where people come to enjoy experiential retail rather than plain old shopping.)
Intergenerational Trends in Grocery
The grocery category has a strong advantage over others in building connections and brand loyalty across multiple generations of immigrant groups, especially with those born here. U.S. ethnic grocers understand the acceleration of assimilation through the second to fourth generations of Latin American, Asian and Indian families. By the fourth generation, the majority have become native English speakers. Knowing that younger generations have their feet in two cultures, U.S. ethnic grocery retailers catering to Indian, Latin American and Asian markets have offerings that satisfy their young customers’ bi-cultural appetites in addition to those of their original targets and the newly arrived. In Canada, Loblaw followed a similar path when introducing their Halal private label products. The Sufra brand caters to multiple generations of Muslim customers primarily through meat staples like boneless chicken thighs and beef cuts, in addition to certified Halal chicken nuggets, beef burgers, and even lunch kits (cheese, crackers, and chicken bologna) created for younger, second or third-generation tummies.
Multicultural Pharmacy Insights
Grocery isn’t the only category keeping pace with immigration. Leading U.S. retailer CVS Pharmacy acquired the long-established Miami chain, Navarro Discount Pharmacies (itself a transplant from Havana in the 1960s), in response to the country’s growing Latin American population. Keeping the Navarro name and running the business as a separate entity, CVS has gained insights from Navarro about merchandising, products, services, value and atmosphere that appeal to Latin American consumers, which it applies to all CVS pharmacies across the U.S. The CVS website is fully operational in Spanish. CVS also offers prescription medication information in numerous languages, and features multi-language signage in its stores.
Home Improvement & DEI
The Home Depot is being recognized for its strong contribution to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), both within the organization and in the way it markets to consumers. The Home Depot Canada was ranked as one of Canada’s best diverse employers in 2023 for the 15th consecutive year. In 2023, The Home Depot (U.S.) was voted Most Culturally Inclusive Brand by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM). The awards reflect a partnership with a market research firm that uses extensive data to identify the cultural impact, effectiveness and relevancy of a brand’s advertising materials in order to encourage inclusive promotional communications. The Home Depot understands the value of marketing that portrays diverse consumers in a genuine manner, while inspiring other businesses to understand, recognize and celebrate all consumers as they really are. By reflecting real customers in all their communications, they build meaningful connections with their communities.
Due Diligence
Target with purpose. Do your research and connect with your ethnic audience through marketing communications THEY ‘get’ – and just as importantly, that YOU also get. As outsiders to another culture, it’s extremely easy to confuse, offend or annoy. When developing content, remain vigilant about cultural sensitivities and relevance – communication styles vary widely around the world and are generally not transferable because of minor differences in language, humour, and even norms of politeness. History is full of product and brand launches gone sideways, so get a second opinion from cultural experts. You can’t assume your message is on point, as HSBC did when its successful “Assume Nothing” investment marketing campaign was rolled out to other countries with a decidedly lacklustre translation that came across as “Do Nothing.”
Different culture, different platform.
Go where your audience goes, whether it’s Instagram, WeChat, Kakao Talk or TikTok. Popular with Chinese speakers in Canada, WeChat is China’s multi-faceted shopping and messaging platform with over 1 billion users worldwide. It offers retailers and consumers alike a dynamic market-like environment in which to sell, engage, promote, chat, rate, endorse and discuss products at length, as collectivist cultures like to do. Invest time in understanding cultural nuances when creating campaigns with multicultural social media influencers, then adapt marketing strategies that fit. Different cultures prefer different personalities, so choose an influencer that legitimately resonates with your audience.
There is a lot to be gained from thoroughly researching ethnic segments’ habits and trends. Equally so from studying large mainstream grocery banners in the U.S., and to some degree in Canada, that are adjusting their offerings to embrace the ethnic market opportunities. Many have the advantage of dedicated buying teams hired from within the target populations. At the same time, these businesses are also seeing more interest from global companies in expanding their business to overseas markets. And inevitably, a cross-cultural halo effect exists where demographic changes in North America are triggering more interest and demand for ethnic products by non-ethnic consumers. Younger customers in particular are displaying more curiosity in exploring new flavours and products.
How can retailers make the most of the new opportunities?
· Do your homework. Study the cultures you intend to target.
· Sell products people understand. Explain products they don’t.
· Guide newcomers through the customer journey.
· Adapt your retail experience if needed.
· Accommodate cultural differences.
· Adapt product or brand offering. Create new brands!
· Create storytelling that connects and resonates.
· Avoid generalizing about cultures.
· Reach newcomers with an omnichannel approach that gets them.
Which new audience should you be thinking about? As we witness a new era of Canadian immigration, some retailers have begun to embrace the opportunities in converting newcomers into mainstream customers. While not without challenges, with expert guidance you can adapt your existing retail experience to be successful in winning new Canadians.
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