Bus 446-01
14 April 2015
Diaspora Marketing
When discussing the concepts of diasporas, a common example is the Jewish migration as the ancient Jewish people were exiled from their home lands. However, more generally diasporas are simply groups of people living away from their birth countries. With increasing globalization, Diaspora Marketing has become increasingly useful towards expanding a companies base market into other countries, where the idea is to market a product from a groups’ home country to the group once they have immigrated to another country. Once that group provides a sales base, the product’s market gradually expands to people connected to the diaspora and eventually to a broader market. This strategy avoids the often unfeasible attempt to build a brand on foreign shores from scratch, providing a solution to a tough problem seen by many companies. Firms attempting to engage in brand extensions can learn from these ideas and are the types of companies that would most likely utilize Diaspora marketing. Look first to customers who are already using your brand in another context and let them provide a base business and build from there.
Diaspora marketing often requires segmentation. One attractive segment is the ethnic affirmers, who choose to maintain their cultural orientation and prefer home country products.
While another even more attractive segment includes those individuals who are bicultural, people who not only will buy home country products but can also help diffuse new products into the host country. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum there are the assimilators, who simply adopt the new cultures and typically prefer host country products. Finally, there are the
marginals which usually consist of poor immigrants who feel they have been marginalized by society and remain relatively neutral towards either culture. After segmenting each market, a firm looking to potentially utilize Diaspora Marketing must very
