Understanding Cultural Dimensions of Customers and Employees

Origins is a robust and efficient way to measure cultural diversity of your customers and employees. It helps you create meaningful cultural segments of your customers and employees, and benchmark them against the cultural mix of your markets.

Benchmarking and Monitoring

Gap analysis of what you have versus what is available – highlighted by under- and over-indexing – provides you with insight about how well your customers and/or employees reflect Australia’s cultural diversity.  With Origins, you will understand the cultural dimensions of engagement and behaviour, creating a snapshot or a stake in the sand, so there is a reference points from which you can monitor future change.

Customer segmentation

OriginsInfo reveals which cultural groups prefer to use which products, services, channels and outlets.  It also defines which customer segments your organisation is good, and not so good, at attracting and retaining.  Equipped with insight from Origins analysis, appropriate marketing communications and activities can be developed that resonate with your target cultural segments.

As an example, it may be appropriate to direct marketing activities towards a cultural segment with messages on a community radio station, or in a culturally-specific periodical.  Timing your marketing activities to coincide with major cultural events may also be an effective means of promotion.  Using the services of specialist multicultural marketing agencies is the best way to craft a campaign.  See Partners for our recommendations.

Employee segmentation

In Australia, there is much scope for organisations to capitalise on the benefits of a culturally diverse workforce.  Research undertaken jointly between OriginsInfo and Diversity Council Australia revealed that ASX200 executives do not reflect the diversity of the wider Australian population.

In other words, some cultural segments were over-represented, while others were under-represented.  In short, Australia’s business leaders were male, pale and stale.

Yet the Capitalising on Culture report concluded that “Executive and workforce cultural diversity is linked to increased innovation and creativity, market share and sales revenue, brand reputation and differentiation, and improved financial performance.” For more, see our OriginsInsight piece.

A major deficiency for many organisations is having the capacity or the resource to find an appropriate and cost-effective way to measure cultural diversity.  This was highlighted in a report published in 2018:

“Lack of diversity data was a barrier to benchmarking and tracking progress”¹

Whether for customers or employees, measuring cultural diversity is the first step in creating insight and real engagement with multicultural Australia.  Find the best way to achieve this here.