Multicultural Marketing
In-language marketing programs built for Australia's multicultural audiences, from proposition through to community distribution.
Get a quoteMulticultural marketing in Australia is usually described as a segment. It's a strange way to describe more than 5.5 million people who speak a language other than English at home, in a country where nearly half the population was born overseas or has a parent who was (ABS Census 2021).
Treated as a segment, it gets a translated version of the general-market campaign and a share of the budget proportional to nobody's actual behaviour. Treated as an audience, it gets a proposition built for it, and it responds like an audience.
What we do
- Proposition and positioning developed for the specific community, not inherited from the national platform and translated.
- Creative development in-language, through transcreation where a brand platform has to hold, or original concepts where it does not.
- Media planning and buying across in-language radio, print, digital, WeChat, Zalo, Viber, WhatsApp and community channels that don't appear in standard planning tools.
- Production of video, audio, print and social assets, built for the channel rather than resized into it.
- Measurement against behaviour in the target postcodes, not against total reach.
The mistake that costs the most
Buying media before understanding the audience. A campaign for Canterbury-Bankstown leads with Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Greek. A campaign for Casey in Melbourne's south east leads with Punjabi, Sinhalese and Hazaragi. Both are correct for their catchment and neither transfers, yet national language rankings get used for local campaigns constantly.
The fix costs less than the media it protects. Multicultural research sizes and locates the audience from ABS Census 2021 data at suburb level, then tests the concept before production is committed.
The framework underneath
Our approach draws on the NX framework set out in The Authenticity Advantage by Mark Saba, which argues that multicultural marketing works when the audience recognises itself in the work rather than recognising that the work was aimed at it. The book is free to read online, and it's the clearest statement of how we think about this.
Common questions
Speak to our teamIs multicultural marketing worth it for a national brand?
It depends entirely on category and catchment, and we'll tell you when the answer is no. Where a category has genuinely different penetration or different purchase drivers across communities, the return is straightforward. Where it doesn't, a translated campaign at low weight is money spent to look inclusive. The way to find out is to size the audience in your actual trade areas before committing the budget.
Which channels reach multicultural audiences in Australia?
In-language radio and print still perform strongly and are chronically under-bought. Messaging platforms carry more weight than mainstream planning assumes: WeChat and Weibo for Chinese-language audiences, Zalo for Vietnamese, Viber across much of the Eastern European and Balkan diaspora, WhatsApp broadly. Community organisations, places of worship, sporting clubs and trusted local businesses are distribution, not just goodwill.
Can you work alongside our existing agency?
Yes, and it usually produces the better outcome. Your agency owns the brand platform and the national creative. We own whether that platform survives in twelve languages, and we raise it early when it won't. That conversation costs nothing at concept stage and a great deal after production.
How do we measure return?
On behaviour in the communities and postcodes targeted: enquiries in-language, conversions, store visits, attendance, uptake. Where the behaviour can't be isolated cleanly, we measure comprehension and intent directly with the community. Reach against a language group is the easiest number to report and the least useful one to act on.