Maurice Nicholson from Kantar Added Value: A More Urban and Multicultural Market

Maurice Nicholson, SVP of Kantar Added Value New York, wrote an article on the company website titled, Putting the Cultural in Multicultural Marketing, in which he speaks of how demographic, educational, migrational, and technological changes in the U.S. are remodeling and empowering consumers in unimaginable ways.To explain what is really happening, Nicholson highlighted the changes in educational achievements and migration of Millennials to urban centers. In the first case, he said that attaining a university degree nowadays doesn’t necessarily ensure rising on the socioeconomic scale, if the degree isn’t “productive”. And in second, that companies are now moving towards where the talent is, and not the opposite like it used to be.”We now see a mass market that is more urban and multicultural, more heavily weighted towards service workers. This New Mass Market is not a collection of groups that are to be addressed according to their respective proportion in society; it is a group whose collective identity and values are evolving driven by a fundamental shift of its core” he explained. He said that in the near term, identifying what the emerging cultures are and where you compete will be critical for brands searching for fertile ground to drive growth. And for the rest of the decade, it is necessary to think about how your company’s brand identity and brand expression shift to ensure relevance and a deeper cultural connection between your company and the new mass market.