We’ve written in the past about Nielsen’s “Significant, Sophisticated and Savvy: The Asian American Consumer 2013 Report,” released in December. The report found Asian Americans to be the most prolific and impulsive buyers in the nation, with the average millennial Asian American family spending nearly 40% more than the average millennial household.
As a recent article from Forbes points out, the Nielsen report seems to have successfully gotten the attention of corporate America just in time for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, when a crop of in-culture, Chinese-language New Year marketing programs were released by some of the top brands in North America.
But, before you make the assumption that all Asian American families are mega consumers with sophisticated tastes, one should delve deeper into the diverse groups represented, or misrepresented, by the report.
According to Forbes, “While the report shows that Asian Americans are more likely to enjoy incomes of $100,000 or more than overall U.S. households, 13.2% of Vietnamese, 30.7% of Hmong, 24% of Cambodian and 14.5% of Laotian American families lived in poverty in California, compared to 10.2% of the total families in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.”
It should also be highlighted that Asian Americans tend to live in the most expensive cities and regions in the country, which could account for the higher than average spending on housing and transportation found in the report.
To read more about the Nielsen report’s limitations, see the article at Forbes.
