of volunteers from concordia two young african women so we sat with him after we had some something he'd been asking questions about africa and everything and i i said to david everett after the meeting i said you know i'm thinking process of you know giving it a name the brand we came up with the u s emerging african market after consulting with african leaders from l a and d c new york and here and so that was a beginning  the hard work came and we had some we had some real heroes with us one was a minneapolis foundation sandy vargas stepped up to the plate and funded pretty much a lot of the a lot of the expense for the study so  we're here today i think it's about two years old the study david but as you're going to explain but we're here today to to have the the study come to minnesota  to be able to present this to introduce david as a good friend of ours tom gaeta tom gator arrived here in minnesota twenty two years ago came in to study really didn't come from kenya and  entrepreneurial they are you know as we're finding out you know business and it's in the d n a about coming here and taking opportunities fifteen years ago we started with challis the african community newspaper  going to introduce david morris t behalf of my newspaper so that this just took it to a whole nother level and we have become really integrated with the rick and multi cultural conference so today it's my pleasure to introduce to you david moss is the president and companies in the united states in developing innovative and profitable ethnic marketing strategies mr morsi has over twenty five years in market research and brand management and strategic planning experience in the u s and is book is called multicultural intelligence with a subtitle make or break rules for marketing to race ethnicity and sexual orientation which i believe is available on amazon on amazon or on his website as well so it's my great pleasure to introduce to you mr david moss of the america dimensions good afternoon as a sound you know i mean i made it you're going to cardinal mistake as a present i'm reading a book on presenting and i've realized that i break just about every single role that's in this book and the rule they say don't think your audience because everybody but you know i got to break that rule thank you so much for for having me and to allow me to present on this subject as everybody has said the it always gets ignored or there are so many misconceptions about the african segment it's interesting you know i'm like like like the people that spoke before me where vangelis about multicultural marketing and often you know i find myself in front of corporate america saying you know the african american segment you know they speak english but there are very strong reasons to market to that segment well now i'm going to say to you that what i'm going to talk about is not the african american segment it's a saying that is one point six million people strong in the united states largely an immigrant segment and one that i'm not going to show a lot of numbers in terms of economic buying power but you will see how some of the stereotypes that we americans have about africans going back to the tarzan days i think are just totally erroneous if you guess what these pictures are this is africa this is  ghana one of the start to show you that there's kentucky fried chicken there it's not all about villages and people running barefoot so much negative stuff gets talked about and we'll hear about summary of some research that we can ducted two years ago as rick mention rick and many of you here in the audience had the foresight to realize that this is really cutting edge stuff to do a study to mine to my knowledge it is the only study that is available on marketing to africans there's government there are some government stuff you can get information from the census but and the best indicator that i have my company we do a lot of market research studies and you can find them on our website new american dimensions dot com we track who goes to the website you'll be asked to fill in a form it's this african study that i would say every three days i was going on a website and  downloading the study and i would say judging by the names of the people that enter most of them seem to be africans there's a real passion about about africa among africans and one of the reasons is because africans get so ignored and as a marketer i think that that means real opportunity because as with any multicultural segment multi cultural people don't always see themselves represented in the media or targeted in an advertising and it's such an opportunity to to acknowledge a group and to make a connection so a little bit about methodology and then i'm going to show you a video we did this is a quantitative and a qualitative study we talked to believe it was about five hundred people in the it was a national survey and we also did intercept and interview be a compilation of some of the the focus groups that we did as well as we did some one on one interviews so without further ado robert if you would play the video ok all right well if you go to my website and you can watch the video there's some interesting things in the video that young man right there talked about one of the one of the themes that was very frequent what we heard about  african young man i forget what country was really what west african and he's talking about joining the black dormitory but his university and the difficulties that he faced fitting in  you know when i talk about the african american market one of the points that i make is you know we segregation we had jim crow laws for many many years in this country and led to a very strong culture of african americans and one of the challenges that africans face one of the challenges that this young man faces is the expectation that he acted certain way because he's black the expectation is he should act like an african american he doesn't talk like an african american he doesn't share the same experiences as african americans that's one of the things that he was talking about and we're going to see some of that in the data one of the challenges that africans face not only are the perceptions not only from  white people in the general market but but from african americans as well because they don't fit into the molds that have been created for them so let's get to the data ok lady other different africa from kit you're from kenya many many indian people live in the continent of africa i also want to make the point that in the quantitative study as well as a qualit focused on what is sometimes called subsaharan africa so we didn't talk to people in northern africa countries very distinct culture very strong colonisation by by by arabs back in the six seventh eighth century so we focus more on the below the sahara people from some alia many came here as refugees so there's a lot of a lot of diversity but seeking economic economic opportunity was one of one of the main reasons and rick was talking earlier about the the spirit of entrepreneur ism that exists in the community we heard a lot of that people that came here that have started their own businesses and a very very well and that's going to be an overall theme that i'm going to talk about is just how well africans are doing in this country and we are the ones that we we surveyed in spite of what seemed to be many many difficulties that they face so let's talk about the difficulties of culture shock was came up all the time it was just very very strange experience coming to the united states and again as i mentioned we heard  again and again about the existing racial dynamic that exists in the united states that's been cemented over the last four hundred years and just not quite knowing how they how they would fit into that racial dynamic and not only that but americans black or white not quite knowing what to make of of these folks language you know with any little immigrant group was was it was a problem although many speak english many come from countries that were well it like kenya that were that were colonized by by by the english figuring out the american system created lots and lots of conflict how does it work again sophisticated people looking to open a bank accounts looking to get cell phones looking to get internet con how does it all work homelessness i'm sorry homelessness home sickness and loneliness were were big themes you're going to hear about the importance of family and people missing their families and missing their countries of origin many come over as students that come over alone and get settled here in the united states lack of respect in the community that again people have misconceptions about what africa is all about and you know people have this image that everybody in africa comes from a very small poor dare i say aids infested famine infested village we heard so much of that and as you can see by those photographs it's clearly not all of africa and it's clearly not the case for many many people holding on to their traditions music food art religion family values which i'll talk about in a few minutes and passing them on to one's kids  there's a wonderful book written by a lady named mary waters and it's not about africans it's about it's another aspect of the african diaspora people from of from the west indies living in new york and what what she found was that for these black folks that came from the caribbean one of their biggest challenges was passing on culture to their kids because what ended up happening to this community in new york is they assimilated the kids assimilated into african american culture even even as haitians so we heard a lot of the same thing here with with people from africa how do i instill in my kids a sense of african identity when they're just going to be bomb did with expectations that they behave like african americans so much pride a lot of teary eyes i teared up during the focus groups respondents tear up i you know i just have so much affection for africans having done this project got to confess i've never been to africa other than egypt so it's not an area where i old particular expertise and i learn so much from talking to these folks and one of the things that we often do when we do research is ask what does it mean to you to be hispanic what does it mean to you to be a gay person what does it mean to be african and number one answer unanimously i think was respect respect for others respect for our elders growing up in a very very  family oriented system where discipline was done was meted out with with with love politeness and i'm going to have read some of this because i don't want to miss hospitality that you know you invite somebody into your home and you feed them you treat them like a member of your family religion is very strong and again much much religious diversity christianity  who are coming to get a higher level of education but also in africa that's one of the things that's that's pounded into people's heads is the importance of education and  to different ideas and people and i'm not quite sure how to express this but it was really a real theme i kind of relate this to the level of sophistication of the people that we talk to obviously people that have come from another continent to live in another continent but just very very cosmopolitan the right word is very sophisticated in terms of being people here's the word i want there are people of the world they're very worldly in the sense of having knowledge of the world having very international groups of friends many have married people from other countries black and non black and again the theme of raising children with a strong african identity is a big challenge and it's also a very strong aspiration against family family dependency and we hear a lot of this you certainly hear about it you know when we're talking about the asian segment all these multicultural segments right to a certain extent that's because in the united states we very much value independence that's kind of you know our country is based on on a declaration of independence and where we pride ourselves on being entrepreneurial and self sufficient well well that's not true for for other for some other cultures and particularly african cultures pride themselves on a dependence that family members take care of themselves and they care of each other another core pillar which i have never heard in with another multicultural group was all truism giving to others is is of deemed to be of high importance with w many of the communities are small and again it it's a real challenge for immigrants to hold onto that to hold on to their culture and as i mentioned it's particularly difficult for africans given the the racial dynamic of this country i can't talk enough about racism and i feel kind of funny talking about it and i'll let you know why and i've shared this story i think with with a couple  people yesterday when we first came out with the study we talked a lot about the racism because it was it was a very pervasive theme and when i say racism feeling of these are africans feeling that they are the  victims of racism and i talked a lot about it and i talked a lot about racism coming from the african american community and i i got chided by some african american friends that said you know we're working really really hard towards developing a sense of black community and you're not really helping the matter and i very much torn on this because on the one hand i feel that based on what i heard certain the dialogue is a good thing and that it's good to have dialogue  by the same token i've kind of toned down in many presentations of the extent that i talk about it because i want to be helping the communities that i'm researching and i don't want to cause any harm but i do think that  that that this group of people here is a very sophisticated group of people and i'm just going to tell you what i heard and maybe we can talk about what the implications are but racism came up again and again and again and people getting made fun of because of their accent because of the way that they dress and again not filling the expectations of how black people should should behave we ask them questions of a quantitative we've measured  it some particular challenges sixty two percent of our respondents said that africans are usually portrayed negatively in the u s media and when we probed in the qualitative about what these stereotypes where we heard about tarzan and we heard about the villages and we heard about we heard about poverty so it has many different faces and yet at the same time fifty nine percent felt that their education their skills or are valued in the workplace thirty one percent said they experience racism it came up much stronger in the qualitative and i think the one of the reasons that it didn't come up higher in the quantitative is because we use the phrase often  know you change the word to frequently or sometimes and the numbers start to change so let me talk about relationships with with african americans the gentleman in the upper left hand corner that's that's the image that  that many people have of what africans are are all about and i heard a lot of negativity and i don't want to dwell on it perceptions that some some said that african americans or that some african americans have said that they were the ones who sold their ancestors into slavery we heard some really strong stuff and again there was lots of emotion which again gave me so much respect you don't like to hear as a researcher you don't like to hear stereotypes and and at the same time it was a very very moving group of people so a nuff said about identity let's talk about about marketing and we asked them about brands we asked about all kinds of behavior very brand loyal group of people these are some of the brands of mercedes landrover seems like a lot of the africans we talk to are into max ok that were that were apple loyalists a real appreciation for showing black people in advertising on the one hand and on the other hand showing people that aren't just perfect models showing other people of color showing models that don't have perfect figures and things like that a couple of the mention an ad where they featured a woman with it with a scar from a c section you like to see real people in america it seems that you're showing us nothing but perfect people perfect white people and if a company is willing to acknowledge people of color there was a real appreciation and i think that this represents a real opportunity to connect with this community like many like many immigrant groups word of mouth is big it's a typical profile of an immigrant come to we would be the same way if we went to live in another country you start asking people particularly people that come from your own country of origin where's the best place to buy a tie where's the best place to go grocery shopping and this african segment was was no different but you know they are watching t into what networks there are watching when it came to price loyalty again there were differences by market that reflects the diversity of this this community washington d c where you have a lot of  very very brand conscious spending a lot of money in department stores here and here in minneapolis shopping more in in discount stores most talked about value all about value run a strong theme but you know a desire to touch a product and to see a product before buying it so here's some data and again i'm mixing up the qualitative with the quantitative you like to shop around and find the right product and price for you two thirds of the people agreed with that you definitely prefer african rather than food from other cultures fifty eight percent so you know real opportunity to sell them food and you'll see in a slide coming up that they are shopping in mainstream markets and they're shopping at african markets as well there's this mixing of culture that takes place you buy products that agree with your religious values about forty six percent this was and you don't mind buying insurance policies forty two percent i'm going to show you some ownership rates again it's going to represent the sophistication i think of this market so where are the leading places that you go to shop thirty three percent said supermarkets are going to is a national survey so it depended what supermarket depended on the market but yet eighteen percent said that they shop in african grocery stores and it was very common for us  most frequently what we found was that a huge majority shop in both so that you'd go to the general market store to get toilet paper or you know bread maybe and you go to the african store to get get your local food but you that you that you that you miss we talked a lot about financial planning and again these are folks that are investing very very active in terms of seeking out financial information investing their money which it is so striking it was so striking for me the contrast between the behavior of the folks that we talked to in the stereotypes that exist because they couldn't be more diametrically opposed many many of these folks are working hard they're working multiple jobs and hard work is a pillar of the community that i didn't mention but again you know they come here to work they come here in exploration of acts of economic opportunity and that's another stressor is holding down a couple of jobs and trying to trying to trying to build a business or are trying to establish a family this date again keep in mind the date is two years old which is not going to impact this light as much as the next some other slides but these are these are very high numbers for an immigrant group nearly all have checking accounts and saving up accounts credit cards you know we we do a lot of what work with latinos for instance credit card rates are tend to be much lower there's a there's a cultural belief in latin america  your credit's advice not so with with this community we heard a lot about alternative financial sources got people from the same country or the same community pulling their resources  and and helping loaning money in pulling it so somebody could buy a house and then you know pass it on kind of kind of kind of kind of thing and look at eighty one percent of the quantitative said that they have four one k plans thirteen percent these are high numbers again i want to point to the the sophistication of the community auto insurance a lot of cultures do not buy auto insurance hispanic culture for instance very low rates of i don't want to say oranges of insurance and generally you don't want to attract the evil eye you know you know you don't want to bring on bad vents by by even talking about them on pleasant  vents high ownership of this is well even fifty eight percent ownership of dental insurance so i'm going to ok personal computer these are the numbers i would imagine would be even higher but two years ago these are very high numbers eighty five percent owning a personal computer i think that there are there is still a digital divide in the united states it's closing but it's certainly does not seem to be a problem for the majority of the africans that we spoke to just a very connected community seventy three percent having internet access cable t v multiple telephone lines thirty two percent have gaming systems  this is a this is a community that's that very wired ninety six percent on a cell phone and i would we didn't ask the question two years ago i wish we had how many on a smartphone and my guess would be that many of these folks do own smart phones what are they watching on t v look at this c n n came up again and again n p r b b c you know we didn't we didn't hear a whole lot of you know and hear a whole m t v i didn't hear a whole lot of even network t v again the sophistication of and the international mindset of these folks was just was just a start astounding and the international news came up again and again in terms of a choice of spouse or or the type of music that i listen to in the kind of food that i concern and in this particular case the kind of media that that i consume so i don't want to beat a dead horse here but this is what most people think of when they think of africa right now don't we all think of why ends and elephants that's that's what's pounded into our heads i don't have a number but a very high number of africans are actually urban but that's not the image that is projected in the meeting in the media coming to america and you've seen that movie that that that movie came up a lot as kind of kind of the the  image of kind of you know a redneck yoko image applied to africans and it kind of reflecting the way that they felt americans saw them what to do they said they said so often show real people show us as happy people we're very happy culture and you turn on the media and we are just suffering show the other side of africa not that we want to  ignore aids and famine and and you know some of the problems but there is a whole nother side and so many of our respondents said you know that is my experience i have happy memories of home we have a happy family we have a happy middle class family we love our kids we love spending our time with our kids we love to eat we love to dance we love to miss into music and we don't see that end in f a company were to show that reflect that side of africa in an ad we would we would be loyal to that company because we just don't see it here's pursuit per participation  rates in media activity i don't know if you can see that you have a copy of the deck again the point being the sophistication forty three percent were on facebook two years ago i imagine that those numbers of probably doubled at this point  not a whole lot watching african movies in theaters sophisticated group of people i think what i'm going to do i think i've covered most of the relevant data what i do want to say is  there is a report on our website that you can access for those of you that are really into the numbers it's i know that it's late in the day here i am apologizing just like the book said not to  do i did want to make the point oh actually a few more sides i want to show we asked what how many hours a day do you spend watching media t v websites and again overwhelmingly watching much more watching a lot of english language media that includes on the internet on the radio although there is consumption of of african language media so there is a an opportunity to to to target africans using using african language media and in which language media targeting africans again c n n number one network number network consumed as a news channel with c n n these numbers here in terms of the internet would be much higher today but using yahoo using facebook but also african language websites  he rom dot com african news nigerian website but again very small numbers only three percent so so you are to a certain extent reaching these folks with with with your general market media like any multicultural segment there is such an opportunity to do targeting because they're largely ignored so let me recap and then i think we'll will we'll get some some folks up here if you have can will come up in a minute let me just recap hard working people very ambitious working two jobs family is the biggest priority that we heard about respect education is a top priority optimism that with hard work hard work will bring success focus on community sending money lots of sending money back to relatives at home and  helping the community here in the united states keep in mind that african american african immigrants consider themselves to be african not african american and a lot of them commented when i go back to africa though i feel very american i realize that i've i've changed a lot from they stay in touch with their culture they're looking for opportunities to stay in touch with their culture and as we've mentioned i beat it to death but very very different from from african americans the point i really want to make here is i think so many companies do not do do not even acknowledge that they look at the census numbers and they where the black is checked off and and they feel that they're targeting these one point six million people with their african american targeted marketing and it's just true very brand loyal  word of mouth very important spiritual folks for religion plays a very very important role in almost all of the people that we talk to and shopping a wide range of stores financial planning for those of you that are inventing lots of opportunities there and if you're if your best buy in the gadget business you're in the electronics business lots of opportunities there i'm going to i'm going i'm going to end the presentation here if i can leave you with any thought it is that that this is a very sophisticated group of people and yet very diverse and and one point six million people is not a number two to sneeze at this is a real opportunity here particularly here in minneapolis as you know so i'm going to break another really say not to thank the audience at the end but i am very grateful that you listen to all this data at the end of  a great day so thank you very very much are americans but have african origin i want to also time then because they have done some work so i've lived some grounds before people like me came over here in the civil rights china is so much ally british on parts of africa that they say where it means what are we doing here so for anybody that is interested in these economic ties develop those fifty fall nations beyond what the actually that's my news what you either of you like to say some words thoughts but africa africa well hieron my name is nathan white so right off the bat you can see if you and i actually had this done the data thing that saul was talking about earlier you go true and you run your database and you again one of the reasons i'm dressed like this is yeah if i showed up looking like looking like david you're probably paying me as ordinary black american but on tell i take off some layers and put something else on then you understand that i have a little extra to me and i think that's the bottom line of his presentation is when folks don't really try to understand any demographics whoever we're talking about really don't try to get past the first level of the outer shell you will miss the mark because if you're not speaking to folks the way they want to be spoken to you will definitely be speaking to somebody else other than yeah and in fact if you if you if you go through the complete area back there you go through the complete report we looked at religion we looked at country of origin we looked at east africa versus west africa versus central africa  you know absolutely a lot of differences especially by country of origin and drove a lot of things like food food choice so much change a little bit but yeah right off the bat so yeah i have some extra data at that point to that and again if you segmented by regions soft africans the highest income of africans  follow i think by north africans and west africans and east africans so depending on where you're from within that region it can be broken down to the income level off those folks so yet again  africans stare and can and by telling the number one state for where africans are nope it's on their california california i know i was i was forty years old when i found out my my father wasn't pedro he had a real complicated name so when he arrived in minnesota he became pete so the yeah  known african here that i work with but then i'd see the name on the on the phone and then it was a whole different thing so maybe you can tell us the date they some of that actually  for opportunities and education and i was talking to a little bit and during the i think it was very young man but during the one nine hundred seventy s while sixty's sixty three when kenya became independent things had changed and during the seventies my family by graded from india to east africa to wall to zanzibar and then to kenya and we started a lot of businesses but unfortunately we lost everything through socialism and the government took everything away so it was very devastating and now you know things are different in kenya and the second thing you were talking about education when i first came here i started college at north end up in community college and i took english one hundred one and it was a breeze and i thought oh my goodness you know is english why no one is equal to was equal to my last year of elementary school so the standard of english is very high and during that time it was british system and saw when i was growing up i went to school well of course in kenya the elementary school and high school i could not understand the british system i just had a tough time it was too difficult and i really appreciated the american system of education you know i could understand it better it seemed like it was a better fit for me and so i'm glad i'm here in the united states i really appreciate it and the last thing was we were talking about racism well when i was growing up in school i didn't experience any of racism i had lots of african friends indian friends british friends we all hung around together and s all and in fact even though i was brought up in a hate to say this even though i was brought up in a wealthy family all my friends were very poor because i did not fit toity class yet also that was an important and i felt felt everybody was equal under the eyes of god so that's how i felt and the last thing is you were talking about the racism during the eighty's i visited when i went to kenya i met a flight attendant who was african american and he was complaining about he was very frustrated with the african community and so i said well why you're so frustrated he felt being discriminated in kenya he felt he was he wasn't a good fit for him and us all he just didn't understand the african culture so we had a very long conversation about the african culture so  thousand and eleven as president c e o of clues a highly successful nonprofit organization located in st paul in minneapolis and if you've entered ever done your work with the last you know community i think that that's been recognized as one of the top twenty five a spank nonprofit agencies in america and one of the one of the one hundred forty eight top work places in the twin cities in two thousand and eleven he was among one hundred national leaders who participated in the white house hispanic policy summit and in two thousand and eight he was listed among the one hundred most influential health care leaders in minnesota jesse has received special words from the ramsey county bar candid is do we see the growth of the multicultural communities and all the data is is this is this something that's going to be welcome in beyond that you know our everyday lives i think there's some clients maybe just see you know i'll have clients maybe a little more sensitive not understand it or to some and i think that's important to know as we all are interested in this and how do how does america going to handle this whole shift in what we see now is in the in the populations just maybe you can leave that off i'll want to talk about that and to stamp points  first i think that you know the world is flat and it's smaller and i had worked to bring decent a fox president of mexico to minnesota hundred million dollars and to answer this question i thought that within five years we could double that and so a behind the scenes that played a pretty significant role with  ninety million dollars to mexico so you know that's the answer right there we played a big role in opening the doors towards the sense of connection in i think to the second point actually the next twenty years will see the most significant demographic shift in america and in minnesota for instance by twenty thirty you know it the fastest growing age group isn't minnesota it's the sixty five and above it two hundred twenty five percent of all high school graduation  graduates decreased by ten percent all diverse communities in minnesota increased by a hundred twelve percent and so we're embarking upon such a significant change  governor's workforce development council says that by twenty eighteen ninety six percent of all jobs they catered by their retiring boomer population will be filled by generation you and you know what the use dance for the unretired so you think of metropolitan state university a university that is so focused in understanding the needs of  adults has no achievement gaps graduation rates actually met supposed to universities one of the most prestigious but profound universities in america serving the working adult and so this university has to go to scale to be about securing and saving jobs so i'm taking your question from the standpoint that in minnesota two different reports show that by the twenty twenties we lose between three hundred fifty thousand jobs to five hundred thousand jobs because we will not be producing enough back clerk to greet people to keep those jobs so education is a key and from the standpoint of the marketing equation about reaching out to help people see the world the lexicon culture the values we really have to figure out how institutions like much part the state university  complain even much larger role in education so that we're able to help people get those jobs the other part of this is that as we diversify it is just a it is business schools where it is welcomed and it is  days when there's that sense of relationship so a long answer but i going to say that it don't i don't believe it's a function of multicultural i think it's  the natural changes that we're seeing demographically and in the case of mexico where we doubled from four hundred million to eight hundred ninety million it think it's a function of how do we open doors make connections so that business schools where it is welcomed and it stays where it's think so very much that could mean for us a thriving future if we take to heart now what we need to do in education in to take to heart about the issue of language and culture you know coming from my background with clues when i left the agency we serve sixteen languages of people and i finished a chapter in an international book called engaging diverse communities i'm one of seventeen authors in that book and our journey was this that we found that the univers question for all peoples when they come to our doors from sixteen the cations from throughout the world was this what are your hopes and dreams for children's future now that is universal question so when we start to really rethin from that broader perspective marketing does have a significant role to play in reaching the universal needs and interests that people have from language and culture that's very much a part the global world have been a lot of that you know laws being passed restricting restricting various things like the affirmative action and the university of california things like that and so we did this really interesting study and we asked a whole series of questions we did a segmentation study based on it and we basically found that forty about forty six percent of the total population in southern california were really love the a slight majority but most of them were minor issues and only five percent really actively hated latinos but we asked a whole lot of other questions about things about their willingness or interest in learning languages languages they wanted their children to learn and even among the people the five percent who hated latinos fifty three percent of them one of the children learn spanish so i thought that was really interesting so you know some of the issues they were they just were bothered by the latinos being you know you loud colors on their houses parking their lines on the drive cars on the drive on the lawn you know many of them just simply didn't the immigration wave we did a big study among latinos to try to find out how they perceived all of this the piles of the world and the jan brewer's of the world and all of that backlash against them a couple ricans are basically citizens but they were just as a bald and just as committed to the dream act and a path immigration immigration reform with a path to citizenship as the latino as and as the mexican central american counterparts who have skin in the game and then we looked at by you know by by political affiliation and yes the latinos who are affiliated as republicans were significantly lower in their in their  opposition to s b ten ten seventy and in favor of the dream act but they were they were seventy eight seventy three percent so they were significantly lower but they were still very high basically two thirds of driven country any marketer in any category that looks at that and says we're not going to do anything is should not be in that career ok this is this is just you know imagine piles of money stuck to the moon being left on the table so multicultural marketing it's quite clear it's not a question of if anymore it's a question of when what we're encountering now in many categories is resistance to doing something that organizations have not done in the past and there are some valid reasons for that resistance there's a lack of prior consumer data for many of these groups either available in the public domain or available within corporate databases you know so first they want to know how big is it and how do they interact with my product and then there is there's also some issues in terms of measuring the channels that reaches communities media measurement we've got lots of media but not all of it is all of it that there are a lot of valid concerns but still the visionary marketer needs to look at that and say for the rest of the lifetime of everybody in this room and the future generations come in the next two three generations at least this is the future of consumerism do we if we're if we want to be in business and we want to sell do we care about these populations or not get already more than half the population of the state of california or single largest state market population majority in our top ten urban areas fastest growing in fifty of the top hundred urban areas so this is the future it's hard to imagine what what's going to happen after twenty fifty we could have a country where states start to declare spanish second official language i mean once there's majorities in these areas we could start to see things like that it's going to revolutionize education the whole concept of what being an american and what the general population looks like is right now undergoing a radical shift so it's not that the general market's going away multicultural it's coming it's that the general market is becoming multicultural so there's all this inertia against corporate america to embrace this but just the basic numbers dictate and has to happen and the brands that move now and you know make some mistakes in stumble a bit but learn and keep going well when the ones that delay it will not win or they're going to have to spend enormous sums of money in the future to play catch up it's just as simple as that from russia you know the jews came over we ended up closing the borders to a certain extent in one thousand nine hundred four but my point is you know we're going through a demographic revolution and it is natural that when so many people in the united states are foreign born that there's going to be resistance i do a i do a presentation where i begin with a patrick buchanan interview on the on the daily show and jon stewart tears into shreds patrick buchanan's talk about his book he calls it state of emergency the third world invasion of america and his point is i send then i go through to demonstrate how it's erroneous what buchanan and many nativists if you will say is that hispanics are not assimilating like other immigrants that they're there and that they're not learning english that they're that they want that they're loyal to mexico and not to the united states and you know on one point assimilation or acculturation or whatever you want to call it is not the same now as it was in nineteen ten we're talking about a completely different kind of immigration and it completely different time in our history however i are learning english and they are embracing the united states culture and they're joining the military and they are adopting our values the thing that you need to keep in mind and i think that what's going to ultimately solve any resistance that there is to so much immigration and you see the same phenomenon in the asian market the population as you do in the hispanic population if you look at the adult population it's a largely immigrant are largely bifurcated markets hispanics something like sixty percent of hispanic adults are immigrants something like seventy five percent of asian adults are immigrants if you look at the under eighteen it's the complete opposite something like ninety five percent of hispanics under the age of i think it's closer to ninety percent of hispanics under the age of eighteen were born in the united states and it's slightly lower for asians but ultimately what's going to happen is you've got a whole generation born in the u s that's going to grow up they're going to have kids now you're talking the third generation they're going to be that much more removed from from from immigration they're going to be that much more like americans and the other thing to keep in mind is they're changing the mainstream so they're not going to be the alien people that their parents often appear to be so i think that you know the real the real cure in terms of any kind of hostilities just is going to be time and it's going to be acculturation with open up the questions and robert when i go back to the philippines this is the old country my family think of me as behaving like an american and so my question right now is here is that about how these groups how i just call them this groups the immigrants the you know the cultures are they changing america were america changing them or both are trying to change the other and  i'm just wondering about that because i'm also kind of wondering about what it what is it what makes an american and what will be you know what's its implication in in in the context of marketing because we talk about you know how to market but we we you guys discuss about marketing it to a certain group of immigrants that still has that culture but going forward there will be those generations would slowly be not become immigrants anymore like my daughter she won't be she won't have that i don't know filipino culture it's just kind of a weird because i have a spanish a spanish name but certainly a nation feature so i have that kind of you know i don't  that diversity is ours when a person is an immigrant becomes an american they're an american this notion that all the next generation there will be american no right now that's what it means to be an american so i want to say this not from a euro centric view or but just a global view of who we are as americans that we have always been a diverse rich community is that when you think about the inalienable rights of life liberty and happiness that's universal that i think is so critical to understand as people move up from a sociological perspective second third generation like myself you tend to have a great affinity now for me my grandparents are from mexico and my mother side my grandmother's family was from small in sweden my father's mother's side and my father's father's side was from hamburg germany so i want to dispel this idea of we they because to be an american is about a sense of who we are as a people so you know yourself from the philippines as an immigrant and as an american you're an american i really want to caution us about to thinking about this from the standpoint of marketing what does multiculturalism mean to us in america in is or pushback what does it mean for the riches of for we are  diverse country and the contributions of all americans from serving in the armed forces to serving in public life to at bats is an education to science to me this this really starts to speak to the richness of war marketing truly can add tremendous insight and that is marketing simply is about reaching people from how they see the world into their employee handbook into a one hundred sixty five countries throughout the world think of that marketing equation so we're we have always been diverse and i want to stress that in marketing if anything it's the sophistication of understanding the term mass customisation of how you have to reach out to people for how they see the world and i think that's an important distinction that i'd like to make in altitude over to  mexican i'm mexican i'm mixing mexican she was completely bilingual she could say this in the in english and spanish he said and then i went to business my up my family's village back in mexico and i realized i'm completely american all the kids are my age all the girls are her age were picking out their wedding dresses and their their path their their their patterns for their somebody for the for the china or whatever it is they're going to get married they're going to start a family and they're you know picking up baby kids baby clothes already and there are seventeen they said and i was just thinking about my new i pod and that's all she did that's as far as she could think so she realized that she was you know she was doing the classic american thing of postponing you know marriage and childbearing and of that stuff until she got to college and she started a career and then she was maybe start a family the inner thirty's like most americans do and she realized that she was quite dramatically spectacularly different from her cousins and  me lately there's still tend to be relatively low oil but still their level of expectations and the demands and expectations for packaging and product quality and taste and consistency all of that starts to change so it's pretty dramatic and i always tell mexican companies please do not make assumptions about this market if you want to come up to the united states that's fine but you have to know that you're competing on a different playground this is a completely different playground you have to have to compete just in answer to your question i would say that in the great immigration of one hundred years ago which many of us remember at least vicariously through grandparents if not in more direct ways  at that time in our country's history there was a clear kind of racial and ethnic pecking order in this country with white european christians being at the highest level and then kind of everything else down the wrong and the name of the game for immigrants whether they were russian jewish immigrants or immigrants from other parts of the world was really assimilation defined as do not under any circumstance speak your native language to your children who were born here because you want them to be real americans so that meant a rejection of the previous language yeah you'll keep the culture at home because some of these immigrants still had to cook the way they did in celebrate certain things but your child was encouraged even outside the home to not be like that but what's happened is over the last hundred years with these dramatic demographic shift and particularly visible with the influx of latino immigrant spanish speaking immigrants asian immigrants and others african immigrants that the whole nature of the country has changed in terms of absolute numbers and this all came through a period of forty fifty years where we also underwent this radical trance from a sheen which i think you know as seen through the prism of the civil rights movement that said wait a minute this traditional pecking order that was based on race and based on that is not really that valid because everybody really is more equal so now here we are at the beginning of this century we've got huge numbers of people in these communities and the name of the game is celebrate your individual cultures and languages to the point that immigrants are encouraged even to keep speaking spanish keep speaking chinese yes we want everyone to learn english and when the children go to school they have to learn english but we're actually celebrating the difference so when you talk about what does it mean to be america one hundred years ago being american meant going back way and assimilating one hundred years forward to today being american means relishing celebrating that diversity of culture and i find what's very interesting i'm fifty years old and my oldest child is eighteen he's just graduating high school what i find is interesting is i'm a product of an ultra liberal white jewish family from new york that went through the civil rights movement carrying candles and you know kind of a very left wing and very let's say multi culturally aware nevertheless when i was growing and i went to school with african americans and some asian kids then but nevertheless when i was growing up socially outside of school you know i was in kind of a very narrowly defined social circle of white kids often jewish kind of almost like me not because my parents dictated not because i did but because that's what people did back then i look at my son today my son's a white jewish honor student in westchester county new york and when he gets in a car i'm with four friends on the weekend i promise you there's a black kid in the car there's a latino kid in the car sometimes it's a whole different world for him and it's not that i wasn't open to that as a child it's just our society was not it wasn't happening wasn't for you whereas when our kids come of age and then they have the next generation and all these immigrants their kids are born here it's already happening the genex today is for them color is almost a non issue they're not looking at it and certainly we heard in general mills presentation and i just want to echo this we've got all these numbers here what is it one hundred million hispanic african americans and their influence on our culture is a thousand times that music today is african american fashion is coming from these communities all the artistic an aesthetic sensibility is coming from these committees my son dresses and entertains himself through the cultures of these multicultural communities not through a white mainstream culture and this is what's really going to dramatically redefine it already is but it's going to continue what it means to be american and so make sure your kids know what it is to be filipino because their knowledge of that as to how they will be american let me just respond one thing though and that's a friend from new mexico and i said tell me what your experience is like  spanish in new mexico they're certainly not going to say that it was you know the white people were on the top quite the contrary my standpoint is is that in american means about rights that are afforded to you about equality our narrative is very different in terms of our social logical perspective and that's language and culture even european americans speak english for many generations so i want to suggest that the newcomer experience is always been part of our journey always and it always will be in twenty thirty years from now it'll be a whole other set of issues but defining ourselves in america is the rights for all of us and that is a distinction that we have to find especially for diverse communities that have faced racism that turn allies depression and other things finding voice and finding narratives important and i think it's really critical that we talk about this market is one thing but narrative is something else and understanding the rights afforded to all americans is what i'm wanting us to always get back to because that's what it means in terms of researching the book that i wrote i came across a social a just that it's so nice that state university of new york called richard alba and he has studied the immigrants in the early twentieth century and he's looked the the melting pot phenomenon and you know in an attempt to extract insights in terms of today's today's immigrants and i mean again you know as as saul mention clearly there there are differences hispanics hold on to spanish or at least try to write by my great grandmother my grandmother used to tell a story and her and her thick yiddish accent said i would say to the kids very when america navi speak english concluded is certainly that assimilation is different now than it was back then and there is a holding on to culture but he he says don't throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of sociological constructs because you don't have immigration of the magnitude that we have right now without immigrants changing the mainstream that's happening now and that's what happened in the early twentieth century and his argument you know i don't know if any of you are familiar with the book how the irish became white but if you read stuff that was written in the press in the early twentieth century during all this mag during all this immigration i strikingly similar to what pat buchanan is talking about and what these native us folks who were on a lawn at the jews and the italians they were basically considered people of color and in time they became white i mean we just yes that's that's that's that's that's a i got a in my book headlines of it was story on joe dimaggio and the writer was just amazed that unlike other italians who think of bear grease in their hair he speaks fluent english and his idea of a friday night is going to have egg rolls at the chinese restaurant as if that was the most ironic thing in the world they change they change the mainstream if i say the word took us to you you know what i'm talking about right if i say the words she moves if i say the word confetti you know what i'm talking about we all eat bagels we eat pizza these folks changed what it meant to be america they changed the mainstream his argument is particularly like tino's because of the magnitude of latino immigration are going to change what it means to be america exactly what saul was saying the image you know i lived in mexico for three years and you know i am the stereotype of a getting look you know blue eyes that that image is going to change because a smaller and smaller percentage of americans are going to have blue eyes my children are mixed race so again what it means to be american is it is going to change and it's going to be more inclusive and again as alba would would argue as it out has always been when every you have this much immigration the mainstream adapts and the meaning of what it means to be america is going to change