Imagine you want to reach a more diverse audience (now, there’s a good idea). You start looking for ways to do so. After some research (another good idea) you end up with two options: inclusive marketing or ethno marketing. Great… But which approach is the best? Spoiler alert: we prefer inclusive marketing. And you’ll find out why soon enough.

What’s inclusive marketing again?

We could talk for hours about inclusive marketing, but that’s not why you’re here. Let’s recap: it’s a way to communicate inclusively and take into account the existing diversity of our society, for example in terms of gender, ability, ethnicity, and religion. Within this diversity, the key is finding similarities between different target groups to reach as many people as possible – including ethnic minorities.

Let’s talk ethno marketing

By comparison, ethno marketing focusses entirely on a specific ethnic minority. The key here is to respond as well as possible to their wants and needs, for example, like we did for Brussels Airport. And that’s nice, because, in traditional marketing, a lot of specific ethnic minorities never are the center of attention. Compared to inclusive marketing you reach a less broad – because very specific – audience. Doesn’t sound bad, either, right? Does it boil down to personal preference?

Sweet isn’t always sweet

Not entirely, because if you don’t go about ethno marketing the right way, you might send the message that ethnic minorities are not integrated or accepted within society, and therefore require a special treatment. It’s very important to see which wants and needs you are addressing, and to verify if they are really specific to a certain minority. For wants and needs that relate to a broader audience, ethno marketing is less efficient. Take the sugar refinery from Tienen for example. In 2018 they launched “Shukr”, a bar of sugar that’s 15 times as sweet as a classical sugar cube, aimed at the Maghreb-Arabian community. And while this target audience sure loves their tea sweet, they were not waiting for a special kind of sugar.