Chase Targets Chinese-Americans With Home Show, Ad

Chase Home Lending is targeting Chinese-Americans for the first time as potential residential loan customers. The Iselin, N.J. company is sponsoring the first in-language home-makeover program produced in the U.S. for that segment of the emerging market.

The series, "Better Living in USA" by JLG Entertainment, is an informational TV series aimed at Chinese immigrants about home design and ownership. JLG also produced a Chase TV ad that will run during broadcasts of the show.

The first episode of the program was broadcast Saturday in both Mandarin and Cantonese on Sinovision's three channels in New York and on Sky Link on the West Coast. The show begins airing in San Francisco in April.

Each of the initial 12 episodes--only seven minutes long--discusses financing, energy conservation, insurance and other property-related topics.

Chase will align with the show by launching an advertising campaign called "Better Living," featuring a 30-second commercial that plays off the Chinese concept of double happiness by promoting "Triple Happiness"--marriage, a new baby and a new home.

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The spot shows a young couple celebrating their wedding anniversary. The wife gives her husband a book for fathers, letting him know she is pregnant. He gives her a set of keys to their new home--financed with a mortgage from Chase.

The ad, broadcast in Cantonese and Mandarin, is Chase's first television commercial created for Asian consumers. Chase Senior Vice President Thasunda Duckett says the effort was timed to follow the Lunar New Year, which is widely celebrated in the Asian community, and also to tie in with the consumer home-buying season, which traditionally heats up in the spring/early summer. But it also caps Chase's efforts to build a marketing presence in the Asian community.

"We have continuously grown our diverse sales force. We now have a robust sales force in key Asian communities that can work with customers in their native language," she says--adding that while Chase has run ads directed at Asian Americans, "this is the first time that we've created a television commercial for Asian consumers in their language. In other words, we did not translate a standard corporate English-language ad, but instead created this advertisement specifically for this market and in Chinese dialects."

She says that, per Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, Asians are the second-fastest-growing minority population in the U.S., and in the next two decades Asians and Pacific Islanders will account for 13% of growth--or about 3.5 million--in new households. "And about two-thirds of these new households, approximately 2.3 million, will become homeowners," she says.

In 2006, Chase Home Lending ran a print advertising campaign in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York called "Better Focus," which was meant to brand the Chase name in the Asian community. "Other Chase businesses, specifically Chase bank branches, have run print ads in Asian-language publications in select markets.

According to U.S. Census bureau estimates for 2004, more than 5% of the population calls itself Asian, and about 25% of foreign-born Americans come from Asia. The median income reporting race as Asian was $57,518, versus $44,389 for the general population. The states with the greatest concentration of Chinese Americans are California, New York, Hawaii, Texas and New Jersey, constituting 80% of the Chinese American population, with California grabbing a 40% share.

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