Revised in October 2026.
It may seem obvious, but it is worth paying attention to a
simple dynamic: majorities shape trends, and trends often contain the seeds of
their own perpetuation.
There is much discussion about the multiculturalism
characteristic of the global era, and globalization itself provides an obvious
explanation. Technology allows people separated by thousands of miles to
communicate almost instantly and at negligible cost. Music, food, fashion,
language, and ideas cross borders faster than ever before.
But that explanation can obscure another force operating
much closer to home.
In the United States, one of the world’s major producers and
exporters of popular culture, Millennials were the most racially and ethnically
diverse adult generation in the country’s history when this article was
originally written. In 2014, 43 percent of Millennial adults were nonwhite. At the same time, Census
projections anticipated that the United States as a whole would become a
country in which no racial or ethnic group constituted a majority around 2043.
Those figures naturally attracted the attention of brands
and marketers. Diversity could be measured demographically: how many Hispanic
consumers, how many Asian consumers, how many members of one group or another?
But demographic arithmetic captures only part of what
happens.
Culture does not spread in a one-to-one relationship with
ancestry. One additional Thai-American consumer does not simply mean one
additional consumer of Thai food. People introduce one another to foods, music,
customs, aesthetics, language, and ideas. Preferences migrate across
demographic boundaries.
That creates a multiplier effect.
A generation that grows up with greater diversity does not
merely contain more cultural backgrounds. Its members are also more
likely to encounter those backgrounds through classmates, coworkers, friends,
partners, neighborhoods, media, and increasingly through digital networks.
Culture therefore becomes harder to map neatly onto race or
ethnicity.
Marketing strategist Eddie Yoon made a related argument in
the Harvard
Business Review: companies often make the mistake of treating culture
as if it followed demographic categories automatically, when people's cultural
affinities are also expressed through what they choose to consume and
participate in.
Someone does not need to belong to the ethnic group that
originated a cuisine to love its food, belong to the community that created a
musical form to make it part of their identity, or share the background of a
cultural tradition to participate in it.
This is where demographic change acquires consequences that
simple population percentages cannot capture.
Greater diversity changes not only who is in the market,
but also the network through which tastes move. People influence other people,
who influence still others. What begins as demographic change can therefore
become cultural change at a considerably larger scale.
Companies that continue to imagine consumers primarily as
the predictable product of demographic categories risk misunderstanding that
process.
The multicultural market is not simply a collection of
increasingly diverse groups standing beside one another: it is what happens
when those groups continually influence one another.
