Americus Reed and research on Multicultural identity. Read the full article here. “…Marketers need to get a grip on the complex issues that contribute to people’s sense of identity. This involves trying to understand their culture, their upbringing, and the symbolic cues they identify with and how that relates to their self-esteem,” says Reed. It also involves being able to, as Reed puts it, “drill down and discover what it means to possess this ethnicity. Our research shows how ethnic-oriented marketing can backfire and even turn multicultural consumers against a product or service, in a paper titled, “Bicultural Identity and the Dark Side of Targeting.”