How Cultural Fluency Wins in a Polarized America

Marketing leaders from Hyundai Motor America, the National Football League (NFL) and Translation + United Masters joined Collage Group and Disney Advertising for a CMO panel discussion designed to share how leaders from America’s most iconic brands are navigating the evolution of the modern American consumer and winning in a polarized America.

The panel was included as part of Collage Group’s annual flagship event this fall: the 2023 Cultural Fluency Summit, held in partnership with Disney Advertising in New York City. As part of the event, we came together with our members to share an exclusive look at the latest actionable cultural insights to help brands authentically engage today’s diverse America, including our presentations “America Now: 2023” and “Overcoming the Backlash Risk.”

The most important concept learned at the event: there is no clear playbook to success in the marketplace, and best practices are just emerging. Brands have no choice but to weigh in, break through the noise, and carefully manage and anticipate potential backlash.

Fill out the form to watch the replay of the panel discussion and to learn how these leading brands are engaging diverse consumers.

Joining us for our panel was:

Marissa Solis, Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing at the National Football League (NFL), who leads all global brand and consumer marketing initiatives, including national advertising, both traditional and digital media initiatives, in-stadium marketing, and new fan development.

Angela Zepeda, Chief Marketing Officer at Hyundai Motor America, who oversees all U.S. marketing and advertising activities ranging from strategic direction and brand development to national and regional advertising, among many other responsibilities.

Chaucer Barnes, Chief Marketing Officer at Translation + United Masters, which is the parent company of award-winning creative agency Translation, and artist services platform UnitedMasters.

The panel was moderated by John Campbell, Senior Vice President of Client Partnerships at The Walt Disney Company, who oversees teams across Disney Advertising Sales that range from providing everyday solutions to enterprise-wide initiatives.

Here are the top-level insights shared from this meaningful conversation:

• Engagement is about commitment: brands must make their stories authentic to the basic human experience to connect with diverse American consumers.
• Brands must listen to more signals than ever before: by connecting current events and consumer behavior, marketers can distinguish between a momentary trend and a cultural staple in waiting.
• The world is not a place that’s “out there,” it’s in your own backyard: where brands play and how they play is the big difference for how marketers decide what to do.

Diverse consumers are the growth engine of this country given the continued and certain demographic landscape shift taking place in America now and for years to come. As our country becomes more diverse, more fragmented, and more polarized, winning consumers hearts and minds also become more complex. It’s clear that conventional wisdom is no longer reliable, and that the role of data, insights, and analytics is paramount in winning the consumer resonance space.

At Collage Group, our mission is to support iconic American brands in your efforts to unleash the power of culture to drive brand growth. Our data has shown that when used right, culture is powerful. When overlooked, it is a hugely missed opportunity. And when mis-used, the price is high. Our aim is to help you drive cultural fluency by simplifying this complexity and drive brand growth.

Contact us today learn how you can partner with us on the journey to cultural fluency and engaging diverse America.

Running optimized holiday marketing campaigns is crucial for capturing the business opportunity of the holiday season. With this in mind, this Collage Group guide demonstrates how you can optimize your brand’s marketing campaigns this holiday season using six simple steps.

These steps will lead you through the consumer research process, demonstrating how you can leverage consumer insight data to:

• Identify the target audience with the most business potential.
• Understand the brand sentiment of this target audience today, including brand awareness, momentum, favorability, and purchase intent.
• Utilize consumer research data and insights to design an optimized holiday marketing campaign.

Consumers Are Spending More During the Holiday Season

During the 2022 holiday shopping season, consumers across America collectively spent a staggering $936.3 billion on gifts, decorations, and other festive items, as reported by the National Retail Federation. This data underscores the substantial economic impact of the holiday season, as people embrace the spirit of giving.

It’s important to note that data collection was concentrated within the months of November and December. However, despite this limited time frame, it is evident that consumer spending during the holidays is on the rise. For instance, in 2002, holiday spending stood at $416.4 billion.

To capitalize on this opportunity, brands invest a significant amount of money in their holiday advertising efforts. For example, in 2022, $57 billion was allocated to digital ads, and $2.53 billion was earmarked for digital retail in the same year.

The Extended Holiday Season Provides Marketers With a Unique Opportunity

Four out of ten shoppers initiated their holiday purchases before the end of October, signaling a clear desire to get a head start on the festivities.

In comparison, only one out of ten shoppers planned to commence their holiday shopping in December. This further underscores the fact that people are increasingly seeking to avoid last-minute rushes and plan their purchases in advance.

This extended shopping period offers marketers a unique opportunity. Marketers can fine-tune their advertising strategies, to optimize them continuously and incrementally, and enhance the return on investment throughout the entire holiday season.

Address the Challenge: How to Craft Successful Holiday Marketing Campaigns

The high-stakes nature of holiday campaigns can place enormous stress and pressure on you as a marketer. The holiday season is often regarded as a marketer’s Super Bowl, and to pursue success,  you must identify and address the root causes of the challenges that impede your efforts.

You must work diligently to overcome these challenges and ensure your holiday campaigns attain the desired results. In an ever-evolving landscape of holiday spending and advertising, adaptability, and innovative strategies are crucial for success.

The 6-step guide included in this article is designed to help you maintain this adaptability, utilizing consumer research data to innovate, experiment with, and test new marketing ideas and campaigns. Before delving into the guide, let’s review the challenges that marketing during the holiday season presents. With this understanding, you can tailor your marketing efforts to overcome these challenges.

Challenge #1: Marketing Strategies Are Growing Increasingly Complex

One of the primary challenges you’ll encounter during the holiday season is the necessity to employ more complex, high-effort engagement tactics to maintain relevance. However, you may feel uncertain about the effectiveness of the engagement methods you use.

As marketing becomes more intricate, there’s a risk that these efforts backfire, potentially leading to a loss of consumer interest and the inadvertent erosion of consumer brand trust.

Challenge #2: Consumer Behavior Is Constantly Changing, a Trend That’s Amplified During the Holiday Season

Consumer behaviors are continually changing, which further complicates the task of devising the right marketing strategy. This challenge is amplified during the holiday season due to the myriad of factors influencing consumer purchasing decisions. Examples include emotional triggers, gift-giving trends, and product availability. As consumers’ preferences continue to evolve, staying ahead of the curve becomes a formidable endeavor.

Challenge #3: Data and Information Overload

Adding to the complexity is the data landscape itself. As a marketer, you may feel overwhelmed by a deluge of data from various sources. In some cases, the data may even conflict, creating a labyrinth of information that hinders the development of an effective marketing strategy.

How Can Brands Ensure They Remain Relevant During the Holiday Season?

To maintain relevance during the holiday season, brands must create exceptional experiences for their audience. Relevance is the key, and it involves understanding the right audiences and channels and crafting messages that resonate with them. Failure to do so not only risks eroding trust but can also result in the loss of consumer attention and interest. Additionally, misguided marketing efforts deplete resources and prompt consumers to seek alternatives for products and services.

As a marketer, you must gain an intimate understanding of consumer behavior and market dynamics, necessitating a deep reliance on data. Understanding what influences consumer decisions and how to navigate the ever-changing market landscape is only possible through the insights derived from this data. It’s also important to obtain this data from a designated single source of truth.

Culturally fluent ads use culture to efficiently and effectively connect across segments. In this report, we share the topmost culturally fluent ads for Gen Z consumers through our CultureRate:Ad methodology. CultureRate:Ad provides a one-stop solution for our members’ mounting need for a comprehensive, ongoing analysis of the cultural fluency of their ads.

At Collage, we measure cultural fluency by gauging consumer sentiment across 4 key dimensions: Brand Fit, Relevance, Message, and Enjoyment. These dimensions are weighed and combined to create the Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient (A-CFQ) score. The A-CFQ score gives members crucial insights into their ad’s resonance across different consumer segments and where to focus strategies for improvement. We’ve identified the top ads for Gen Z consumers through their average A-CFQ score and differentiation against Millennial consumers.

The Big Picture

Top ads are fluent in Gen Z’s social media culture and help to champion their values through change-oriented activism.

Why It Matters

Gen Z are harsh critics, they’re quick to spot performative work and inauthentic engagement. Beware of the risk of alienating this segment by demonstrated lack of fluency or by trivializing Gen Z’s interests.

Top ads deftly tie in core Gen Z group traits and interests to foster resonance.

What Surprised Us

Home Depot’s use of their “The Home Depot Beat” theme song in their ad “Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Spring” propelled the ad to a top ranking spot and drove high cultural resonance among Gen Z. In 2019, the song became mainstream after a TikTok using it as audio went viral, and it has stayed socially relevant since. Home Depot’s ability to capitalize on the song’s success through culturally relevant social engagement highlights the importance of infusing Gen Z culture in advertising, and ultimately translated to high brand favorability with this ad.

Contact us today to learn how you can gain access to the full research and more in our world-class Cultural Intelligence Platform.

I’m incredibly excited to announce our all-new, AI-powered software solution, fluen.ci^SM, providing instant access to culture-centric, brand-specific insights for marketing and insights leaders at America’s iconic brands. Grounded in more than 12 years of rich, cultural research, fluen.ci promises to unlock the consumer insights needed to provide direction and validation for brand growth and the competitor and industry comparisons necessary to win diverse American consumers, our country’s growth driver.

We built fluen.ci to answer the challenge brands face marketing to a culturally diverse, fragmented country. The AI-powered application offers our members instant access to deeper, more actionable, brand-specific consumer insights. These rich cultural insights illuminate a brand’s performance across all consumer segments, compare performance to competitors, and connect the performance data to deep consumer insights for action and growth.

The application offers key functionality with no equivalent in the marketplace: fluen.ci is connected to Collage Group’s rich and unrivaled cultural research. Users can connect their brand data to actionable, diverse consumer psychographics, values, beliefs, habits, and attitudes.

Further, fluen.ci will allow brands to deep dive into multi-dimensional audiences, to uncover actionable insights on consumer cohorts, including Black Gen Zers and LGBTQ+ parents, among other intersectional audiences, and use this data to identify the opportunities that drive growth.

Fueling the fresh brand-specific data in fluen.ci, Collage Group is constantly testing thousands of brands and ads among diverse consumers to explore how they perform across the key components of Cultural Fluency ­– the ability to use culture to effectively and efficiently connect across consumer segments.

Greg Cypes, Chief Product and Technology Officer, led the Collage Group team of engineers who developed the application, which is built on top of best-in-class technology. Speaking to the value of the product, Greg says:

“fluen.ci enables brands unprecedented access to cultural insights. Combining the precision of 12+ years of research pioneered by Collage Group with bleeding edge AI/ML technology, members now have actionable insights and data at their fingertips. Simply put, because the app helps brands create more culturally resonate products, messages, and campaigns, we’re enabling marketing and insights professionals to maximize the impact of their investments.”

The fluen.ci application was built with the vital input of nine Collage Group iconic American member brands who have lauded the AI-powered software solution as “invaluable context for interpreting and acting on insights,” and “crystal-clear data visualizations that illustrate where the brand is doing well or performing poorly – and what to do about it.”

In June 2022, Collage Group raised $25 million in growth capital led by Boston-based growth equity firm Wavecrest Growth Partners with participation from industry veteran and investor Dennis Ainge.

The investment in fluen.ci would not be possible without the support of our investors, the incredible talent and commitment across our team, and our member partners. I’m incredibly proud to release fluen.ci, and help solve the challenges brands face around the fusion of brand performance and consumer insights that position them ahead of the curve.

Learn more about fluen.ci and schedule a demo to find out how the AI-powered solution can fuel growth for your brand.

Target Boycott: What Is Going On With Target?

The Target boycott began in May 2023. That is, Target became embroiled in a significant controversy as consumers chose to sever their commercial and social connections with the retailer in protest.

What were consumers protesting?

The catalyst for this boycott was Target’s presentation of products related to Pride Month, an annual celebration honoring the LGBTQ+ community. This boycott movement was primarily spearheaded by a small-but-vocal contingent of conservative influencers, often using misinformation, but the knock-on effects endangered Target’s long-standing relationship with the LGBTQ+ community, plus liberal segments.

In response to the escalating pressures exerted through social media, boycott movements, and threats of violence, Target opted to downplay their Pride Month campaigns and in some cases remove or relocate its Pride merchandise from highly visible front displays to less conspicuous areas within their stores.

However, this seemingly innocuous adjustment had unintended consequences. It created the perception that Target was opportunistic, insincere, and lacking in conviction. Consequently, the brand found itself subject to criticism from both sides of the debate.

How Much Has Target Lost as a Result of This Backlash?

During the second quarter of 2023, Target’s in-store sales dropped by 5.4%, with a more substantial decline of 10.9% for online sales. This downturn is likely a direct consequence of the boycott against Target.

The Story That Uncovers Distinctive Insights Around the Target Controversy

In 2022 Target Was a Top Brand for the LGBTQ+ Community

Research conducted by Collage Group has identified Target as an exceptionally resonant brand within the LGBTQ+ community, a distinction highlighted in our 2022 report, “The Top 10 Brands for LGBTQ+ Consumers.” 

Our research shows that Target’s support for LGBTQ+ merchants, creators, and community organizations has had a positive effect on how such consumers view the brand. As a result, in 2022, this positioning enhanced favorability and purchase intent with the LGBTQ+ demographic.

• Brand Favorability: An impressive 69% of the LGBTQ+ community reports that they ‘like’ or ‘love’ the Target brand, surpassing Collage Group’s average of 50% for the LGBTQ+ segment.
• Purchase Intent: A substantial 69% of the LGBTQ+ community indicates that they are ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to purchase Target’s products or services in the future, compared to the average of 46% for the LGBTQ+ segment.

What Steps Has Target Taken to Garner Support From the LGBTQ+ Community?

Target consistently demonstrates its commitment to the LGBTQ+ consumer group by actively showcasing its support during Pride Month. For example, every June, Target prominently features a range of Pride-themed merchandise, including rainbow t-shirts, and greeting cards.

However, Target’s dedication extends well beyond these annual symbolic gestures. The retailer takes meaningful steps by offering affordable options for gender-affirming clothing all year round. The brand creates a safe and inclusive space for individuals to express their authentic selves. This aligns Target’s brand fit closely with the LGBTQ+ community and fosters a strong level of connection.

Moreover, Target has formed partnerships with TomboyX and Humankind, both queer-owned and woman-founded brands, to launch limited-edition lines of affordable, gender-affirming clothing.

Additionally, Target actively supports organizations and initiatives that provide life-saving services to LGBTQ+ youth, both online and in schools. Given that 60% of LGBTQ+ Americans express concerns about the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ ideas on social media (compared to 39% of non-LGBTQ+ individuals), Target’s efforts to combat this issue are particularly impactful. For instance, the retailer’s ongoing support for GLSEN aligns with its mission to establish welcoming, accessible, and anti-racist environments for LGBTQ+ students.

These findings underscore Target’s commendable efforts to create a welcoming and supportive environment for this consumer group, ultimately creating a strong consumer-brand bond.

Considering this context, what led to Target angering consumers within the LGBTQ+ community?

Understand the Factors Behind the Target Backlash

At Collage Group, we’ve developed a product that measures advertising effectiveness. An important metric for these measurements is ‘backlash.’ In essence, backlash measures the change in how consumers perceive a brand after watching an advertisement. That is, does the consumer’s perception of a brand shift from a positive to a negative view when they are exposed to an ad? 

This article reveals our standout data and findings, along with the requests, feedback, and interests expressed by our members. 

Collage Group’s insights are a trusted resource for iconic brands aiming to effectively engage with and succeed in diverse America. Today, we are excited to share our most sought-after and diverse consumer insights with you.

Furthermore, we delve into what lies ahead by pinpointing emerging trends that are poised to shape the consumer market in the upcoming months. With these insights, you’ll remain at the forefront of industry developments, ensuring you consistently meet the evolving needs of your consumers.

Check out our most popular consumer insights from 2022.

Top Consumer Insight Trends of 2023

Below, we detail our most recently unveiled insights for brand growth among diverse consumer audiences.

We explore:

• The impact of generative AI on the consumer market,
• LGBTQ+ sentiment and backlash,
• Top brands for parents,
• Top brands of Generation X.

By comprehending these trends, your brand will be well-positioned to address the emerging needs of your target consumer segment.

Consumer Insights Research #1: The Impact of Generative AI on the Consumer Market

Consumer concerns and engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are currently shaping, and will continue to shape, the consumer landscape.

Collage Group remains at the forefront, analyzing trends in generative AI to precisely understand how such developments are being embraced and utilized by the American population.

According to our most recent findings to be featured in the upcoming release of our America Now report on Oct. 30, a significant 62% of consumers express concern over AI causing an increase in online misinformation. Another 66% of consumers were alarmed about the potential misuse of personal information due to AI. Furthermore, AI’s impact on employment is a source of apprehension for 62% of consumers. Therefore, our results indicate widespread anxiety regarding the influence of AI on various aspects of society.

Consumer Insights Research #2: The LGBTQ+ Backlash

Despite vocal backlash, a significant majority of Americans stand with and support the LGBTQ+ community and Pride Month activations. Our research indicates that 88% of non-LGBTQ+ people remain positive or neutral about Pride Month marketing. With this in mind, brands should not be swayed by the activities of a minority but should instead create campaigns based on our insights.

At Collage Group, we recognize the challenges brands face when navigating an increasingly polarized cultural environment, where supporting one group could potentially provoke backlash from others. By leveraging Collage Group’s deep insights into the values, passion points, and affiliations of consumers across race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, you can express brand support for causes that resonate with your consumer majority while minimizing potential backlash.

The latest data from the U.S. Census unveils a significant find: the rapidly growing diversity of the Hispanic population.

According to the Census release, eight Hispanic groups have now reached a population of one million or more. The Hispanic population has not only grown rapidly to 62.1 million people as of the 2020 census, but also has become internally far more diverse. This surge in the variety of Hispanic subcultures creates a new challenge for brands: how to appeal to this ever-expanding consumer population, while authentically respecting the full diversity of the individuals within that population.

As the trusted partner and provider of cultural intelligence for over 300 iconic brands across 12 industries, Collage Group insights are core to how leading brands build the cultural fluency need to grow faster than the competition. A trailblazer in recognizing the need to authentically engage with Hispanic consumers without oversimplifying their rich tapestry of cultures, Collage Hispanic consumer data is not only segmented into three groups based on language dominance and acculturation, but also incorporates numerous Latin American countries of origin.

Through this granular data, Collage Group members gain an unparalleled ability to discern the nuances within the Hispanic population as a whole. Consider, for instance, the question of what matters most to buying a brand, such as trust, fit with consumer need, memories, values, affinity with group identity and so on. It turns out that across all Hispanic groups, dominated by Mexican Americans, trust and fit are unsurprising the most important factors driving purchase. But leading brands using Collage Group data do more than meet price-of-entry requirements; they drill into the additional factors that truly differentiate them from competitors.

For example, they know that the large population of Cuban Americans in Florida will be much more responsive to brands that activate around positive memories, relative to Mexican Americans. By contrast, Puerto Ricans, the second largest Hispanic group and more concentrated in the upper Northeast, are notably less likely to care whether a brand relates to their own group identity. This latter insight gives brands more freedom to focus on group identity signifiers (such as fandom for a national soccer team) that matter more to other Hispanic audiences, especially those hailing from South America, without negative impacts.

Collage Group members unlock access to millions of proprietary data points such as those above, brought to life in hundreds of insight-rich narratives, all for the purpose of empowering brands to tap into the true potential of diverse Hispanic communities. We dig below the surface, not only showing the “what” but also revealing the “why” behind Hispanic consumption patterns across dozens of major categories. Our research covers everything, from Hispanic passion points, media preferences, holidays, occasions, and group traits – spanning topics such as sports, music, cultural “psychographics,” favorite streaming platforms, beloved brands and more.

Now, you might wonder if this growth in diversity means you have to target every Hispanic group differently. On the contrary, our proprietary research into the “halo effect” in advertising reveals a fascinating truth: brands can ingeniously leverage cultural specifics in ways that reach audiences far beyond their primary targets. The key lesson here is that the correct use of cultural specifics is, in fact, an essential ingredient in the recipe used by culturally fluent brands to get more bang for the marketing buck. Halo effects enable brands to both engage authentically with specific segments and activate beyond the target, all while avoiding generic campaigns that do little except make consumers yawn.

The time to harness the power of Hispanic diversity is now. Collage Group offers you the tools, insights, and data-driven strategies to thrive in this dynamic landscape.

Don’t wait on the sidelines; join Collage Group today and let us help you unlock the limitless potential of diverse Hispanic communities. Together, we’ll create connections that resonate and drive growth for your brand. Contact us and embark on this transformative journey now.

America Now: Increasing the Return on Engaging Diverse Segments in a Time of Polarization

Our 2023 Cultural Fluency Summit will spotlight what diverse America wants from brands on the issues that matter, as we head into the hot electoral season of 2024. This keystone presentation will reveal the changing importance of personal identity and how it factors into brands relationships. We also cover how consumers want brands to activate around major socio-cultural issues including race relations, abortion, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, and generative AI, among other topics. For the first time, we will examine the role of political orientation across different segments to break through default assumptions of diverse segment beliefs and values. 

Overcoming the Backlash Risk: Lessons Learned from Diverse-Segment Focused Ads that Polarize Consumers

Using insights gleaned from our proprietary CultureRate database of ad and brand performance, we explore the phenomenon of backlash. This year, like no other, has seen consumers mobilize in ever increasing numbers on both sides to place brands at risk when dealing with sensitive issues like LGBTQ+ pride, trans identity and women’s rights. But how big is backlash and what should brands do? We provide a framework to define the “backlash terrain” and go deep into a handful of exemplars to derive powerful lessons learned.

Attendees will walk away with clear insights into the transformation of America now and the strategies brands need to win diverse audiences while reducing the risk of backlash. You’ll also learn how to build creative that connects with specific segments while embracing the broader mainstream.

Contact us today to learn how you can gain access to this event, as well as the full research and more in our world-class Cultural Intelligence Engine.

Using our CultureRate database, we analyzed over 100 ads gathered across the last 12 months to identify key lessons from “Culturally Fluent” ads that were best across all segments of the “New Wave” of younger Americans between 18-39.

Brands Are Challenged by Rising Cultural Diversity and Polarization.

Research and insights leaders face enormous pressure to translate the rapid cultural transformation underway in the U.S. marketplace into clear action steps for brands.

In 2020, we experienced a tipping point when the inexorable movement toward a majority-minority population combined with sudden shifts in consumer values driven by COVID-19 and the emergence of the social justice movement. “Cultural Fluency” is emerging as a new mandate: the ability to use culture to connect effectively and authentically within and across segments. As a consequence, brands are being held to a higher standard.  In research from Session 2 of our virtual Roundtable in late 2020, we found that the number one “values” factor Multiculturals want to see from brands is that the brand supports people of their race or ethnicity.

How CultureRate:Ad Reveals Powerful New Insights.

To address these issues, we launched CultureRate in 2018, a brand and creative evaluation methodology that is now providing our members with powerful new insights in to brand and ad performance across cultural groups.

Unlike anything on the market today, CultureRate brings together both ad and brand evaluations using a rigorous methodology that helps brands navigate the rapidly shifting consumer landscape before them by identifying what works and what doesn’t across diverse segments.

In addition, the methodology is integrated within Collage Group’s Cultural Traits system, a rigorously proven method for measuring cultural variation, that enables marketing professions to link how using cultural insights into specific segments improve ad and brand effectiveness. An example of how Cultural Trait analysis works when applied to Black consumers can be found here. and how we link Traits analysis and ad performance is detailed in Session 3 materials from our 2020 Roundtable and shown below.

Unrivaled Rigor and Database Depth.

At its core, the methodology is built on the observation that conventional ad testing poses challenges with legacy norms and sample bias that can exacerbate the cultural disconnect between legacy consumers and the consumers brands need to grow.

CultureRate:Ad complements conventional creative evaluation approaches by incorporating a deep understanding of the cultural and emotional influences that inform how consumers from diverse backgrounds process ads.

The methodology introduces two important new metrics: the Ad Cultural Fluency Quotient (A-CFQ) and Backlash, both of which are supported with an exhaustive range of diagnostic metrics. A-CFQ is Collage Group’s proprietary KPI that uses four factors to optimally predict high brand favorability and purchase intent. Backlash metrics take conventional brand favorability a step further by quantifying the degree to which an ad can “flip” perception from positive to negative or vice versa. Combining A-CFQ and Backlash metrics for target segments reveal the dynamics that make ads successful.

Top Lessons for More Inclusive Advertising.

Referencing a database of more than 250 ads and close to 300,000 consumer responses collected since 2018, this presentation investigates the characteristics of the most inclusive ads from 2020, specifically for the population of 18-40-year-old Americans. This younger segment, which we have dubbed the “New Wave,” is notably important because it is the first segment in American history to grow up in culturally and intrinsically diverse environment. They are defining the future of values and respect for diversity that will make or break brands in the next years.

This approach is key to helping marketing break the “trade-off” between investing in effective campaigns for specific multicultural segments, like Hispanic and Black consumers, that risk limited appeal, and effective campaigns for the “general market” that risk being generic and forgettable.

By applying A-CFQ and Backlash filters, we identified a top performing group of 16 ads to review in detail shown below.

We find the sweet spot in nuance, storyline and representation that links cultural perspectives and deepens cultural resonance in general marketing campaigns while making dedicated marketing more effective. We derive five action steps into what advertisers can do to better incorporate cultural insight into creative briefs. These include:

1. Obey the Basics: Stay Attuned to Your “Right to Play” to Avoid Confusion and Boredom

2. Create Texture with Realistic Vignettes of Multicultural Segments

3. Show Firmness and Values About What’s Happening Now

4. Authentically Show the “Human Truth” of Connection to Resonate with All Segments

5. Activate on the “Cultural Truths” of Specific Segments to Drive Deeper Resonance

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Harness the power of cultural intelligence to win diverse America. Discover how you can turn insights into impact today!

The life of American consumers today seems to have only one constant – change. To keep up with these changes, we provide our members timely and relevant learnings they can use to fine-tune their multicultural consumer research and marketing strategies.

1. Consumer demographics, cultural values, and passion points (Multicultural Essentials)

2. Consumer attitudes and behaviors within specific categories (Category Essentials)

3. Consumer perceptions of individual brands and advertisements (CultureRate:Brand and CultureRate:Ad)

Understanding this second level – how diverse consumer segments approach the industries relevant to you – is the focus of Collage Group’s Category Essentials reports.

These biannual reports provide a high-level view of the category-specific trade-offs and considerations facing today’s consumers.  They contextualize what you learn about America’s major consumer segments in the Multicultural Essentials by placing these segments within specific industries and categories. The reports’ category-specific coverage also provides insight that can help you better understand how your Brands and Ads are doing as revealed by your CultureRate:Brand and CultureRate:Ad reports. 

Through Collage’s consumer-level expertise and the input we receive from members on issues of high priority, we develop the insights you need to understand key similarities and differences across multicultural segments. Equipped with these insights, you will be able to better navigate topics of interest and importance for your category and target consumers.  We plan on revising all Category Essentials decks twice every year.

Collage Group members can exclusively access full webinar replays and more in-depth Category Essentials materials for the following categories:

• Food & Beverage
• QSR
• Alcoholic Beverages
• Media
• Telecom

To learn more about our multicultural consumer category research, fill out the form below.

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Harness the power of cultural intelligence to win diverse America. Discover how you can turn insights into impact today!