The Brown Pound

Stingy Indians perplex Britain
RASHMEE Z. AHMED

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2003 02:16:10 PM ]

LONDON: Is the typical British Asian becoming richer every day because he is encouraged to be more Scrooge than Midas and is this only because no one is luring him to part with his money?

British Indians boast a combined, estimated spending power of roughly 10 billion pounds and opulent Asian 'rich lists' are the community's yearly staple. But astonishingly, the brown pound still isn't considered a viable "market" in multi-cultural Britain.

So, wake up and smell the korma, says a coruscating report by Britain's leading advertising trade body.

The report, published on Monday, is the first-ever by the UK's lead marketing trade association, the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising (IPA). Its influence may be gauged from the IPA's boast that its members "collectively handle over 80 per cent of Britain's media spend, worth eight billion pounds in 2002".

Commentators said the IPA's prescriptions were likely to be potent medicine for British advertising and retail, which have so far relied on the stereotyped wet-saris-and-sex image to embody multi-culturalism.

The re-think comes as two of Britain's biggest brand names rely on a Bollywood-inspired advertising theme.

In one, the UK's former footballing heart-throb and boy-next-door, Gary Linekar, dresses up as an Indian bridegroom, gets on his horse and rides furiously towards the chicken tikka masala-flavoured potato crisp.

In the second, Britain's leading mortgage-lending bank, the Halifax, gets its staff to belt out an ad jingle to the tune of a Hindi film song, with gyrations to match.

But the IPA said it was important not to stereotype the brown pound.

On Monday, the IPA's Jonathan Mildenhall said their two-year study into the way advertisers dealt with British Asia was a benchmark because it would help develop future marketing strategies that "look like" modern Britain.

Nearly eight per cent of Britain's 59-million population is ethnic minority and it has an astoundingly high, collective disposable income of £32 billion, the report said.

Let's face it, IPA officials told this paper, British Asians, the country's largest ethnic minority, are more "technically adept" than their white counterparts. About 74 per cent of British Asians have a mobile phone against a national average of 69 per cent; 57 per cent have home internet access compared with 47 per cent of the whole population.

Wags said the new report and wake-up call might just mean the UK sells more computers to geeky British Indians.

But Mildenhall, co-chairman of the IPA's Ethnic Diversity Project, said: "The economic contribution that ethnic minorities make ... is huge. We need to educate and advise our clients about the potential of all target groups".