Tom Kadala on the Hispanic Consumer

Opinion: Speaking Spanish is not enough! One must also understand their Culture!

After spending a number of years marketing to Hispanic consumers, corporate department heads are starting to decide which strategies have worked best for them. Depending upon who you ask, whether a marketing director or a sales manager, you may get strikingly different opinions.

Marketing directors will tell you that they have their finger on the pulse of every market demographic. On the other hand, ask sales managers from the same company and their response may be more representative of the chaos found in today’s marketplace. From a sales manager’s perspective, many Hispanic consumers no longer respond to current corporate marketing messages. To meet their aggressive budgets, several corporations have developed specialized sales teams by hiring and training more Hispanic sales personnel.

For example, companies like Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Division have made significant progress expanding their local sales departments. As stated in an October 22, 2006 press release, 250 new hires who would be considered ‘in-language home mortgage consultants’ were added to their ‘diverse sales force’ to support the opening of 30 new stores strategically located in ’diverse neighborhoods’. The results from their efforts were felt almost immediately with a significant increase in closings.

In the case of Wells Fargo, their sales managers believed they could resolve their quota issues by hiring sales personnel from consumers who were already their clients....and why not? It makes perfect sense to expect that Hispanics will feel more comfortable when ‘sold’ in their own language. But hiring and training specialized sales people can become quite expensive and time consuming.

Marketing directors defend their efforts to win over Hispanic consumers by claiming that
Opinion: Speaking Spanish is not enough! One must also understand their Culture!

Hispanic buyers will eventually acculturate and respond favorably to their ‘tried and true’ marketing campaigns. To them a simple translation of their work from English to Spanish is more than sufficient. What they may not realize, however, is that a simple word or phrase in Spanish can have multiple meanings and can be easily misinterpreted from one Hispanic culture to another.

How then should companies sell to Hispanics? Should they redirect funds from marketing to grow a specialized sales force or develop ad copy to meet the idiomatic language requirements for more than 30 different Spanish-speaking cultures? The correct answer depends on many interrelated factors. What we do know is that these are some of the key questions being asked by senior-level managers today.

Tom Kadala is the president of ResearchPAYS, Inc., a strategic business consulting firm dedicated to the development and expansion of Hispanic consumer markets. - (www.researchpays.net). Mr. Kadala can be reached at tom@researchpays.net.