Identifying and reaching an ethnic market : methodological issues

The potential for segmenting and targeting consumers, using ethnicity as a segmenting variable, is widely recognised in the marketing literature. However, attention to the problems of identifying and reaching a single, often relatively small, ethnic group, as opposed to some aggregate of groups, has been minimal. This paper proposes a framework for ethnic marketing research that is currently lacking. A method for conducting exploratory qualitative research of an ethnic group, for which little published information is available, is discussed with particular attention given to the sampling process. The proposed methodology, involving a symbiosis of symbolic interaction with phenomenological description, yields rich information about the group.