By the Gonzales Group
RISMEDIA, Oct. 23, 2008-Without the right infrastructure, you cannot accommodate multicultural customers or recruit the right sales professionals. The multicultural consumer and real estate professional requires language, religious, and philosophical considerations if you are going to win them both as customers or team members. Being respectful of their religion, philosophical beliefs such as Feng Shui, and their English language proficiency are a few things to consider.
For example, organizations often try to apply mainstream practices to multicultural marketing and recruiting, which often is contrary to the communication style of the multicultural consumer and professional.
Multicultural consumers and professionals are known for being “High Context” communicators. Their communication tends to be indirect and information not communicated in explicit words or messages.
They tend to be:
• Less verbally explicit with less written/formal information
• Communication is internalized and heavily relationship based
• Stronger than usual emphasis on trust
The U.S. is a “Low Context” communicator with information being expressed in explicit codes such as words.
We tend to be:
• Rule-oriented and play by external rules
• Time and space is sequenced and dictates the depth of personal relationships
• Relationships are of shorter duration and are task-centered
With the multicultural consumer, aggressive approaches to selling and strict adherence to the clock can be considered rude. Not acknowledging these differences is what prevents many organizations from successfully capturing this consumer segment and hinders professional recruitment.
Companies are creating separate multicultural departments, allocating marketing budgets by segment, and more importantly, setting measurable goals for each segment. Successful organizations provide high-level customer service in multiple languages from end-to-end and accommodate the new multicultural homebuyer with culturally relevant information and collateral material.
At the Gonzales Group we provide the multi-dimensional business development discipline to help you develop and execute an effective multicultural strategy build profitable connections with the multicultural consumer.
For more information, visit www.thegonzalesgroup.com.
The Gonzales Group and RISMedia are excited to introduce a ground-breaking White Paper that takes a realistic and practical in-depth look at the changing face of modern-day real estate. In “The New Economic Power Source: Increasing Profitability with Multicultural Home buyers,” the authors will help you unlock the potential of the multicultural market by answering the questions and clarifying the assumptions often associated with this consumer group. To order the White Paper, click here.
