Reframe The Marketplace: The Total Market Approach to Reaching the New Majority

Chapter 12Implementing the Total Market Approach around the World

Back in 2009 a group of us were researching the meaning of cross-culturalism in preparation for the work we were soon to do with brands. We ran across a different word—one that seemed more like the inchoate thing we were looking to express: transcultural. Transculturalism, we learned, is rooted in the pursuit of shared interests and common values across cultural and national borders. That word, especially for the global agency in which we worked, seemed perfect. And yet we discarded it, choosing instead to go with a weaker, yet more apt word: cross-cultural. Cross-culturalism is concerned with exchange beyond the boundaries of the nation or cultural group. In short, it is a celebration of values and beliefs across cultural groups. We chose to go with cross-cultural because we thought it was the best description of where the United States was at that moment in its history.

I still believe that the current cross-cultural time is a developmental phase on our national journey toward transculturalism. I believe that because it's happened before.

As all of us learned in school, the United States experienced a great wave of immigration in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. During that time, the foreign-born population of the United States hovered around 13 to 14 percent of the total (reaching a peak of 14.7 percent in 1910, nearly two percentage points higher than today), with ...