Reaching the AAPI community—4 strategies to connect in a genuine way
Understanding consumers’ diversity is crucial to engaging with campaigns and messaging.
Fransebas
The Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in the U.S. is a multifaceted and diverse group, blossoming from a variety of cultures and identities. However, marketing campaigns often target the AAPI community with cookie-cutter messaging and outreach. This generalized approach excludes many AAPI and multicultural audiences and communities who are left unseen and unheard.
Ad Age celebrates AAPI creative excellence
Asia and the Pacific Islands include more than 50 countries with a wide range of religions, spiritual beliefs and deep-rooted traditions—as well as more than 2,000 languages and dialects. In addition to rich cultural history, there is also cutting-edge ingenuity, innovation and trendsetting initiatives. The AAPI experience is a journey of people from these regions to the U.S. and building a home and community for themselves. They are individuals and groups of both the old world and the new—a unique American identity that gets lost in translation.
Understanding the diversity and nuances of the AAPI community is crucial to engaging with these consumers authentically and genuinely in campaigns and messaging. If your team is seeking to be more inclusive in connecting with the AAPI community during AAPI Heritage Month and beyond, here are four takeaways for success:
Understand nuances; be specific
The AAPI community is one of the most diverse groups in the U.S., with more than 25 ethnic groups defined in the U.S. Census Bureau. Brands and advertisers must do the research to appeal to these groups in a nuanced and genuine way. They can go about this by crafting campaigns and messaging that are localized to the language, dialect and region—but what matters most is intent and context. Not all AAPI groups think or live alike, and experiences differ. Languages including Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog and others require careful consideration of cultural norms, localized context and unspoken mannerisms. The makeup of AAPI households is also multilingual, multicultural and multigenerational—all factors to consider specific targeting and how decisions are made within AAPI groups.
Celebrate tradition and make room for innovation
AAPI Heritage Month is all about celebrating the achievements, influence and contributions of the AAPI community in the U.S. Let’s focus more on these stories and moments within marketing and advertising campaigns. Share value through meaningful messaging and experiences that speak true to the AAPI community. As more businesses become digitally native to market their goods and services, it’s important to know that AAPI households and individuals over-index the general U.S. population in digital adoption and access to tech, e-commerce and streaming. The culture of innovation can be seen in China and Japan for example, both hubs of major tech companies and startups that rival those of Silicon Valley. While Amazon is well known and utilized in the U.S., within the AAPI community the likes of Alibaba and Rakuten are household names as well; AAPI consumers are extremely digitally savvy.
Dive deeper into demo; representation matters
Diversity comes in numbers, and the AAPI community is one of the fastest-growing and most diverse multicultural groups in the U.S. with AAPI households accounting for $1.3 trillion of collective buying power and making up approximately 6% of the population. With such a large addressable market, brands and advertisers need to dive deeper into demographics to target unique clusters of AAPI communities beyond California, New York and coastal cities.
Digital-forward and beyond
AAPI households spend more time on digital devices and online platforms for content consumption, shopping journeys and social sharing compared to the average U.S. household. It is a game of numbers, and AAPI are indexing at the top of the charts. Almost 90% of AAPI households have internet-connected TV devices. Additionally, 90% of AAPI households have a computer, and 97% have a mobile/smartphone. Not only are members of the AAPI community present-day digital consumers, but they are also the audience and consumers of the future. Meet these audiences where they are, learn about the act of sharing within the community, and you’ll see that AAPI are digitally everywhere beyond just Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
Before you continue building your marketing plan and strategy, consider the importance of engaging with the AAPI community. With the enormous addressable market and interconnectivity of the AAPI community, it is necessary for brands and advertisers to understand the cultural nuances, celebrate the wins, research specific demographics and invest in digital targeting. There is no better time to think about this than AAPI Heritage Month.
