Hispanic Shopper Marketing Do's and Dont's

What’s the best way to reach the Hispanic consumer? Consider throwing out that TV budget and focusing on in-store media instead. And don’t go out of your way to make your brand look “Hispanic.” Such are the insights of Carlos Boughton, brand director of Tecate and Tecate Light, Heineken USA and Manuel Wernicky, president, chief ideas officer and managing partner at Adrenalina. The two collaborated on a shopping list below for marketers aiming to tap the country’s largest and fastest-growing minority group.

DO:

1. Consider the context. Hispanics have been particularly hard-hit by today’s economic crisis so a message designed for the ‘good times’ will feel insincere.

2. Focus on the idea. Let your inspiration lead the media. Design around one great concept that extends equally and powerfully to several mediums instead of trying to match each medium with a laundry list of incomplete thoughts.

3. Shift ad spend from TV to in-store merchandising. The store shelf, where 70 percent of purchasing decisions are made, is the last frontier for swaying purchase behavior. An LCD screen on a shopping cart may be a more direct way to woo Hispanics than the ads on the big screens in their living rooms.

4. Engage the consumer to ‘feel’ the brand. Latinos gravitate to brands they sense feel right. For instance, Tecate leverages boxing as an effective way to reach Hispanics and as a powerful metaphor for boldness, masculinity and character. Consumers, in turn, make the connection: bold brand = bold product = bold consumer.

DON’T:

1. Rely on a Power Point to know your customer. Data provides invaluable context, trends, and insights. But to get inside the head of “Juan Q. Consumer” spend time outside the office, meeting and talking with brand users. Data is not an effective way to read emotions. Tecate’s platform of ‘character’ came from consumer interaction not from data.

2. Underestimate consumers. With the growth of user-generated content, consumers are more involved than ever in shaping a brand — almost like co-brand managers. In this sense, the right consumer-designed message can boost a brand just as the wrong one can wreak havoc. One consumer designed image that was a take on the Tecate campaign became a minor hit on Facebook.

3. Get mired in cultural relevancy. Streaming papel picado in the store isn’t a shopper marketing strategy. Don’t try making your brand look ‘Hispanic,’ instead focus on delivering a relevant message. At Tecate, we’ve abandoned all obvious references to origin because it doesn’t serve the message we’re trying to convey.

4. Be a brand for all people. Tecate isn’t an Hispanic brand marketing to multicultural groups, our target is Mexican men and we speak from their perspective. Even people who don’t understand the campaign value its genuineness. Often, a pan-Hispanic message will lack bite and authenticity. More people may ‘get it,’ but fewer will care.

Tooting your own horn... is that so bad?

I usually try to keep work-related stuff out of this blog, but there's no way I could keep this one out... This is from this week's issue of Brandweek:

If Tecate knows its drinkers, it's because this brand director knows them even better.
April 07, 2008

One of the new commercial spots for Heineken USA's Tecate beer shows a muscular Mexican man tossing an egg into the air. The egg symbolizes huevos—guts—and ties nicely into the tagline: "Para los que tienen lo que se necesita para estar aqui," which loosely translated means, "For those who have what it takes to make it here."

The commercial's imagery espouses the spirit of the Tecate brand by paying tribute to Mexican male immigrants as U.S. working-class heroes. But it also happens to say just as much about the man behind that brand, who also happens to be a young, hardworking immigrant and someone with the guts to make it here.

As Tecate's designated "Mexican-in-Chief," 37-year-old Carlos Boughton (whose official title is brand director) has been shepherding Tecate's positioning and messaging at Heineken USA for nearly four years. It's a task far more complex than it might look. Tapping into the rich iconography of the Mexican working-class experience, Boughton's managed to take the delicate themes of ethnicity and immigration, and forge them into an emotional branding message that's as unusual as it's impactful. "Carlos is open to exploring the uncharted, the route that's never been taken," said Manuel Wernicky, partner of New York-based Adrenalina, Tecate's lead agency. He credits the brand director for having the courage to "doubt the conventional."

For Boughton, the work of connecting Tecate with stateside consumers was indeed unconventional. But it was also personal, since the stories of today's Mexican immigrants could just as easily be his own, even though Boughton's quick to note that he's here legally and the ads wisely leave the issue of how some immigrants made the crossing up to the viewer.Boughton was the first person hired in 2004 by Heineken USA to work on Cerveceria Cuautemoc Moctezuma's (CCM's) brand portfolio, which includes Tecate, Carta Blanca and Bohemia, after the Mexican brewery shifted its U.S. brewing and distribution to Heineken from Labatt USA. Boughton took the job shortly after he'd just bought a home in Monterrey, Mexico.

To accomplish Tecate's unique messaging, Boughton had to persuade both his white colleagues at Heineken and his Mexican colleagues at Cerveceria to buy into the multilayered cultural imagery and language, a marked departure from traditional beer advertising that customarily relies on sophomoric humor and men behaving like boys. "He believed in [the new approach]," Wernicky recalled. "He took the time to sell it through, never never once saying, 'Let's have a Plan B.'"

Boughton credits his "outsider" status—being neither a product of American corporate culture or its educational system (he earned his MBA in Spain)—for his personal insight into the lives of Tecate consumers. He's known to conduct impromptu focus groups with Mexican delivery men who come to his Manhattan apartment. Effective marketing, Boughton said, "is more about believing the opinion of a Mr. Gonzales than in the opinion of Mr. Yankelovich." The belief has paid off. Tecate is the No. 4 import beer in the U.S., with an 8% increase in shipments last year, per Beer Marketer's Insights.

"You can't be an effective marketer if you believe that your consumer is a bunch of PowerPoint slides or pie charts," Boughton added. "You need to know your consumer at a much more personal level." Fortunately for Tecate, Boughton does.

Cob-website

It is too bad that this nice little meme never caught on... a cob-website is a site that hasn't been updated in a long time, kinda like this one.

It turns out that keeping a blog is a little tougher than I originally thought... I guess it is something that happens to everyone (at least once in a while...): Anything that we don't understand very well must be very easy to do.

I just wanted to let my one reader know that I'm still working on the blog, albeit much slower than I'd like. The past couple of months have been brutal, but things are finally beginning to relax. I'm working now on a post about the prizes at the AAHA.

Thanks, and sorry about such a lame post!

No marketer is that dumb...you'd think

Yesterday was a day for vegging out, and we spent most of our day just watching the TV. At some point, there's this ad for a new birth control pill called 'Yaz'. They make a big claim that this pill works for other menstrual symptoms as well. For a visual metaphor, they show women symbolically getting rid of symtpoms like "irritiability" by pushing the words out of the screen.

What makes this commercial unique, however, is their choice of soundtrack. I don't know who was the brilliant marketing mind who decided that they could take a classic song like Twisted Sister's "We're not gonna take it", re-record it to give it a Go-Go's sound, and put it as the background of a medicine commercial... Picture this if you will:

Image: Women going about their day in a happier way (you know the type)
Announcer: "Yaz, the greatest thing since sliced bread"
Background music: "We're not gonna take it. No, we ain't gonna take it"

WTF?

CB

Encu-que?

"Acculturation is the process whereby a Telenovela–watching, norteño-listening and used car-driving member of a three-generation household with a prominently displayed statuette of the Virgin Mary mysteriously morphs into a Simpsons-watching, reggaeton-listening and new car-driving member of a single-generation household with a broadband connection.”

One of the most debated topics in Hispanic / Latino marketing is the topic of acculturation. First of all, no one seems to agree on what to call this phenomenon, and people have used a number of words like acculturation, assimilation, americanization, cultural appropriation, enculturation, and many others that I wouldn't know how to spell, or if they even exist.

Countless hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sacrificed at the altar of cultural understanding. Many companies, trying to capitalize on the growth of the "Latino" market, hire consultants with impressive credentials and even better looking theories. They present intelligent sounding theories like "the boomerang of retro-acculturation", and then recommend including a "Abuelita" in the spot. "Hispanics" are into the family thing, you know...

One theory, defines acculturation in very simplistic terms:

TC(FIFL)=NC*(1-TOC/TL)+FC*(TIFC/TL)

You would agree that it can be any clearer than that...

Many people buy into this theory, that argues that the longer you live in a foreign country, the more you lose your native culture as you absorb the foreign one. In other words, imagine that we can hold 100 units of culture. If we are going to add a unit of foreign culture, we have to drop one unit of of our native culture. How this happens, I've no idea... Maybe it is like:

- Honey, Santos-America is about to start
- Honey, didn't I tell you? I'm into basketball now.

This is ENCULTURATION, one of the theories out there, and it is one that just doesn't make sense. Next week (hopefully), we'll look at another theory.

"Aspirational"

A good friend just sent me a very interesting piece written by Laura Martinez for Ad Age. Laura is a journalist who also keeps the excellent 'Mi blog es tu blog'. Laura tells a couple of stories, one related to how Mexican advertising tends to go 'aspirational' (i.e. portray whiter, blonder people in advertising) and another on how she was rejected to participate in a focus group, most probably because she's a successful / educated Mexican living in the US. She writes with a journalist/social commentator's sensibility. Being a marketer, I'm a lot more cynical than that.

When I worked in Mexico, we had the very handy SEL (socio-economic level) definitions. This is always the first line for segmenting markets in Mexico, at least for less sophisticated companies. The SEL definitions use letters, and it used to go from A to E (A being the highest). Nowadays, the definitions look a bit more complex: A/B, C+, C, D+, D, E. According to researchers, the breakout between socioeconomic levels works like this:

A/B 7.4%
C+ 7.2%
C 25.0%
D+ 23.5%
D 27.9%
E 9.0%

The way that researchers put people in different segments is fascinating. They use 13 variables like education, number of lightbulbs in the household, number of rooms without bathrooms, number of bathrooms with showers, and also whether you own (or not) things like cars, water heaters, vaccum cleaners, computers, microwave ovens, washing machines, toasters and VCR's. The way they define the segments themselves is also fascinating. The A/B segment, for instance, "includes those segments of the population with the higher standard of living. The head of the household will have a college degree or higher. The households in this segment are luxury apartments or houses with full services and comforts". In contrast, the E segment: "(rarely included in market research [sic]) is the lowest segment in the population. The head of household will have not completed primary education. These people [sic] don't own a place and they have to rent or otherwise manage to find somewhere to live. There's usually more than one generation living in the household,which is totally austere". You can read all about it (in Spanish) here.

Why is this information even relevant to the topic? There's a point to be made, and, as always, it boils down to economics. Just to illustrate, and according to the same data source, the A/B C+ segment, which makes 14% of the population concentrates almost 60% of income. The remaining 86% of the population keeps 40%. If you're a CPG company, however, who are you going to sell to, regardless of income levels? To 14% of the population? Or to 86%? If you want to build a decent volume level, you need to work with the larger parts of the population. Your product needs to work with the larger segment, and that's why Laura did not pass the screener for the focus group interviews.

The other side of the story concerns advertising. One time, a visiting professor I had in college told me something that stuck with me, he said: "In Mexico, you can take a look at a person's skin color and facial features, and you can estimate their social level with amazing accuracy". I thought that this was a very racist remark at the time, but after a while I was forced to concede the point. He was (kinda) right. I guess that Mexico inherited this from the social dynamics in colonial times, and while it is becoming less true as time goes by, it is still a valid observation. It sucks, I know, but I do believe that it is changing for the better. From a marketer's perspective, you want to make your product desirable, so what are you going to do when you produce an ad? What kind of imagery will work best? What kind of people do you want to show using your product? How do you make it 'aspirational'?

I'm going to leave the question open for now. I'm sure it will come back.

CB

There's a new order in my world.

To my one reader:

As mentioned in the first post in this blog, we were about to have a baby girl. This just happened last Sunday. I had heard a lot about how intense this experience is, but never really understood it until now. I don't want to dwell on the countless cliches that could be said at this time, so I'll just say that I'm in awe with nature, that Ana, my wife, is my hero, and that I'm in love with my daughter.

I have three posts in the works, and they should come out in the next few days.

Thanks!

CB