Asian-Americans Put Quality Above Price, Survey Says : Marketing: The new data on preferences will likely add to advertisers’ perplexity over how to reach this potentially lucrative, but culturally and linguistically diverse population.
Although Asian consumers have a reputation for frugality in their homelands, where saving is encouraged, their Asian-American counterparts are avid shoppers--generally less concerned about price and convenience than they are about quality, according to new research.
The findings are bound to renew the debate among advertisers and marketers about how to best reach America’s rich mix of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Southeast Asian immigrants, as well as highly assimilated Asian-Americans. Although such consumers are widely viewed by Madison Avenue as a potentially lucrative market because of their comparatively high incomes and education levels, differences in language and culture make them difficult to reach, experts say.
“Most advertisers think that all they need to do is simply translate an English ad to reach this market,” said David Chen, executive vice president of the Los Angeles advertising firm Muse Cordero Chen & Baca. “But there are problems with that; there are many differences among Asian people.
“I can understand advertisers being concerned with the difficulty,” Chen said, “but it’s not a difficulty we cannot overcome. Themes like stressing quality have universal appeal” among many Asian groups.
A study by the SRI/Gallup organization of Lincoln, Neb., found that in choosing a product, 67% of 779 Chinese-American consumers surveyed ranked the quality of the product more important than price, store location or service. Similarly, an SRI/Gallup survey last year of 400 Japanese and Korean households in Southern California found that while there were “significant” cultural differences between the two groups, both “are upscale shoppers with rapidly expanding purchasing power.”
More recently, both Impact Resources of Columbus, Ohio, and the Find/SVP research organization in New York found Asian-Americans to be avid shoppers who are generally more concerned about product quality than the general population. For instance, while price was more important to the total population than among the 3,251 Asian-Americans surveyed in the Impact study, 54% of the Asian-Americans said quality is the most important reason for selecting a men’s clothing outlet, compared to 50% of the total population.
Quality, of course, is a subjective concept, and it is still unclear to many experts why Asian-Americans embrace certain brands or whether they will remain loyal to them as they become more acculturated. Nevertheless, some marketing specialists believe that companies should continue to direct special campaigns at even highly assimilated third- and fourth-generation Asians, although convincing advertisers of that approach has been difficult.
“We’ve been banging on the door since 1985, and now we’re beginning to see greater acceptance of the Asian market,” said Greg Sullivan, president of Asian Television Sales, a San Francisco company that sells advertising time on three Asian-language television stations, including KSCI in Los Angeles. “What advertisers don’t realize is that if you are an Asian immigrant, 80% of this stuff on TV you’ve never heard of.”
Concentrated in three areas--California, Hawaii and the New York metropolitan area--Asian-Americans represent a large and rapidly growing market.
The Asian population has increased 67% since 1980 in Los Angeles County alone, according to a 1987 Census Bureau estimate. And because the mean family income of Asian-Americans is about $10,000 higher than that of Latinos, their buying power is substantially greater, said Holmes Stoner, head of Artesa Media Services, a Los Angeles ad agency that specializes in marketing to Latinos and Asians.
Yet, unlike Latino immigrants who come from countries closer to the United States, Asians are not as familiar with the broad universe of American goods. As a result, many Asian-Americans flock to a dominant brand deemed “the best” by their immigrant neighbors, experts say.
For example, studies conducted between 1986 and 1988 by SRI/Gallup found that 40% of Chinese consumers surveyed used Tide laundry detergent, 44% of Koreans used Ajax cleaner and 70% of Japanese used either Crest or Colgate toothpaste. No other brand had more than a 10% share in each of those product categories.
As a result, many experts see a tremendous opportunity to instill brand loyalty and grab a large share of the Asian-American market by trumpeting the quality or the prestige of their product to newly arrived Asian immigrants.
In advertising to the general public, for example, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. of New York runs ads featuring the comic strip character Snoopy saying, “Get Met; it pays.” But in a special campaign directed at Chinese- and Korean-Americans, the company stresses its prestige, as well as Asian values such as financial security and family responsibility. Instead of showing Snoopy, the ads shows several massive office buildings owned by Metropolitan Life.
“It’s a more tangible identification of where our financial strength lies,” said William Orton, a marketing executive with Metropolitan Life. “We did a fair amount of market research in terms of what major themes would appeal to the Asian community . . . We emphasize the prestige of dealing with a company that was here yesterday and will be here tomorrow.”
Similarly, Las Vegas hotels such as the Desert Inn and Caesars Palace have held Chinese New Year parties, advertised on Asian-language TV and put on other glossy promotions stressing the quality and prestige of their hotel’s accommodations to entice both Asian-American and foreign tourists. Caesars also has marketing offices throughout Asia--as well as in heavily Chinese-American Monterey Park.
“The Asian community is a significant market for Caesars Palace; we try to emphasize (to them) the elegance and ambience of our world-renowned resorts,” said Jack Leone, a vice president at Caesars World Inc.
AT&T; has taken a somewhat different approach. Last year, it became the first U.S. company to air a regional television commercial with entirely Japanese dialogue, said Mark N. Burgess, AT&T;’s acting director for international advertising. The 30-second ad, which had English subtitles, shows a Japanese-American man calling long-distance to a colleague in Japan to relate a joke told to him by his daughter.
Some Asian-American advertising executives, as well as the 157-page study published in December by Find/SVP, prefer AT&T;’s general market approach, saying it’s a waste of money to specifically target the Asian-American market. They say Asian cultures are too different to reach efficiently with one kind of campaign.
“Even though Asian people who come here have their own ethnic television, the majority are watching regular network TV,” said Clifford Yuguchi, president of the Los Angeles advertising firm Bozell/Yuguchi Inc. “What companies ought to do is pull off some of those white people and show more Asians.”
Deborah Ching, executive director of the Chinatown Service Center in Los Angeles, says she, too, would like to see more Asian-Americans on TV. But she said she is turned off by some efforts that have “racist and sexist” depictions of “Asian men as less than masculine and Asian women as exotic, desirable and subservient.” She cited as particularly offensive the Singapore Airlines’ “Singapore Girl” commercial that shows attractive female flight attendants serving passengers.
Bob Candiotti, a spokesman for Singapore Airlines, responded: “It’s true that the presentation of Singapore girl has been one of our ongoing ad campaigns for several years. To us, the Singapore girl is symbolic of our high level of service. Their uniforms are actually quite modest; they wear ankle-length dresses. We do not view the ads as being sexist or racist.”
Although many marketers say they are moving away from unfavorable Asian caricatures, there are still slip-ups and outright mistakes.
Playboy magazine once wished Chinese celebrants “Year New Happy” in a full-page newspaper ad. And Filipinos--the nation’s largest Asian-American group--are sometimes mistakenly lumped with Latinos by marketers because Filipinos often have Spanish surnames.
A more practical problem in reaching the Asian market is the lack of national media. Unlike Spanish-language television, which has two national broadcasting networks, there is no national Asian TV. Instead, regional systems--such as KSCI Channel 18 in Los Angeles and KTSF Channel 26 in San Francisco--provide programming in areas with large Asian populations.
The print medium is even more fragmented. In Southern California, there are at least 15 Vietnamese-language newspapers, more than a dozen Chinese newspapers and three Japanese papers.
“Unless you are willing to get in there and get your hands dirty, the (Asian-American) market can be really intimidating,” said Stoner of Artesa advertising. “You can’t go out there with a typical kind of ad and try to be all things to all people.”
Indeed, although Find/SVP agreed with other experts that Asian-Americans have a “commitment to obtaining products and services noted for having the ‘best’ quality” the study went on to conclude that: “In reality, each of the separate Asian-American ethnic groups is a separate ethnic market. The only characteristic they all have in common is their ‘American-ness.’ And it is only through their ‘American-ness’ that the various groups can be reached through the same marketing campaign.”
