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Marketing In A Demographic Revolution
Hispanic-Americans make up over 15% of the American population.
In 2002 Hispanic-American purchasing power exceeded $580 billion dollars.
In 2005 Hispanic-Americans filled one out of every three new jobs.
In 2007 Hispanic-American purchasing power was projected to rise to $926.1 billion.
This year it should exceed one trillion dollars. And keep rising at a rate roughly twice that of non-hispanics.
Hispanic-Americans aren’t becoming a major market. They are a major market.
Yet in a great deal of American marketing, hispanics and hispanic culture are minimal to the point of invisibility. And some of that marketing, even when it is visible, seems almost calculated to misfire.
What’s the best way to create marketing and advertising that reaches the Hispanic market?
Customize Thoughtfully
Some companies think the way to market to hispanics is simply to point existing marketing material at them. Why bother to customize? If a Coke ad works on one market segment, it should work on another. Right?
Wrong. In fact it’s so plainly wrong one hardly knows what to say. If you address English-language advertisements to a population a part of which doesn’t read English, isn’t it obvious that a serious chunk of your marketing dollar will simply not get through?
The whole broad edifice of market segmentation is built on the knowledge that markets are built of subsidiary markets with unique needs and characteristics. Know them and address them and you will do better. Ignore them, and at best you will communicate inefficiently. At worst you may more than fail, you may alienate.
Companies who understand this and customize to a target market can nonetheless make the mistake of addressing that market superficially. This is what I think of as ‘touch-up’ marketing: you take marketing collaterals aimed at traditionally non-hispanic markets and simply tack on a latino phrase or face or, often, cliche. The hamburger remains the same, only a dash of salsa is added.
This can misfire too. The surface may send out one message, but is the subtext sending another?
Take commercials that target the generic ‘American’ family. As a rule you’ll tend to see the traditional nuclear family, suburban and secular, of husbands and wives of roughly the same age and occasionally one or two children. But you’re not likely to see six children. Nor are you likely to see a family with live-in cousins and grandparents, or a wife of twenty and a husband with grey hair.
But sociologists note that in latino society, families are often extended families. A family picture without a grandparent is the exception. Old people and young people interact regularly, and older ones have a visible measure of authority and respect. Religious pictures and symbols are a common part of most household decor. Colors are alive. Food is spicy. Music is vivid rather than ambient.
Is there a standard latino style? Not really. But there are styles that are definitely not latino, pale minimalism and unisex understatement among them. One can tape a latino element to these, but it only produces the sort of faux-latino advertising that poses as being culturally sensitive but leaves a subtle or a sharp flavor of dissonance — the sort that can do more harm than good.
Showing marketing sensitivity to hispanic culture has another tall challenge — the fact that there is no hispanic culture as such. Or at least, no single such culture. It’s a multitude of cultures, rather - Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Argentinian. We all understand why a campaign that might succeed brilliantly with New Yorkers might fail miserably with Southern Baptists or with Scots. The same applies to marketing to latinos: one size does not fit all.
The median age of a Cuban-American is 39. The median age of a Mexican-American is 24. Will that make a difference to a company selling life insurance as opposed to one making college loans? You bet. The numbers tell us that hispanics in the urban North are largely Puerto Rican, but those in the rural North are largely Mexican, whereas the hispanic population of Miami is overwhelmingly Cuban. Does it make a difference? It makes a difference.
What can help alert you to those distinctions? Direct market research is probably your best source. But just studying advertising in specifically hispanic locales helps too. Puerto Rico and Mexico and Brazil have their ad agencies, marketing awards, and print ads and commercials too. A quick review can be an illuminating one. Provided you review it thoughtfully.
Why? Because hispanic culture in America is far from being a patchwork of cultures from elsewhere. A hispanic culture native to America began emerging long ago. It’s here, it’s alive, it’s growing, it’s changing. One day it promises to be the mainstream.
So it isn’t just a matter of being of hispanic culture. You need to be aware of hispanic cultures. And, in the long term, of the fact that American culture is becoming a new hispanic culture all by itself.
Talk To People In The Language That They Use
Right now roughly one out of every four hispanic consumers in the United States understands Spanish well, but may have a degree of difficulty with English.
Companies can ignore that. They can save time and translation fees by continuing to produce marketing materials in English alone. And so, addressing a trillion dollar market, they will send partially or utterly incomprehensible messages to people that control a quarter of a trillion of those dollars.
Of course it would be an equally great mistake to treat hispanic Americans as being Spanish-speaking only. A part of the hispanic market in America doesn’t speak Spanish at all. And the emergence of ‘Spanglish’ is yet another twist for marketing writers to take into account. You don’t have to translate ‘baby’ for ‘Hasta La Vista, baby’ to get across in either language.
But stats are stats: a significant minority are still more at home with Spanish than English. And so marketing communications directed at the hispanic market needs to be, to some extent, bilingual. Any other decision wastes too large a part of your marketing and advertising dollar.
Admittedly this poses some challenges. How do you create successful marketing materials in two languages?
There are several ways. Parallel texts in English and Spanish may be used in marketing material. Headlines, read by over 90% of readers, can be in both languages, whereas body copy, read by less than 10%, might be in one. In video, visual text in one language might be accompanied by voiceovers in the other, or vice versa. Subtitling can be used with real wit. In a bilingual website I created for a client, one can click on a page and go from English to Spanish and back.
Here again American marketing can learn by looking across the border. Media awareness work in bilingual Quebec showcases a wealth of insights into multicultural marketing.
But however it’s done, some elements of a company’s marketing material will need to be in Spanish. It doesn’t have to be completely or exclusively in Spanish. It doesn’t even have to be a large or very conspicuous part of what you have to say.
But the critical part of your message needs to be made available in both languages. Otherwise you will lose business. And possibly a lot of it.
Think Globally And Locally
If all the latinos in the United States were counted as one nation, it would be the third-largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world. Only Mexico and Spain itself are larger.
But the global Spanish-speaking market is larger than all the people in the United States put together. As of 2005, the Gross National Product of Latin America alone exceeds four trillion four hundred and twenty-one billion dollars. Spanish is considered to be either the second or third most-spoken language on the globe.
If your business is purely local, this may not be a major consideration. But there are fewer and fewer such businesses in the age of the internet.
The phrase, ‘a world of opportunity,’ isn’t just words when it comes to marketing to latinos and latino cultures. If your business product can be shipped, flown, or downloaded, opening your business to Hispanic-American consumers can be one step in opening it up as well to a global Spanish-speaking market of dozens of nations and hundreds of millions of individuals.
Think locally and globally.
Remember That The Rules Remain The Rules
There are differences between Hispanic consumers and non-Hispanic consumers. Noticing and addressing those differences can get you more business. But basic marketing principles are basic marketing principles. And those don’t change.
If you want to get a good consumer response, you need to have a good product. You need to promote that product — to let the people who might want that product know that it’s available. You need to tell them why it’s smart to get it. You have to show why you’re better than the competition in some important respect. You need to show them where they can go to buy it. It has to be look good and work right and be affordable.
Hispanic people will not go to a restaurant if the food isn’t good. Even if the menu is bilingual, even if the waiters know Spanish, even if the menu mentions classic hispanic cuisine, even if the background music stretches from Segovia to Santana, the food still has to taste good, not bad, the price has to be appropriate not outrageous, the restaurant has to be minutes away, not hours or days away.
The product must satisfy the customer. Advertisements and survey questions have to clear. Product packaging has to let people know what the product is. Business decisions need to be based on studying the market and addressing the people that make it up.
Markets change. But marketing basics like these stay the same. The best way to reach hispanic consumers is by sticking to those basics: good business practices and good marketing approaches.
And the best time to start? Pronto.
David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.
Email:
davidpascal@gmail.com
Company Profile:
Pascal & Associates
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