When consumers have a good experience, they tell three people. When they have a bad one, they tell ten. Doing a deep dive into conversations taking place on the ground is essential to identifying and combating false narratives that can derail a multicultural marketing campaign. This is especially important when that campaign is in the interest of public health.
Despite thousands of shuttered stores across the country earlier this year and varying degrees of re-openings as restrictions ease, the beauty industry has proven resilient. While sales have declined, they have not bottomed out like many other industries. However, the loss of in-person experiences has fundamentally changed the dynamic of how beauty brands engage consumers. In our ThinkNow Cosmetics & Beauty Report™, we surveyed a representative sample of cosmetic/beauty buyers to gauge sentiment in the category and how COVID-19 has impacted purchase behavior. Through our research, we’ve found that the decrease in sales has not depressed consumers’ love of beauty products, but it has changed how they buy them.
In July of 2019, Illinois became the 11th state to allow the adult use of recreational marijuana. Its state legislature is the first to legalize selling the drug. Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, for now. But that hasn’t stopped blue-chip consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies from exploring cannabis-based products as many believe that federal legalization in the U.S. is only a few votes away.
For decades, Hispanic grocers and Hispanic products in mass market grocers have been dominated by food which comes either directly from Latin America or U.S. based companies that try to emulate those of Latin America, like cheeses, spices, and canned goods. There has been little innovation in these products since the 1970s and 80s when Hispanic immigration into the U.S. boomed, and companies responded with products to meet the new discerning consumer who was looking for authentic Hispanic products. Flash forward to 2019, and now immigration from Latin America is at an all-time low, but the U.S. Hispanic population continues to grow at a rapid pace driven primarily by U.S. born Hispanics.
For the first time, a brand development agency that specializes in cross-cultural marketing is bringing the following message to suppliers and advertisers of alcohol who think minority populations shed their social and cultural identities when purchasing premium products: You’re wrong. In response to a belief that most high-end beer, wine and spirits brands promote themselves in a way that’s far too color-blind, WPP’s Geometry, a commercial marketing agency, has partnered with the cultural insights research agency Think Now to survey more than 1,000 Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans and LGBTQ+ individuals living in the U.S. to find out what influences their purchasing decisions. They discovered that background does, in fact, heavily impact their shopping behaviors.
Special Report Brought To You By Abasto & ThinkNow. The steady growth of the U.S. Hispanic population has caught the attention of the Latin American food and beverage industry. The United States is the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world and represent a sizable opportunity for smaller, more localized Latin American brands to engage with a large pool of consumers more likely to try their products. Successful brands like Bimbo and Novamex have paved the way for other Latin American food and beverage companies aspiring to take up residence in the U.S.
As marketers, we tend to group people into neat little boxes (that’s technically what segmentation is, right?). Of these segments, no generation has been more clearly defined as millennials, although Gen Z is catching up. But the measure by which we define millennials — age — is rarely questioned. For years now, millennials have been identified as 18- to 34-year-olds. But, that age range has shifted, now indicating that they fall in between the ages of 22-37. Pew Research has drawn the proverbial line in the sand for millennials, defining them as “those born between 1981 and 1996 and the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.”
