Asian-Americans Have Strong Purchasing Power. How Can Marketers Reach Them?

May 24, 2019

Reaching the $1 trillion mark in 2018, Asian-American spending power is impressive, to say the least. With data from a recent report [download page] from Nielsen predicting that Asian-Americans’ spending power will reach $1.3 trillion in just 4 years, this is a demographic group that should command marketers’ attention.

Asian-Americans are a big and diverse group which, according to the US Census, encompasses heritages from more than two dozen countries. Chinese Americans (23% of the total Asian-American population) are the largest ancestry group in the US, followed by Indian Americans (19%) and Filipinos (18%). While immigration is still a major source of growth in the Asian-American population, some 86% of Asian-American children were born in the US.

As a group, Asian-Americans tend to have higher incomes than the total US population. They have a reported mean individual income of $41,947 (compared to $33,315 for the total population) and 22% of Asian-Americans over the age of 25 make at least $75,000. Asian-Americans’ mean household income is also significantly higher than the US population ($85,000 vs. $60,000), with 43% of Asian-American households having an income of $100,000 or more.

Figures from Claritas also show that Asian-Americans households are spending 21% more than the average US household. Notably, Asian-Americans have an estimated $3.2 million remaining average household cumulative life spending (spending potential that exists for the remaining life of an average active household).

So, where can marketers reach this group of avid consumers? They should first look online. Virtually all (99%) Asian-American households have internet access. At least part of the time Asian-Americans are online is spent shopping, with 87% having made a purchase online in the past 12 months and 2 in 3 (68%) having used the internet or apps for shopping in the past 30 days.

In fact, Asian-Americans over-index the total population for usage of just about every category of website and app. Search engines have the highest reach for both websites (96%) and apps (92%). Among app categories, Asian-Americans over-index the general population the most in their usage of Family and Lifestyle (114) and Corporate Information (113) apps. Among website types, Corporate Information (108) and Home and Fashion (108) are their highest-indexing categories.

One area in which marketers are less likely to reach Asian-Americans is traditional TV. Indeed, Q3 2018 data from Nielsen shows that Asian-Americans watch much less traditional television than other ethnic groups. This more recent report reveals that only two-thirds (67%) of Asian-American populations subscribe to traditional cable, well below the 76% of US households overall.

That being said, Asian-American households do enjoy video: 4 in 5 households (81%) have some form of SVOD, compared to two-thirds (68%) of the total US population.

To read more, download the report here.

About the Data: Data for the report came from a number of sources from Nielsen including Nielsen Homescan and Total Media Fusion.

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