What is Diversity Marketing?

Diversity marketing is a type of marketing based on the principal that all potential customers are diverse and have their own set of cultural beliefs and backgrounds. It is a type of marketing that is designed to appeal to a widespread audience and to recognize that each individual subgroup of that audience may have different ideas and should be appealed to in a different manner through advertising that demonstrates cultural awareness. It is one of several different theories of marketing.

When a company determines how to market or present a product to an audience, the company must make a decision regarding how to present that product and which groups or segments of the population it wants to target. Some corporations focus on marketing to a select group of individuals, called niche marketing, and aim to learn all they can about how a given group of people think. Others engage in personalized marketing, tailoring their efforts and advertisements toward figuring out what each customer wants to best appeal to that particular customer. Those who engage in diversity marketing, on the other hand, design their marketing campaigns to appeal to specific groups of individuals based on their backgrounds.

Diversity marketing may target a particular ethnic group. For example, a company may determine that it wishes to market its products differently to its Hispanic customers than to its Asian or Caucasian customers. When the company makes this determination, it is on the belief that the Hispanic segment of the population that may be interested in its product will have a different cultural idea or perception of the product or marketing based on the shared cultural background of the Hispanic community. The company must be careful not to stereotype a given segment of the market population, while still paying attention to the cultural ideals that unify a racial, ethnic or cultural group.

Diversity marketing may be especially important when a product is available to a multi-national audience. An understanding of the culture in a different country can be especially complex, and using the marketing tactics that applied in the corporation's home country may result in a failure of the product to convey its message, or worse, insulting the target audience. Careful research must be conducted to gain insight into different groups and different factions of a society's culture for diversity marketing to be an effective marketing strategy.