Hispanic Marketing

The Power of the New Latino Consumer

Felipe Korzenny, Sindy Chapa, Betty Ann Korzenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317422297
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Hispanic Marketing: The Power of the New Latino Consumer focuses on using cultural insights to connect with Latino consumers. Now in its third edition, the book provides marketers with the skills necessary to perform useful Hispanic market analysis and thus develop effective integrated marketing communication strategies.

Brought to you by three leaders in the field of Hispanic Marketing, this third edition now includes:

• twenty-seven new case studies which emphasize digital marketing applications
• theories and discussions on recent changes to Hispanic culture and society
• concepts of social identity, motivation, cognitive learning, acculturation, technology adaptation and the influence of word of mouth in relation to the Hispanic market
• a brand new companion website for course instructors with PowerPoint slides, videos, testbank questions and assignment examples

Replete with marketing strategies that tap into the passion of Hispanic consumers, this book is the perfect companion for anyone specializing in Hispanic marketing who aims to build a meaningful connection between their brand and target markets.

1
Cultural marketing

A new understanding

From international to intra-national marketing

The role of culture in marketing has become salient over the recent past as brands have global strategies and local implementations.¹ Marketers have generally had an easier time thinking about international localization of their brands than localization for diverse ethnic groups within a country. The case of the US Hispanic market is perhaps prototypical in that it is by now the most visible case of intra-national localization in the world. Many countries around the world are now realizing that the diversity of their own immigration is creating more diversity than ever conceived before. Countries like England, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and many others are being forced to address multiculturalism as a central dynamic. Marketers in many of these countries are starting to question whether they need to use different approaches to reach consumers beyond demographics and their cultural heritage. The case of the US Hispanic market may serve as an example of the complexities of intra-national localization.

Why Hispanic marketing?

Marketing to Hispanics in the US has become a necessity because of the sheer size of the market, over 55² million people in 2014, and also because of a unique cultural and linguistic heritage. This homogeneity in background has made Hispanic marketing possible, productive, and lucrative. Still, there are many marketers in the US who do not see how culture can work in their favor, or against their interests, depending on their approach. The goal of this book is to encourage marketers to learn about the culture and think about how Latinos differ ethnically from the rest of the consumer base in the US. It is about encouraging better communication between marketers and US Hispanics. Marketers at the forefront of their discipline should understand that increasingly, marketing is about creating customized campaigns to build one-on-one relationships. This chapter introduces the concept of culture, and explains how marketing depends on cultural meanings and social dynamics to effectively connect with consumers.

Why is culture underestimated in marketing?

Cultural understanding can enrich the activity of marketers in significant ways. Yet, few marketers have incorporated the concept of culture in their day-to-day thinking and planning. Culture is an idea, a construct, or a phenomenon that many people in marketing talk about; but grasping the elements of culture to apply in all aspects of marketing has remained largely difficult. One of the main drawbacks has been that the conceptual meaning of culture is complex. It is easy to tell this by listening to the way people use the term “culture”. It can mean what educated people “have” when they talk about history, the opera, and museums, or culture can mean foreign or radically different groups of people.

Most humans are socialized in relatively homogeneous environments and that makes culture more difficult to grasp. Many cultures around the world are quite alike internally. The Japanese, for instance, tend to come from a specific ethnic group, tend to prefer not to intermarry, and make it very difficult for anyone not born from Japanese parents to become a citizen of Japan. The Japanese, then, share a great amount of accumulated experience among themselves. They can sometimes speak without words because situations speak for themselves and generate common understandings.

Cultural homogeneity is perhaps best illustrated by the Japanese. Many other nations around the world also have cultures that are homogeneous to some extent, but with the high level of mobility in contemporary society, increasingly there are diverse cultural influences within most societies.

The US Anglo-Saxon Germanic Protestant-dominant heritage has made for a relatively analogous centrally visible culture. It has a central set of beliefs, values, cognitions, behavior, and overall ways of living that are relatively consistent. The stamp of hardworking middle-class Protestant America is everywhere in every town of the US. Americans are known the world over for the productivity of their workers, and for the numerous and innovative products they manufacture, enjoy, and export. Yes, there is variability within the culture; however, anyone around the world can identify the American character and the American way of doing things in almost every commercial communication, product, and official message.

In addition to productivity, Americans in the US tend to have a communication style that is identifiable and supported by a strong underlying value in the culture. In the US there is a preference for heroes, spouses, politicians, bosses, and religious leaders to be straightforward and plainspoken – to “tell it like it is.” Some of the most respected and beloved cultural leaders have illustrated this norm: Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Harrison Ford, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, Walter Winchell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinem, and Walter Cronkite, to name a few. This is an aspect of American culture that has been revered at home, and yet sometimes it has caused misunderstandings and resentment in communication across cultures, not only externally with other countries but also with diverse groups within the US.

This relative homogeneity is an asset to American culture. It has created a craving for the glory of the ideas, style, and products of US society. However, it is so valuable that many US marketers, who are themselves generally part of the mainstream-homogeneous culture, have a very difficult time understanding that people from other cultures could be different. Even more surprising to these unenlightened marketers is the notion that a group of people within the US who have become a very large and important market could be of a substantively different culture. While in this book we will largely concentrate on US Hispanic culture, the implications for marketers can be extrapolated to other cultural groups in the US, and also to other diverse societies around the world.

This book is not about marketing to individuals but about marketing to a cultural group. That is the only sense in which a specialized approach, like this, makes sense. Still, understanding the culture allows for targeting efforts more accurately than by starting from scratch with every individual consumer. For example, understanding how women think differently from men helps establish more productive consumer relationships with them. The same is true about Hispanics and other culturally distinct groups. The individual is the most important target; still, that individual belongs to groups of different sizes. One of the most important and largest groups people belong to is their culture. That is, the culture they were born in and the one shared by their loved ones.

Understanding the importance of culture

The nature of culture

Culture can be associated with a community, an organization, with art and with other collective mechanisms that encompass a number of people conditioned by the same life experiences.³ The heritage that humans carry with them through history is culture. A culture generally is understood to be the cluster of intangible and tangible aspects of life that groups of humans pass to each other from generation to generation. The reason why cultures have endured the passing of time is that they have provided survival value to founders of the cultures. Some elements of culture include social norms, manners, customs, myths, religion, interpersonal communication forms, social structures, and language. For example, Jews and Muslims do not eat pork or seafood without scales because at a certain point in history, eating those organisms was very dangerous to human health. The custom endures to this day, even though the danger has greatly subsided. Elements of culture that had great survival value at some point in history can continue to be important even after they lose their practical utility.⁴

Part of the reason that these elements of culture are still important even once they are no longer functionally necessary is that they continue to have emotional value for a long time. For example, the Spanish language has had an impact on Hispanics over time. Even when a Latino consumer is fully competent in English, the Spanish language, even if infrequently used, has strong emotional and cultural value. The following is an anonymous quote from a 24-year-old Hispanic man born in the US who responded to one of our surveys:

Spanish is my mother tongue and it is the tongue of my mother. Spanish is still the language which I feel most clearly speaks from my heart. It calls out from my childhood.

What I mean is that it encompasses my sense of identity by its sound and rhythm, and the fact that it is the language which I speak to my family with.

It speaks not of the identity which I project in public now, but rather of my personality and sense of self since birth. When I speak in Spanish, I feel I speak from my soul.

Here one can clearly observe that it is not the utilitarian aspect of Spanish that makes the use of the language important. It is the emotional value that makes the difference. Marketers should not be blinded by the notion that eventually everyone blends into a homogeneous culture. The dual identity this young man speaks about is powerful. Connecting with him in Spanish has value that goes much beyond pragmatism.

Tangible culture: objective culture

Figure 1.1 Culture as an onion

Source: Adopted from Hofstede and Hofstede (2005).⁷

In his book Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede⁵ describes values, symbols, heroes, and rituals as key elements of a culture, and illustrates its complexity with an onion.⁶ As depicted in Figure 1.1, symbols, heroes, and rituals are tangible expressions of culture visible to the eye of an outside member of the culture. At the center of culture, we find those intangible core values. The tangible or objective aspects of culture are most commonly known. Those are the artifacts and designs for living upon which cultural groups depend for everyday life. These elements can be appreciated as expressions of culture and are more easily identified and observed. They include foods, buildings, attire, music, preferred colors, statues, urbanization, toys, and all of the other aspects that an archeologist would be able to classify as forming part of a particular culture. An example of objective culture in a typically mainstream American cultural scenario might be a fall football game at a Big Ten university. A game with a profusion of home team colors, hotdogs and popcorn, cheerleaders shouting and making human pyramids, a mascot figure with an oversized fake head and upper body, the crowds doing “the wave,” and the team heroes blocking the opponents and passing the pigskin for a touchdown. Another example is hanging an American flag out on the fourth of July. And, of course, there is nothing as American as a 1957 Thunderbird in mint condition.

Examples of Hispanic objective culture

Hispanics of Mexican background are known to eat “Mexican food.” In the US, Mexican food typically is known to include items such as enchiladas, tacos, burritos, fajitas, and chiles rellenos. Dishes not as well...