Cultural Attachments Won’t Beat the New Business Reality.

Not too long ago, I had an interesting phone conversation with Napoleon Johnson, a prominent Haitian business leader, investor, and Chief executive of Azure College — a Nursing University in Florida. We discussed many subjects, and one that intrigued me the most was the fact that many Haitian businesses still don’t get it when it comes to properly appeal to a specific market segment in the Haitian community. Will people from the Haitian community buy your product(s) or service(s) merely because a Haitian makes it? Let’s try to address this question.

One of the most important tools in marketing is segmentation or market segmentation; a process marketers use to divide a target market into smaller and more defined categories. It segments consumers into groups that share similar characteristics, such as demographics, interests, needs, or location. This method is also accurate when it comes to the Haitian community, what I call the “Haitian market abroad” (HMA), and it is a bit more complex when dealing with what we call different generations of Haitian immigrants. For instance, in the USA, we divide them into first, second, and third-generation to better understand their behavior towards specific Haitian product(s) or service(s). We realize that the second and third generation of Haitian immigrants are part of a bigger group today that marketers…