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How this minority can become a majority? The state of California has conducted one survey and actually the minority became the state’s majority population (Schiffman and Kanuk 2007). In 1995, based on some studies, Timmins (1995) indicated that London would have 30% of its population composed by minority ethnic groups by this year.

Other issue is related to stereotyping and prejudice, which can occur when there is a division of ethnic minority groups inside a large society. Stereotype occurs when there is an assumption that individuals, who are members of a certain group, have certain traits.

Actually, stereotyping can be natural when there is a tentative of describing different cultures and it does not necessarily mean bad thing, it just depends on the way it is used (Schneider and Barsoux 2003). It can be a beginning, the initial reference that people acquire through experience, and which will be completed by new learning through contact. The important is to avoid prejudice.

Another important issue, which generates an extensive debate and which is very important for the study of consumer behavior is acculturation, which is an important point of analysis to understand what happens when different cultures come in contact. What the issues and outcomes are which involve minority ethnic groups inserted in the culture of the possible main group.

The importance of this study is based on the considerable size of these groups in some locations, their increasing purchasing power and how these contacts can affect their consumer behavior. According to Solomon (2002), in the United States, ethnic minorities

spend $600 billion a year; in UK, their disposable represent ￡32 billion (Sekhon and Szmigin 2009).

It was demonstrated that culture influences people decision making, however marketers need to understand how cultural values of an ethnic minority group can change when they are in contact with the considered mainstream culture. This will affect some decisions such as: should these groups be considered as a different target market? Should the strategy be standardized considering the whole population as similar or should be adapted taking in consideration these differences?

In fact, the discussion about acculturation involves these points: to what extent culture’s values and beliefs of a subgroup can change? Who actually does change? What are the outcomes? Although, there are different perspectives for acculturation, two main words are the same for all of them: learning and change.

As it was mentioned before, based on sociologist perspective, Robert Park (in Padilla and Perez 2003) has conducted a study which identified that immigrants in contact with a dominant culture pass through a process of new culture assimilation gradually and which is definit本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。