Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

In short, this is not a North American sporting landscape. 

But that's not all.

Missing the empty net that’s right in front of you

I am gently skeptical of the NHL's ability to get this right when they don't currently get it right, right here in Canada with visible minority immigrant Canadians, especially Chinese and South Asian Canadians. As an evangelist for and practitioner in this space, I would know.  

Unlike the NBA who have managed to break through to immigrant hearts and minds thanks to Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming, the NHL isn't really paying attention.  

For a start, the NHL appears to be forgetting that the sport likely to become its biggest threat here in Canada is a sport played by immigrants. Cricket, once Canada's national sport, is today one of Canada's fastest growing sports - possibly the fastest. This is largely due to grassroots work in Canadian communities by immigrants from across the Commonwealth who are united in their love for the game. 

Immigrants may be behind the growing threat of cricket, but for the NHL they represent a huge opportunity in an otherwise saturated marketplace. In 2017, well over 6 million new Canadian consumers belonged to visible minorities - and South Asian and Chinese Canadians accounted for well over half of that. 

Like most immigrants, they are eager to understand and embrace the culture of their new home without losing their own. Hockey is a central part of that culture and they know that. While the CBC actually built a successful bridge with HNIC in Punjabi first and later in Mandarin (before HNIC moved on to Sportsnet) the NHL in Canada seems unaware of the market growth goldmine they are sitting on, right here. 

Investing in attracting immigrant fans here in North America represents a huge business upside.

Home ice advantage

For organizations like the NHL considering a market play in China or India, there’s a bonus: lessons learned locally from such an investment can be carried to the "away" game. 

Winning with immigrants right here is the equivalent of having home ice advantage in the series. 

Investing in the South Asian and Chinese Canadian segments is a low-cost, high-reward, learning opportunity slapshot. 

What does that sound like? Here’s a taste, first via HNIC's Punjabi play-by-play of a Nick Bonino goal that went viral - in the mainstream - last year:



And this little scene (below) at the Stanley Cup victory rally in Pittsburgh gives you a sense of how completely the Pens embraced Harnarayan Singh's epic broadcast.




It's worth mentioning that Nick Bonino has even suggested his family take it up as a personal ringtone. 

Unfortunately, I think the NHL is tone deaf on this one. 

I see its preseason experiment in China as nothing more than a PR play at best. 

It’s a one-goal wonder that will hog ethnocentric headlines at home in North America and barely appear on the Chinese cultural radar in China. 

Moral of the story: grab the bird in hand. It's a win-win. 


Gavin Barrett is Chief Creative Officer and Ideawallah at Barrett and Welsh, an award-winning multicultural advertising Toronto agency that specializes in the new Canada, a magical place where the cricket is meh, the beer is good and the curry and noodles are shared with all.

The Yellow Pages campaign makes it onto CBC. But for all the wrong reasons. Bibimbap is a rice dish. And the visual shows noodles. As tweeter @edwaan points out. Another commenter on Facebook helpfully explained: "Think about having the copy about the best pasta in town and the icon is pizza. It's that weird."

Tesco makes a generous donation to our library of multicultural mistakes, with this Ramadan blunder: bacon flavoured chips on a stand with the message Ramadan Mubarak.

The scene of the marketing crime? The Tesco store on Liverpool Street in London, not far from Whitechapel's East London Mosque, one of the largest Muslim places of worship in Europe. An amused Muslim shopper saw the stand and tweeted it and it quickly rippled through the twitterverse, before the chips were moved.

Who moved the Pringles? Tesco. To their credit they acknowledged their mistake and issued a statement:

We are proud to offer a wide range of meals and products to meet the needs of our customers during Ramadan. We recognise these Pringles weren’t in the most suitable place and our store colleagues have now moved them.

As I've commented elsewhere before, marketing and advertising are all about perception and persuasion. Consumer opinion both reflects and affects brand perception.

Interestingly, some of the reaction in marketing circles has been less on the mark than Tesco's.

One media professional defended the mistake saying "if you walk down to any large Tesco you will be surprised to see the number of Muslims picking up this product" - a classic reactive defence based on anecdotal evidence.

We have to be cautious with such evidence when acting as professional counsel to our clients. I have observed some of my (devout but heterodox) Muslim friends indulge in a dram of Scotch from time to time, but it would be an act of insanity for me to recommend to an alcohol client that she begin advertising Eid specials on Scotch based on my observation.

Another commenter observed, "I believe you are from India" and reminded me that there are Muslims there who sell alcohol during Ramadan.

Yes, I am from India, but my knowledge of the actions of individual Muslims cannot be used to explain away a marketing error. Marketing for the most part is a social-risk-averse, share-building discipline in which marketers tend not to risk slim brand marketing budgets on the behaviour of the individual, but rather to invest on the preferences of majorities so as to achieve success on a scale shareholders can go out to dinner on.

Niche brands - like hedge funds - often swim the other way but it is rare for a large brand to do such a thing. When it happens, without all the accompanying fanfare, one can be relatively certain it was a mistake. I'm no fan of political correctness in a conversation, but would think it horrifying in our times, if a brand were to use that to excuse the ignorance, laziness or negligence that produced a racist or sexist advertising message.

Our business is all about influencing consumer perception positively.

This focus is often lost in these days of mindless network ad distribution and aggregation, when the motto seems to be "anything goes as long as it goes everywhere" – placing a premium on efficiency of distribution over the effectiveness of the message distributed.

In reality, the wrong ad placed in the wrong medium or the wrong product placed on the wrong shelf could easily leave a bad taste in the mouth.

This is surely not something Tesco intended. A single act of thoughtless product selection on its part resulted in it knocking over its own well-meant Ramadan display.

Tesco's Pringles mistake was neither racist or sexist - it was just dumb - and, I believe, just a mistake.

Like selling combs to bald men. Yes, there will always be a few vain men who buy combs for that single lonely strand they nurse. But most bald men will either treat the message like unaddressed mail or feel insulted by its utter thoughtlessness.

Neither response is the desired response.


------

Gavin Barrett is Ideawallah at Barrett and Welsh, a Toronto agency that specializes in the new Canada, a magical place where all cultures are understood, shared and enjoyed.

A thought-provoking pair of explorations into beauty and ethnic/racial identity: earlier in 2014, journalist Esther Honig sent a self portrait to photoshop artists across the world asking them to "make her beautiful". 

The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, reveal the impact of culture and ethnicity and a huge variety of beauty ideals/standards. http://www.estherhonig.com/#!before--after-/cvkn 

Now, biracial journalist Priscilla Yuki Wilson does the same with very different results. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/08/priscilla-yuki-wilson-different-countries-photoshop_n_5775200.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063

I am fond of saying that in today's Canadian market, if it ain't multicultural it ain't mainstream. But the more multicultural our markets are, surely the more fragmented they become? Not so.

The way I see it, it's not our new multicultural society that's fractured - it's old mainstream that is fracturing.

But wait, there's no reason to panic. It's not as bad as it seems. All this fracture business sounds painfully like we're talking about a bone breaking when in reality we're talking about an egg, hatching.

After all, we never really had a homogenous culture in bilingual Canada - and perhaps bilingualism and the distinct identities of Quebec and the First Nations were always a sign that this idealized (by some) homogenization would never come to pass.

Our changing demographics tell us that this is now a matter of fact, not opinion, borne out by the 2006 census (the fruits of the sainted "long form"). 6.1 million Canadians were born elsewhere and that population is growing 4 times faster than the Canadian born. The 1.1 million new Canadians who arrived between 2001 and 2006 accounted for 69% of all the population growth.

If advertising and marketing courses don't begin teaching multicultural marketing and advertising now, they'll be turning out students who will see markets that don't resemble their textbook markets in the slightest way. At the very least, they need to begin changing their syllabi now. Multicultural advertising and marketing needs to be taught, at least as a module in established courses.

In about five years, the mainstream as we know it today will have changed - by 2017 it will be an entirely different marketing reality and by 2030 it will be a brave new world for the bright, smart marketers and universities who took what their stats and research departments told them and applied it to their strategies and syllabi.

The fundamentals aren't changing because the new mainstream is a different colour. It's changing because the new mainstream is fundamentally different in every way - culture, conservatism, language, religion, cultural habits around money (saving it and spending it) and cultural habits around food. And the most fundamental thing about advertising/marketing is that it is about how people work. This is not an old "us" vs. a new "them". This is just a new "us."

One of the cool things about Canadian immigrants is that they want to be Canadian and they are proud to be Canadian, but they also discover very early that it is really difficult to define what "Canadian" is. Ultimately however, they come to realize in a single, empowering, incredibly Canadian moment that being Canadian is... being themselves.

And that is why I believe we need the Canadian marketing industry to invest in understanding this new emerging mainstream better - it's not going away. It's going to get stronger, richer, more vibrant and more challenging to deal with. Preparing for it is simply good business.

In fact, in our multicultural, polyglot, many-hued future, our local need for hybrid minds is going to serve us well globally - a rare instance where Canada is destined to be uniquely competitive. This is a time to learn how to spread our wings. One day we're going to have to fly. If we don't, we're going to have egg on our face.

Sunrise by the Ocean by Vladmir Kush via www.vladimirkush.com © 2008 Kush Fine Art. All Rights Reserved.

In April 2010, I was interviewed by Marc Montgomery of CBC's The Link on why so much multicultural work is so poorly made and why it so often misses the point.

There are a few reasons and I touch on a couple in the interview. Click here or on my post title to go to an archive of the show.
The interview only begins at 26:20 - so move the slider forward to that point if you're short of time.


Interview via CBC Radio International podcast archives.
Article: Creative Commons License 2010 Gavin Barrett
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.

I'm torn.
Here's a brand new campaign from At&t advertising its global roaming capabilities. I've been watching it unfold in the pages of the New York Times over the last few weeks.

It's beautiful, visually lush.
I believe it is a precursor to multicultural advertising of the future; i.e., it is cross-cultural and therefore, truly multicultural.
At the same time, it picks up cues, graphics, icons, that are specific to individual cultures/locations.

That's the good part.

The bad part: where's the insight?
This is not a multicultural campaign of course, but to be honest it fails utterly despite the stunning art direction.
A campaign for global coverage running in the US is surely targeted at global travelers from the US visiting or working in the world's largest countries and fastest growing economies.

C'mon guys. It should have hit you like a brick.
The sum of all things Chinese is not the Great Wall.

India is not all caparisoned elephants or the Taj Mahal.

You have to rise above those hackneyed images.
Get with the times, cause they're a-changin'
Why do people want better coverage in India or China?
Because they're doing business there.

Think Shanghai, not the Great Wall.
Think Mumbai or Bangalore, where the money is made and your software is written.
Find a symbol that isn't the same damn symbol that everyone has ever used.

This campaign probably starts in some feebly educated American mind, wherein the rest of the world must be reduced to cliches, so as to effectively communicate with other feebly educated American minds.

No? Am I oversimplifying?
Have I offended some American friend or colleague who resents my generalization, and doesn't like me reducing Americans to a cliche?

Ads via Ads of the world.
Article: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin Barrett



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.