Between Cultures

Successfully launching a brand is somewhat like preparing a meal with carefully selected ingredients and perfectly orchestrated courses. But that’s not all:
A good chef knows his patrons. He knows their tastes and their customs.
He knows how to excite their palates with the familiar, but he also knows how the unfamiliar can often delight.

In similar fashion, a good advertiser also knows his audience. He speaks with words, images and sounds understandable by his target group.
Intercultural marketing is precise target group marketing, precisely considering all cultural facets, customs, values and mindsets. And avoiding the proverbial foot-in-mouth syndrome.

In recent decades, Germany’s ethnic minorities have developed unique cultural identities: a new synthesis of different cultures and traditions, of historical factors and contemporary social circumstances – and brimming with their very own hopes and dreams. New target groups have developed, each having their own consciousness, needs and receptiveness. And marketing has developed in response – ethno-marketing has given way to intercultural marketing – marketing right at the target group’s own level.

Highly attractive target group

The 2.8 million Turkish-Germans living in Germany have their own culture, one neither wholly German nor wholly Turkish. And they have their own cultural identity. This makes for a very attractive consumer group: younger overall than the Germans, with a strong brand awareness and a purchasing power well in excess of 17 billion Euro. And the per-capita costs of winning new Turkish-German customers are generally much lower than for German target groups. The same also holds true among the Russian-Germans and Italian-Germans and the various other “new” cultures now enhancing Germany.