Savvy businesses setting sights on Canada's '1.5 Generation' at Schema : more than ethnic

Savvy businesses setting sights on Canada's '1.5 Generation'

Vancouver Sun

Shopper Linh Walji (left) chats with Aritzia sales associate Debbie Bui at the company's Robson Street location. The company's focus is on 'hiring women ... that [customers] can relate to,' Aritzia's marketing director says.
Photograph by: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

When the research group Environics recently highlighted Canada's fastest-growing consumer segments, the online seminar about Chinese and South Asian shopping habits was so popular, it had to be run twice. And earlier this year, Ipsos-Reid launched a new 3,000-member multicultural research panel of "new and ethnic Canadians," telling marketers that they "cannot afford to see these groups as small niche segments."
Increasingly, for richer insight, information about Chinese and South Asian consumers is being cross-cut with the length of time they have been in Canada. One study pinpointed how long an immigrant woman might cling to the Pantene shampoo popular in her homeland before giving it up for Head & Shoulders, L'Oreal Vive Pro, or Clairol Herbal Essences. Chinese women, for example, make the switch after 11 years in Canada, according to Environics.

This slicing and dicing of how first- and second-generation Canadian consumers spend differently is revealing a hard-to-define but interesting new subset known as the "1.5 Generation." These are Canadians who were born abroad, but immigrated as children and grew up here.

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