Mothers Day a big winner for Western Union at National Multicultural Marketing Awards

(left to right) Gemma Kingsford-Smith, Angelique Ristwej, Lara Sofizay and Lou Petrolo from LOUD Multicultural receive their Big Business Award on behalf of Western Union from Luciana Ozcan of Luciana Ozcan , sponsors of the Awards.

The international money transfer giant, Western Union, has won the Big Business prize at the National Multicultural Marketing Awards tonight, for spectacular results in a Mothers Day promotion earlier this year.

The company beat off a challenge from two other big finalists, St George Bank and Ford Australia.

Western Union set out to create a special occasion like Valentines Day when immigrant families would send money home for mum. To do this they identified 13 Asia Pacific nations where Mothers Day was being celebrated on May 11 this year and then targeted those communities in Australia.

Congratulating Western Union for their success the Chair of the CRC, Stepan Kerkyasharian said:  "They very cleverly worked with the idea that many immigrants separated from their mothers who are left behind in their country of origin and that Mothers Day was a perfect occasion to express gratitude and love by sending some money home. As the company saw it, the distance which amplifies the emotional longing between son or daughter and their mother is easily bridged by Western Unions electronic money transfer."

"The company is unique for a multinational corporation operating in Australia in that, in its own words, its business model is built on migrants sending money back to their home country. Western Union spends its entire marketing budget on wooing ethnic communities, not just through the ethnic media, which was employed extensively, but through, what it calls, the powerful use of in-language street marketing. This involves the use of well-trained community members promoting the message to other community members at a one-to-one level. They handed out heart-shaped chocolates and promotional material, in key geographic locations with high concentrations of their community. As part of this campaign thirty- thousand gift bags were distributed at shopping centre locations around the country."

The use of this community-marketing technique took the companys staff to festival days, social clubs, dance events, charity events, Mothers Day Banquets and the Philippines National Day Ball.

These so-called cultural consultants of Filipino, South Asia and Pacific backgrounds were involved at every step of the creative process to guarantee the material was appealing and culturally relevant.

As a result of all this activity, nearly 41 thousand money transfer transactions were made during the promotional period. Over 26 thousand of those customers entered the promotion to win $ 10,000 if they transferred money home. Significantly nineteen thousand of the entrants were new customers for Western Union.

"This is serious big money multicultural marketing carried out in a thoroughly scientific fashion. Years after we first started selling the message of targetting markets by language and culture, here we now have a big multinational company successfully carving up the market for itself, entirely through multicultural marketing," Mr Kerkyasharian said.