Insights

The Multicultural Consumer Is Your Growth Strategy

Multicultural consumers are the new mainstream. Five imperatives for leaders who want to capture the growth they represent.

Marketing as a discipline hasn't changed, but the world around us has. I said that on stage in 2017, when I co-led the Case for Change for the ANA's Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, and I made the full business case in the Journal of Brand Strategy two years later. The argument has only grown stronger since. Multicultural consumers are the new mainstream, and no brand can sustain growth without them.

The market has already changed

Multicultural Americans now make up about 44 percent of the U.S. population, and Hispanic Americans alone reached 20 percent in 2024. Among Americans under 18, the majority is already multicultural, and the country as a whole is projected to follow in the mid-2040s. Nearly one in ten U.S. adults identifies as LGBTQ+, rising to nearly one in four among adults under 30.

The economics follow the demographics. In 2017, I pointed out that multicultural consumers combined would rank as the world's fourth-largest economy. Today, U.S. Latinos alone do. They generated $4.4 trillion in economic output in 2024, drove 28 percent of U.S. economic growth that year, and have grown their household consumption nearly three times faster than non-Latino households since 2019. Black, Asian American and Native American consumers together hold another $3.2 trillion in buying power.

The same pattern shows up at the shelf. Hispanic households make up 14 percent of U.S. households but drive 16 percent of consumer packaged goods growth, and their unit purchases are rising while non-Hispanic unit volume declines. When I made this case in 2019, multicultural consumers were driving all of the growth in categories like food. The pattern has held.

That's the point many leaders miss. Today's share of spend tells you where your business has been. The source of growth tells you where it's going. Hispanic Americans alone accounted for 71 percent of U.S. population growth between 2022 and 2023. Multicultural consumers are also younger, with more life milestones and more years of buying power ahead of them, which makes them a greater source of lifetime value.

Investment still isn't following the opportunity

When we built the Case for Change, 50 to 60 percent of top U.S. advertisers were spending less than 1 percent of their budgets on multicultural audiences. The gap persists. Hispanic Americans make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population but receive roughly 4 percent of total ad spending.

The root cause is timing. Multicultural strategy usually enters the conversation when a creative brief is already being written.

By the time the brief exists, it's already too late to drive material impact with multicultural consumers.

It's also too often relegated to a siloed team of multicultural specialists, when it's everyone's responsibility. This conversation belongs upstream with the CEO, where corporate strategy is set and enterprise investment decisions are made.

The cost of waiting is real. Because multicultural consumers are fueling population growth, every brand will organically acquire more of them. The question is whether the brand is ready to serve them. Brands that aren't will underserve their customers, lose relevance and cede growth to competitors who are ready.

Five imperatives for capturing multicultural growth

01Size the opportunity in business terms

Start where you'd start with any market. Identify which segments drive the greatest impact across your categories and portfolio, then build the business case and plan around them. Take a long-term view, because the demographic shifts will continue, and make sure the plan is prioritized in corporate strategy so every action flows from it.

02Invest in quality insights, data and measurement

You can't grow what you can't see. Multicultural data is often incomplete or comes at a premium. One recent industry study found 42 percent of Hispanics missing from third-party datasets. Getting it right requires the right methodology, such as oversampling for a reliable read and fielding research in the language each segment prefers. Demand that standard from internal analytics teams and external partners alike, then set goals and track multicultural performance throughout execution so you can learn and optimize.

03Invest for long-term growth

Too many brands fall into a vicious cycle. They commit early, can't prove the return because the measurement isn't in place, cut the investment and disband the team, then start over years later. Multicultural investment is a long-term growth strategy for a marketplace that's becoming majority-minority, and it doesn't always require incremental dollars. Often it means recognizing the diversity already in your customer base and aligning investment to match it. Be bold and invest to create measurable impact. Don't be afraid to take risks. Test, learn and optimize.

04Expand diversity in marketing

Marketing is the voice of the customer inside the company, so its teams and partners should reflect the marketplace. Diverse teams bring sharper customer perspective and a more empathetic understanding of consumers, and McKinsey's research has consistently linked diverse leadership with stronger financial performance. I'm female, I'm LGBTQ and I'm Hispanic, and I know firsthand how far it goes when a brand genuinely supports my communities. Audit your workforce and agency roster, build an action plan and invest in diverse talent.

05Educate your organization

Teams can't deliver inclusive strategies they don't understand. Assess where your organization stands, from skeptics to advocates, and build a learning plan that meets people where they are. Immersion works. Take teams into focus groups and into communities so they build real empathy for the consumers they serve. Education is the glue that holds an inclusive strategy together.

Multicultural growth is modern marketing

The brands winning with multicultural consumers anchor every decision in cultural insight, from product development through go-to-market. In 2024, McDonald's built its Grandma McFlurry launch around a real tension in multicultural families: many young Americans struggle to talk with grandparents who don't speak English. The brand launched Sweet Connections, an AI tool that translated personal video messages into more than 30 languages, ran ads in six Asian languages and hosted workshops at senior centers to teach grandparents how to use it. The McFlurry sold out in two and a half weeks of a planned four-week run, and the work won a Grand Prize at the ANA Multicultural Excellence Awards. The product, the technology and the story were all built on the same cultural insight.

The diversification of the marketplace is here. Leaders who shift this conversation upstream, fund it with intention and measure it like any other growth driver will capture the opportunity. This is no longer about a siloed version of multicultural marketing. It's just modern marketing.