"Being Muslim often means having a set of values that can impact how we eat, travel, date, dress and consume — this has major ripple effects on how we spend our money,” says Nafisa Bakkar, founder and CEO of Amaliah, a media company focused on centring the voices and stories of Muslim women and an agency that works with brands, agencies and charities — like Spotify, Lush and Pinterest — to consult around, market to and support product development for the Muslim market. Nafisa is also the author of How to make money, a guide to building a six-figure business.
Here she shares her top tips of marketing to Generation M.
Understand who Gen M is
Acknowledge that it is highly likely that you have preconceived ideas of Muslims. Learn the basics first:
- It’s a global audience that has Islam as its common thread.
- It’s a cross-cultural audience – there’s often a misconception that all Muslims are South Asian.
- It’s a young audience — building relationships with this audience today is vital to long-term brand growth. In the UK, 33% are under 15 years old — compared to 19% of the overall population. Almost 50% are under 24 years old — compared to 30% of the overall population.
- It’s a growing market. In the UK, for example, the Muslim population has increased by 33% in the last 10 years and now makes up 6.5% of the population. 26% of the global population is Muslim.
Understand your assumptions
Work with consultants, talk to trusted partners and discuss with other companies that already are doing that work to remove your preconceptions from your marketing efforts.
Go where your audience is
Where does your target audience congregate? Go where you can reach them at mass and in a brand-safe way. For example, to do a small soft test, maybe you work with an influencer who has a high percentage of Muslim followers in the demographic and age range you’re targeting. You can speak directly to your target audience and with the language they speak. This is better than doing it through your socials, where you’d be starting from scratch and figuring out how to balance speaking to all of your different audience types. You could also work with Muslim-focused companies or agencies for a similar effect.
Remember that Muslims are intersectional
Their consumer behaviours are reflective of age, environment and schooling… not just their Muslim identity. When you forget this, you miss out on authentically serving your audience. For example, Uber Eats ran a campaign for Ramadan a couple of years ago that saw people breaking their fast with a box of Indian sweets. That’s great, but it wasn’t thinking about how Gen M interacts with “mainstream current trends” around food. It missed the data that shows that some people are having dirty milkshakes, crepes, pancakes and burgers to break their fast. So, the attempt to be culturally coded misses the mark of understanding the average consumer.
Create features or products for Gen M
What can you add, create or adapt to your product that will make it attract a Muslim audience? Deliveroo, for example, has a Halal food filter. It had to work with restaurants to find out if they offered Halal options. It also had to onboard new ones to ensure it had enough options to capture this audience. It ensures continuous communication with this audience. Other examples may be selling Ramadan bundles in the same way that you might expect Easter or Christmas bundles. A lot of examples of product innovation can be found on supermarket shelves — like drinks, themed food items like cakes or themed decorations.
Figure out your comms
It’s not just about product development, sometimes you need a good comms strategy. Bumble is a good example of this. It did a Black Love campaign to get more people on the platform — but it didn’t change the product. How can you use this approach for your product? You could lean into targeting your audience by using paid ads on TikTok. Events platform Eventbrite, for example, serves ads to young people of colour looking for activities for date night. Other audiences might see a white woman attending a candle-making workshop.
Don’t just target Muslims during Ramadan
To have an authentic relationship with Gen M, especially those among the ageing Gen Z, you need to be talking to them all year round. Often this is a better approach anyway because you don’t have to compete with the noise from all the brands trying to get a piece of the pie!
On the subject of… selling to Generation M
1. How much do you know about Ramadan?
2. The Ramadan effect. Making the most of the increased spending is all about timing.
3. The seven Ramadan personas. Think with Google has distilled its learnings on the different Muslim consumer trends that are prevalent during this month and broken it down into seven key audience segments.
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