Why oversimplifying identity is harmful to marketing strategy

Black History Month felt different this year. There was more history in my timelines, more posts with vintage Black family photographs dating to the 1800s and more revelations about the impact of slavery and racism on society, systems and culture.

Generally, companies appeared to follow Black History Month advice extolled in recent years to celebrate achievement, foster meaningful dialogue and make changes to realize greater diversity, equity and inclusion. However, a key framework created at the height of the Jim Crow era is still a fixture in marketing best practice today: acculturation—defined by John Wesley Powell in an 1880 U.S. Bureau of Ethnology report as “psychological changes induced by cross-cultural imitation.”

In marketing practice, acculturation is used to predict media consumption and buying behaviors. It’s primarily applied to the Hispanic community given they are the largest U.S. ethnic group, comprising almost 20% of the country. Marketing acculturation segments Hispanic immigrants and citizens into groups based on three levels of assimilation into American culture: unacculturated, bicultural and acculturated. For the unacculturated who have not assimilated into American culture, their home country values and language are most dominant in their routines and customer journeys. It also fundamentally implies that unacculturated mindsets and experiences are the most “un-American.”

The concept is often visible as a respondent-recruiting research tool that crudely sorts the Hispanic community, many of whom are also Black immigrants and Americans, into arbitrary groups. 

Many multicultural experts have criticized acculturation for its oversimplification of the immigrant experience. Few of those critiques have focused on its whitewashing of the American experience. Acculturation is not inclusive. It implies American culture is homogeneous, and identity is singular. It’s centered on a narrow view of what being an immigrant and being an American look like. Three critical flaws underscore how acculturation both dismisses the experience of people of color in America and stereotypes the immigrant experience:

Flaw—“unacculturated” and “American” are opposites

Baked into acculturation frameworks is the erasure of many valid American experiences, including the presence, culture and values of indigenous and Black Americans. That erasure also ignores the similarities the “unacculturated” share with African Americans and Native Americans that impact many aspects of behavior including content consumption, shopping journeys and purchase habits.

Acculturation paints the unacculturated and the American as opposites. That couldn’t be more inaccurate today when fewer than 10% of immigrants to America come from Europe, and popular influencers on American culture like Bad Bunny, Ckay and BTS, who are not American, create wildly popular music in Spanish, Naija and Korean, not English.

Flaw—the immigrant experience is binary

Traditional acculturation models assume the immigrant experience is binary—that only two cultures matter and sit at opposite ends of a spectrum: American culture and a country-of-origin culture. However, America is a place where residents can encounter and embrace cultures not at either end of this imaginary spectrum. 

Flaw—the immigrant journey is linear

Acculturation implies that the immigrant journey is linear and moves in one direction. It suggests, you start as unacculturated then become bicultural and then acculturated. However, exposure to American culture often occurs before immigrating and this generalized view of the process does not account for “retro acculturation,” actively deciding to revive language and other ties to one’s country of origin, even as a U.S. native.

Acculturation still accepts that nationality and proximity to American identity drive an immigrant’s experience. But today we recognize that identity is dynamic, and that nationality, ethnicity or immigrant status does not fully determine experience or decision-making. In fact, race, socioeconomic status, ability, gender, age, life stage or sexuality might be more dominant influences.

What does this mean for marketing best practices? As brands, businesses and institutions work to become more inclusive and acknowledge holidays and heritage months, it’s critical that they recognize the complexity in communities, avoid making value judgments on cultures and end the use of harmful and inaccurate terminology. 

Brands should focus on cultural or community participation instead of acculturation to anticipate media consumption and buying behaviors. After all, social media, the internet and technology accelerate cultural exchange and fuel cultural participation in ways that were impossible when the acculturation concept was first introduced 143 years ago.