BY ELISABETH A. SULLIVAN// EDITOR
esullivan@ama.org

Asian-American consumers might represent a small segment of the U.S. marketplace, but they control some pretty signifi cant purse strings. So says Vicky M. Wong, president and CEO of DAE Advertising Inc., a boutique Asian- American marketing firm based in San Francisco. A Hong Kong native, Wong began her marketing career at Ogilvy & Mather before joining the DAE team in 1993 as an account supervisor. After a hiatus in Malaysia—during which she managed brands for a satellite TV company and an international restaurant concept company—Wong returned to DAE as an executive in 2000. DAE’s clients include Wells Fargo, Southwest Airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, as well as nonprofit organizations such as the American Cancer Society. Marketing News recently caught up with Wong to discuss DAE’s work, and why and how marketers should target the Asian- American audience.

Q: How do you integrate Asian- American messaging into your clients’ general-market campaigns?

A: Most of the clients that come to an Asian-American agency already have their branding established and they have their positioning pretty much set. When they come to the Asian segment, they would consult with the agency and say: ‘Hey, this is what we have. … Should we just adopt it or should we modify it, or should we create something new?’ Our philosophy is that most of the time, we would like to advise the client that you should have one branding [strategy] only no matter who you are talking to because this country has a lot of crossover. [In] global marketing, you can tweak your platform based on [each individual] country, but here [in the United States,] you walk across the street and it is a Hispanic town or Asian town...It really makes sense to have one voice that you enhance by tweaking it to talk to your audience more specifically. It works better that way.

Q: Are your clients typically targeting one faction of the Asian-American audience or are they targeting Asian-Americans as a whole?

A: We have to advise our clients that they really need to prioritize. The Asian segment is fragmented. There are six groups composing 80% of the [Asian-American] population here, so are you able to have the resources to address the six groups together? As resourceful as Wells Fargo is, [for example,] they can’t. Even for Wells Fargo, we advise them that you need to pick certain segments to start with. Along the way, you do your internal marketing to get more resources … so that you build it up to be ready to expand. So for Wells Fargo, we started with only the Chinese segment in 1993. ... By now, [after] almost 15 or 16 years, the Asian segment of Wells Fargo marketing targets five segments, including English-speaking Asians. I don’t quite know whether there could be a classic example of Asian marketing. Some clients actually would go for more at one time, but very few would go for all at the same time. I think it’s a resources question. You have to have enough managers to manage that many segments. In general, it is a prioritization question and then you know that has a lot related to the mapping. You map the different Asian segments’ profiles versus your business profile to identify which segment offers you the biggest opportunity. Then you go after that first.

Q: Are there lessons to be learned from the Hispanic marketing model? Should marketers targeting Asian immigrants also measure consumers’ levels of acculturation?

A: I think the situation among Hispanics and Asians is quite different. In general, 70% of the population actually is immigrants within the Asian segment. It’s a very, very immigrant-centric population. And the country of origin will have a different impact on the acculturation level regardless of the length of time within the United States… In the Philippines, they speak English and in India, they speak English, so those two groups are acculturated faster than Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese. Also, a part of that is the familiarity with American culture in their home towns. Some Asian segments, say like Chinese, there are five generations of Chinese in America since the Gold Rush days and some segments like Vietnamese, they came here only after the downfall of Saigon in 1975. So with each group, the acculturation is kind of different and the heritage, you know, their approach or their value system, also has a part of that factor in that acculturation curve. There’s the 1.5 term in the Asian-American market: You’re born overseas but you came here in your pre-teenager years, so you’re kind of acculturated but you’re not really second-generation. You’re not first and you’re not second, so you’re 1.5. For that group, whether you target them in their native language or in English is still an ongoing debate. So it’s a little bit more nuanced than the Hispanic [market]. And the thing is, I think the Hispanic market is kind of, you know, here, so a lot of marketers already know the importance of targeting Hispanics. … But with the Asian segment, we are not yet at that level of discussion. We’re still talking to lots of marketers and convincing them of the potential of this market, not even the best way to reach them. It’s like, you need to reach them.

Q: If step one for your agency is to say, you should be targeting this audience,
what’s step two?

A: I think the industries that are already in the Asian market, they just know that the money is there without doing anything. They already see the [Asian-American] consumers coming in. What are those industries? In the early ’80s and ’90s, all of the telecommunications companies were in the market because if you don’t do it, you’d probably lose 70% of your pie. AT&T, Sprint, MCI and PacBell … they needed no education whatsoever. They already knew because who’s making all those [long-distance] calls? Immigrants. So telecom is one [example and] financial institutions are another example of that. You can quote any bank in the United States, I would say, and they have some form of Asian-American marketing, no matter what. It’s just a fact that when you look into your [customer] profile [as a bank], you know that Asians save the most. They’re very savvy in terms of financial management; it’s kind of in the culture, in the blood. They are the best customers for banks, so for those [companies], they’re kind of forced to be in the market. Whether they like it or not, they have to.

But for certain categories, we are still in the stage of convincing, like packaged goods, cars or image-driven products. … I think internally you will need to have some champions who raise the topic. And most of the time, it is a director or above, the C-suite. Somebody with more vision and insight who could say, ‘Hey, this is a segment that we might want to look into.’ … Once the research coming in shows them that money is there, then campaigns, that kind of thing, would come.

Q: How about reaching highly acculturated Asian-Americans? Is there as much of a push as there is with the Hispanic market to get representation on general-market TV commercials, for example?

A: A lot of the general-market corporations use diverse faces in their commercials, so you actually see a whole lot more Asian faces now in the general market campaigns. That, I think, has nothing to do with Asians; it’s really a recognition from the mainstream marketers that America is changing, their customer bases are changing. It’s an acknowledgement of the diversity. They’re targeting everybody. Highly acculturated Asians, probably second-generation and up, would be in that mix. So that approach, in some ways, is very sound.

When you are specifically talking about targeting the highly assimilated, acculturated Asian-Americans, actually, this is really not quite on [marketers’] radars. I would say that there’s an overwhelming belief that that profile of Asians doesn’t need any targeting because they are already in the mainstream mix.

If you really are targeting them, there are some ways to customize that targeting even if you are using mainstream media. … The advice we give [companies] is that they should supplement [their mainstream marketing] with some form of professional or business reach that is not paid-mediadriven but is more [about] community engagement. … Many professional organizations and business associations are grouped by the type of Asians, so if you go through [those groups], you would be much more focused in terms of reaching the right profile.

Q: You mentioned the Asian-American culture’s financial skills earlier and there are a lot of studies on Asian-Americans’ spending power, yet many marketers have yet to reach out to that audience. Are you surprised at the lag time?

A: Absolutely. With the Asian segment, the weakness is the population size. It’s only 5% [of the U.S. population], so a lot of marketers are only looking at that [number and thinking:] ‘5%? Forget it.’ … But when you are looking at certain industries like the banking industry, I don’t have the statistic, but I’m absolutely sure that Asian consumers [constitute] 20% or it might be 30%-plus [of banks’ target audiences].

In San Francisco as a metropolitan city, 40% [of residents] are Asians, so if you don’t target Asians, who are you going to target? Same as in New York. … 20% are Asians. Unless your business is totally evenly distributed nationwide, if you have to justify your target in Idaho or Alaska, I buy the 5%. But if metropolitan cities are your footprint, you’re no longer talking about 5%; you’re talking about 20% or 30%.