Many companies and marketing teams can agree it is very easy to market to the wrong crowd which can completely throw the marketing strategy off. For example, in recent years according to HBR.org, “Suburban white men consume 80% of hip hop music, even though it’s typically considered a genre aimed at young, urban black Americans. Misconceptions like this aren’t limited to American markets.”

Marketing experts are making the mistakes of targeting different cultures incorrectly. Mangers and experts are focused on attempting to reach the right cultural groups based on their interests, not based on their locations, race, or ethnicity. Basing there strategies on the location, race, and ethnicity is what has gotten so many companies in a hole which is tough to recover from. Experts explain how this phenomenon of wrongful targeting is painful to watch considering the amount of money being allocated to marketing groups whose main goal is to find the target market and appeal to them. They explained, “First, we need to look beyond demographics. Most likely the markets for all products we think of as culturally specific are understated by a significant amount, which should have big implications for resource allocation.”

Even though experts believe targeting cultural groups is not the right and most effective way of marketing it is still the major strategy used by most marketing groups or firms. Experts hope these companies start to target consumers based on what the new popular item or group is. In a way they hope that they start to market the whole population on what the new in item  is instead of targeting one small target based on culture. Trends show that they could eventually move to what experts believe will work best, but until then our best bet is that marketers will continue their current strategies until a new breakthrough way to target consumers is revealed.

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