The Top Ten Mistakes In Marketing To Hispanics (And How To Solve Them)

by
David Pascal

Marketing In A Demographic Revolution

Hispanic-Americans today make up over 15% of the American population.

Hispanic-Americans filled one out of every three new jobs created in 2005.

Hispanic-American purchasing power for 2002 exceeded $580 billion dollars.

Hispanic-American purchasing power will rise to $926.1 billion in 2007, and soon after exceed one trillion dollars. And continue to rise at a rate roughly twice that of non-hispanics.

Hispanic-Americans aren't just becoming a major market. They are a major market. Right now.

So why are the marketing efforts of so many companies failing to reach the Hispanic market?

If your company isn't tapping into the exploding Hispanic market, here are ten of the top mistakes it may be making.

And the top ten ways to correct them.


Mistake #1: Not Realizing That There Is A Hispanic Market

Ignoring the Hispanic market is far too common a mistake, and by far the worst.

In 1997, when roughly one out of every ten Americans was Hispanic, the amount of money spent by American corporations on advertising specifically geared to ethnic Americans - not just Hispanics but all ethnic marketing segments - was less than 1%.

Hispanics now make up nearly one out of every five Americans. Treating them as Invisible Men is becoming harder and harder to do. But it's still happening to some degree at far too many American companies. They don't seem to know that a huge growing market is there all around them. And so they don't try to reach out to it systematically. Or at all.

The solution to the problem? Simply taking a hard look at the demographics.

Nearly one out of five of American consumers today are Hispanic.

A quarter of those consumers will be Hispanic within a decade.

A third will be hispanic a few years after that.

And not long after that -- perhaps within your lifetime -- the majority of all Americans and all American consumers will be Hispanic.

The explosive rise of the hispanic population is the major demographic shift taking place in America today and in the years to come. The businesses that reach that market first will get business sooner, retain consumer loyalty longer, and gain the most economically. It's that simple.

Solution? Look at the numbers. And start dealing with the biggest change affecting American society and American business since the baby boom.


Mistake #2: Insensitivity To Cultural Differences

American have for the most part managed to put the days of the Frito Bandito behind them. But not all businesses have reached that point.

And even for those who have, what has replaced outmoded negative connotations of 'hispanic' has been simply -- nothing.

These sorts of companies think that the way to deal with the hispanic market is simply to take existing marketing material aimed at Anglo-Americans and apply it without any change whatsoever.

Which works about as well as taking marketing materials from Poland or Tibet, adding English subtitles, and using it on Texans.

American advertising tends to reflect Anglo-American roles and values. For instanced, ads targeted at generically 'American' families show families with husbands and wives, but not cousins or grandparents, in places where talk is understated and backgrounds are often cool, suburban, secular.

In latino cultures, families are often extended families. A family picture without a grandmother is unusual. Old people and young people interact easily. Religious pictures and symbols are a common part of most household decor. Colors are more alive and vivid. Food is spicy. Music is impassioned rather than ambient.

Whether there is a common latino style is debatable. But most people would agree that unisex looks, minimalist décor, and anorexic understatement are not it.

Moreover, latino culture isn't one single culture. It's a multitude of cultures - Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Argentinian, Basque. The need to take that into consideration from a marketing standpoint is obvious.

Londoners listening to Sting aren't black Americans listening to rap. Irishmen aren't Britons.

Those groups may all be united by a common language, history, even a roughly similar religious background. But that unity can cover a lot of diversity. Enough to make a campaign that would succeed brilliantly with New Yorkers fail miserably with Southern Baptists.

Hispanic-American culture itself is a new and evolving flavor of hispanic culture -- and of American culture too. Businesses need to remember that Hispanic-Americans are Americans. They eat pizza and buy take-out Chinese, laugh at Homer Simpson, drive Fords and Volkswagens, watch Seinfeld, subscribe to the sci-fi channel.

Over 60% of American Hispanics were born in America and regard the United States - rightly - as their nation and their home. Yes, they may share common cultural backgrounds. Yes, a majority are familiar with Spanish, and a section of the hispanic community are more fluent in Spanish than English. But a section of the latino market doesn't know Spanish at all.

And being aware of such differences matters. 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.

Not all hispanics are alike, and companies that assume they are will make serious marketing mistakes.

Solution? Become aware of hispanic culture and especially hispanic cultures. Stop making assumptions. Guesswork is bad marketing. Good marketing means getting close to the facts and to people.

To sell to people in a hispanic culture, become familiar with them.


Mistake #3: Not Speaking To People In The Language They Use

Right now roughly one out of every four hispanic consumers understand Spanish well. But those consumers also have at least some difficulty with English. Companies can ignore that. They can save time and translation fees by continuing to produce advertisements and commercials and product packaging in English alone.

And in a market which will approach one trillion dollars in purchasing power next year, they will be throwing away their access to a quarter of a trillion American consumer dollars.

No sane company can afford that.

Hispanic Americans are for the most part quite fluent when it comes to English. The majority speak English well and understand it perfectly. It would certainly be a mistake to treat hispanic Americans as a whole as Spanish-speaking only.

But a significant minority are still more at home with Spanish. 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.

What's the best way to design successful bilingual marketing materials? There are lots of ways. Parallel texts in English and Spanish may be used in marketing material. Text in one language accompanied by voiceovers in the other may be used. Subtitling may be used.

However it's done, some elements of a company's marketing material will need to be in Spanish. If it isn't, that company will missing a big part of the market it wants to target, and an ever-increasing part of the general public too.

Solution? Put at least part of what you have to say to your customers in Spanish.

It doesn't have to be completely and 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. Possibly a lot of it.


Mistake #4: Not Listening To People In The Language They Use

Businesses need to do more than just address the latino market in the Spanish. They need to listen to it in Spanish.

English-language focus group managers can't find out what makes Spanish-speaking consumers buy. English-language surveys and questionnaires won't be answered by people who can't read the questions.

Dominating the market rests on knowing it. Knowing the market depends on listening to it. Spanish-language output alone won't let you dominate the market. Spanish-language input is needed.

Solution: find people that know what good marketing research is, and that can communicate with people in the language that they use. Translators aren't researchers, and researchers who don't know the language can't ask the right questions. Find a company that can do both, and you've found a winner.


Mistake #5: Not Using Experts

A company in uncertain economic circumstances looks around to see how it can get more business. It sees a rapidly growing hispanic market. It wants to reach it. How?

It takes an existing employee who took Spanish in college and sets him to translate their existing ad copy.

Or it takes a hispanic employee who is a superbly competent in one area and makes him their media spokesman, or the director of a new hispanic marketing initiative. Even though he has no media experience, or marketing experience.

Or it hires an ad agency with no latino account experience or background or personnel.

There is one thing worse than not marketing, and that is marketing badly. Marketing badly means marketing without specialist expertise.

You can be familiar with the hispanic market but not with marketing. You can be knowledgable about marketing but not about hispanics. It comes to the same thing. You need expert competence in both fields to get the best results.

Yes, Google can translate your words - into business failure, if you're not careful.

Solution? To get top return for your dollar, hire experts.


Mistake #6: Not Studying The Market Closely And Repeatedly

In Rochester, New York, I had the privilege for working with an agency called Latinos Communications that specializes in marketing to hispanics. We learned from a survey on language usage in 1980, 21.6% of city residents were uncomfortable using English -- and that in 1990 that number had increased to 34%.

The English-language skills of earlier Rochester Hispanic residents almost certainly improved during that time. Why then the rise in people having difficulties with English? Very likely, a statistical result of the continuing influx of immigrants from Puerto Rico, Mexico, South America, and so on.

Imagine you have to make a marketing decision for your company. You read that years ago, about twenty percent of Hispanics in your market had difficulty with English. But that was years ago! Surely the number has gone down. Isn't that a reasonable assumtption to make?

So you run your advertisement completely in English - and perhaps over a third of the consumers you're trying to reach can't read it. One third of your ad budget is completely wasted, on that one mistake alone, and the whole marketing effort may crash as a result.

Specialists don't make those mistakes.

Solution: learn as much about the current market as you can before you start. Or find people who do.


Mistake #7: Thinking 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 Spanish-speaking market as a whole is larger than the total number of latinos in the United States. More than that: the global Spanish-speaking market is larger than all the people in the United States. Spanish-speaking people are a global market of huge dimensions.

As of 2005, the Gross National Product of Latin America alone exceeds four trillion four hundred and twenty-one billion dollars. Spanish is considered by some scholars to be the second or third most-spoken language on the globe.

If your business is purely local, this may not be a major consideration. But in the age of the internet and global marketing, it should.

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.

The phrase, 'a world of opportunity,' isn't just words when it comes to marketing to latinos and latino cultures. It literally opens a entire world of business opportunity. Are you limiting the scope of your company operations? Why?

Think beyond the usual borders.


Mistake #8: Too Much Salsa

Being Hispanic is a wide, varied, rich cultural heritage. It's not a suit of clichés than a person wears twenty-four hours a day.

It's true that a Hispanic persons in the market for buying a house will respond better to an ad showing a Hispanic persons like themselves buying a house. But if the house is portrayed as an Argentine hacienda with flamenco dancers, as a poster of Che Guevara smiles down from the wall, the agency perpetrating the ad should be - well, dropped. The company will not only fail to make the sale, it could well face legal action from angry consumer groups.

It is easy to put one or two elements in an advertisement or marketing document that sends a signal to the Hispanic consumer. But drowning the Hispanic consumer in a torrent of clichés or a massive mix of conflicting signals from different Hispanic sub-groups is overkill. And what dies are the company's profits.

Solution? Don't overdo it. Speak to hispanic consumers specifically - but tactfully, with a light touch.


Mistake #9: Not Starting Small And Not Starting Now

Hispanic people make sensible consumer decisions just like everyone else. If two businesses are offering their services, and one business does a great job and the other business does a terrible job, Hispanics will pick the business that does the better job.

But if the businesses are even roughly comparable, you can reach the Hispanic market without necessarily having to make major changes to your product or approach.

It's a common mistake in marketing to assume that branding has to be major and gross. On the contrary: you merely need to signal to the consumer that you want that consumer and are ready to cater to their particular concerns. In a world where product parity is constantly growing, distinguishing yourself in small ways can be all that you need to do.

True, efforts translate into bigger gains. But when even small efforts can gain large rewards, why not try? The only sure-fire way to lose is to do nothing.

Solution? Start reaching out to the hispanic market immediately. Experiment. See the response you get to even small efforts. Marketing principles suggest they'll be good ones.


Mistake #10. Forgetting That The Rules Are Still The Rules

There are differences between Hispanic consumers and non-Hispanic consumers. Noticing and addressing those differences can get you more business. Still, 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 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 features classic Hispanic cuisine, that food still has to taste good, not bad, and the restaurant has to be minutes away, not hours or days away.

The product has to satisfy the customer. That's just elementary marketing at work.

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 talking to the people you want to sell to.

The best way to reach the Hispanic consumer is to continue to apply good business practices and good marketing approaches.

And the best time to start is now.

-- David Pascal

Home | FAQ | Samples | Clients | Resume | Research | Contact | ©2007 David Pascal