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Joseph
Assaf, ETCOM
Chairman and CEO.
Joseph
was described by Marketing Magazine in 1994 as “the pioneer of
multicultural marketing” in Australia.
He founded Ethnic Communications Pty Ltd in 1977 and has seen the
company grow to become a major force in multicultural marketing,
becoming a partner in 1998 in the giant international WPP network of
companies including Singleton Ogilvy & Mather, among many others.
(ETCOM remains an independent partner and is free to work with
any agency providing there is no conflict of interest.)
Joseph’s
other achievements include:
founding the National Australia Bank Ethnic Business Awards in
1988; serving on the Multicultural Advisory Council to the Prime
Minister in 1994; being appointed to the Board of the Australian
Foundation for Culture and Humanities in 1995; being appointed as a
Councillor to the Constitutional Centenary Foundation in 1995; Member of
the Review of Independent and Skilled Migrants 1998 and 1999; Member of
the Review of Illegal Workers in Australia 1999; appointment as a Member
of the Board of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation in 1999.
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"The road to the world starts here."
by
Joseph Assaf - Managing Director,
Ethnic Communications
While
the world is changing rapidly and becoming more and more globalised, our
means of communication are not keeping pace. Even though the world has
become electronically connected through the information superhighway and
multinational business, the fast-changing globe has failed to respond
with relevance to the multicultural aspects of the population.
Culture and diversity are becoming isolated and forgotten as the world
slides towards a uniform global village. Monocultural, monolingual
communication is still the common tool to reach across diversity. Yet
what is needed is an effective multicultural and multilingual approach.
Whether you are in Beijing or New York, in Rome or Jakarta, in Hong Kong
or in London, in Beirut or in Tokyo, if you want to be effective in your
attempt to market an idea, a product, or a service, you need to
understand the language and culture of your target audience.
In other words, you need to be culturally relevant in your message and
you need to take a creative, linguistic approach to its delivery. We
already market to various groups such as children, the elderly and
gender-specific groups. For example, women's forums and publications are
designed so that they appeal to women's needs and concerns. To
successfully engage the women's market, you must be sensitive to the
cultural and linguistic signifiers of this market.
Similarly, when attempting to penetrate any of the various multicultural
markets, you must understand the language and cultural sensitivities of
each segment. In Australia, we have most of the world's main cultures
and languages and this is our competitive advantage in a national and
international context.
Development and growth in Australia can be achieved either by expanding
inward to encapsulate our non-English speaking market, or by expanding
outward, using multicultural communication to enter the rest of the
export market. Both require a good multicultural marketing strategy and
both require an understanding of language and culture.
But if we succeed in our expansion inward through multicultural markets,
we are more than halfway into our overseas export market. In other
words, the road to Vietnam begins in Cabramatta or Richmond, the way to
China begins in Haymarket or Fortitude Valley, and the road to the world
begins in Australia. At the moment, many parts of the world are looking
to borrow these communications techniques. They are seeking our advice
and paying us to help them communicate with multicultural populations.
Communicating with diversity and managing diversity is our skill and it
is an exportable commodity in itself. We can sell it, give it, use it,
we can propel ourselves onto the global stage through it.
Whether we are selling or buying, marketing or advertising, negotiating
for peace settlements in parts of the world or lobbying other countries
to vote for us in the Security Council, we need to do all of that in a
very culturally effective way.
We need to understand the language of our target audience. We need
multicultural communication.
[This
is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The
Australian, November 7 1996]
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