Monthly Archives: January 2012

“Millennials” are those youth born between 1980 and 1995 and there are over 80 million of them in the United States.  Hispanic’s account for over 20% of the Millennial population.  This highly acculturated group with its sheer size is a perfect market opportunity for many brands but it is difficult to reach them.  It is difficult to reach them because Millennial Hispanics often live out both cultures, being influenced by their own culture as well as that of the culture around them.   They then “tend to discard traditional cultural labels in favor of their own self-created monikers like ‘Mexipino,’ ‘Blaxican,’ ‘China Latina’.  They tend to choose English as their main language, shun marketing efforts directed towards their cultural heritage, and yet, are still heavily influenced by the opinions of their large, extended families with whom they often live.  The challenge for marketers attempting to address this market segment is forming a marketing message for someone so individualistic that still has influential ties to a group that is far less acculturated.  In order to sell to Millennials, you need to not only target the youth but their families as well.

For future marketing efforts to be as successful as possible marketers will be required to use a more differentiated marketing strategy.  Two separate, and specific, campaigns will need to be created for both the Hispanic youth and their families.  The marketer “cannot simply transfer directly to the U.S. Latino market the conceptualizations or marketing strategies that work with more traditional, general market consumers.”  With regards to influencing less acculturated Hispanics such as many Millennials’ parents and grandparents, there are actually many culture specific characteristics beyond a common language that affect how marketing efforts are perceived by them.  These include their country of origin, the language they prefer to use in the home, their place of residence with its size of Hispanic population, and their strong family values.  Not only will the marketing message need to be re-thought because of these cultural characteristics but, the marketer will also need to take into account that Hispanics and their youth tend to give heed to different marketing strategies than those that work for the general market.

Marketing strategies that have proven to work with Hispanics in general are television, radio and direct marketing although they have to be used together to get the best result.  Regarding television, “49% of U.S. Hispanics who watch television during prime-time hours, watch Spanish language programming” and “30% of English-dominant Hispanics regularly watch Spanish programming.”  A marketer would have to specifically create television advertising to be aired in Spanish on Spanish language channels.

Radio advertising is key in that “the entire family may listen to one station and tune in, on average, 26 – 30 hours per week.  This ranks more than 13% above the general population.”

Direct marketing is highly effective as well in that 72% of Hispanics claim to always read their mail including direct marketing materials.  The process of acculturation leaves Hispanics welcoming what we would call junk mail as it helps inform them better of U.S. based products.

Hispanic Millennials are different in that they are attuned to technology based marketing as they frequently use text messaging, mobile media, and social networking sites.  Hispanic Millennials “are 211% more likely to download content from the Internet than the general population,” and “over 60% of Hispanic Millennials are online.”

A company wishing to successfully address Hispanic youth will need to create 2 separate marketing campaigns: 1 aimed at the youth themselves and the other for their families.  As well as take into account the individual cultural characteristics that influence perceptions when creating the marketing message.

Related articles

• 5 marketing secrets about U.S. Hispanics (thecontentlab.icrossing.com)
• What’s to Become of Hispanic Identity? (adage.com)
• The Effects of Acculturation on the Cognitive Structure of Foreign-born U.s. Hispanics (jakebeniflah.wordpress.com)

Ethnic minorities such as Hispanics and racial minorities such as African Americans and Asian Americans are growing incrementally in number but seemingly exponentially in buying power these days.  Over the next 5 years Hispanic buying power is supposed to increase by 50% from $1 trillion in 2010 to $1.5 trillion in 2015.  Over the same time period, Asian American buying power is to increase 42% from $544 billion to $775 billion and African-American buying power is to rise from $957 billion to $1.2 trillion, which is a 25% increase.  A crucial bit of information to keep in mind is that each of these groups are also increasing their use of the internet as a means for finding and buying products.

Consider the following in relation to the importance of these minority consumers:

• 88% of Hispanics use the internet to search for products.  Higher than the rest of the population.
• 90% of Hispanics use the internet to compare prices.  Higher than the rest of the population.
• 79% of Hispanics use the internet to aid them in making a final purchase decision.  Once again, higher than the rest of the population.
• 67% of African Americans will visit a brands website.
• 72% of African Americans perform a web search daily and 47% of them visit a brands website after finding it.
• One study reports that 89% of Asian Americans say they went online “yesterday,” with 87% of respondents saying they go online daily, compared to 77% and 74% respectively for whites who come in at second place in both instances.

This data proves that the corporate website is an important sales tool for addressing minority markets.  But many of the top 100 companies in the U.S. don’t seem to be taking note of this.  Out of the top 10 Fortune 100 companies, only 2 (#9 Bank of America and #10 Ford) catered to minority groups and even those site didn’t cater to African Americans and Asian Americans; only Hispanics.  The rest of the top 10 included the likes of #1 Wal-Mart, #2 Exxon Mobile, #3 Chevron, #4 ConocoPhillips, #5 Fannie Mae, #6 General Electric, #7 Berkshire Hathaway and #8 General Motors.  Sure, the consumer can only make an actual purchase from the Wal-Mart site out of all those listed but who says all 3 minorities aren’t interested in corporate information to help them choose a brand or to just be informed.

It’s crucial to reach out to the consumer through every means possible to get them interested in your brand; this requires contacting them through the media they are interested in.  It is obvious that each consumer group is interested in going online and using the internet for researching products of interest and making purchases.  Does the information provided on a corporate website not influence the purchase decisions and brand loyalty of the consumer?  This is what Integrated Marketing Communications is all about; having a unifying message across all channels in order to ensure a consistent message is made.  All consumer groups need to know what that message is and the message needs to be made available where they are looking.  According to the data above, that includes websites.

Related articles

• Study: How to Make Ads More Relevant to Different Consumers (yadvertisingblog.com)
• Ethnic Groups Don’t See Themselves in Advertising, Digital Content (blacksonville.net)
• Is Your Brand’s Marketing Strategy 2042-Compliant? (forbes.com)

“Emerging media,” “new media,” “digital media;” it has many names but one thing is for certain, whatever it’s called, it offers some of the most engaging forms of advertising available ranging from podcasts, email, and web sites to social bookmarking, blogs and advergaming.  Engagement is the highest honor a brand could receive from its target audience.  It’s more important than loyal behavior such as repeat purchase.  It’s even more important than a community that forms around a brand (think Apple).  Engagement has the consumer spending not only money and time with the brand but their energy and more, leading to brand advocacy.

Marketers are pouring increasing portions of their advertising budgets into these digital media because of their engaging capacity but also because consumers are paying attention to these media more than ever before.  Any smart marketer knows you advertise where your audience is.  To get a feel for how much attention consumers are paying to digital media these days consider the following internet  statistics collected between July 2010 and July of 2011:

• Online spending on U.S. sites was $21 billion, up 13% from July 2010 where retail spending decreased by 2%.
• 86% of internet users viewed an online video which accounted for an average of 18.2 hours each person.
• 93% of internet visitors made at least 1 search, the average searcher made 124 searches in this 1 month.
• Search has increased 8% since July 2010.
• Conversational media sites such as Tumblr, LinkedIn, Skype and Yelp received great increases of users with 223%, 52%, 71% and 43% increases respectively.
• Streaming media sites Pandora and Vevo received increased usage by 48% and 38% respectively.
• The sources driving the growth of the above mentioned sites are Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and YouTube, all digital media.
• The number of unique visitors to social media sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn has grown by an average of 5%.
• In the first 21 days of the existence of Google+, visitation to the site grew by 561%.

Below are specific examples of how we as consumers have embraced digital media:

• Glamour magazine received 512,339 scans off of QR codes placed in their print editions, which is 25% of their readership.
• Email marketer GetResponse used social sharing buttons to improve email click-through rates by 115%.
• 50.3% of music sales were in digital format rather than physical in 2011; the first time digital has outsold physical music formats.

  

   

This continuing increase in demand for all things digital influences our world and the products and services we use.  Just think about all the digital technologies you use on a daily basis and the influence they have on the world around you.  Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest have the power to shape a brand.  Our positive and negative posts about a product are often monitored by the manufacturer and used to sculpt the product for the future.  These same posts about a brand can truly affect other consumer’s perception of it.  How often have you decided against purchasing a certain product because of what friends and family say about it or what you read in consumer reviews of the product?

Social networks have also made the brand more available to the consumer.  Brands that have a presence on social networking sites have become the target of disgruntled consumers if they don’t respond to customer service inquiries within record time.  Such demand for immediacy due to digital technology has also made brands more transparent, which is a good thing.

We have realized that the internet and all its digital glory can provide us what we want most – information.  It’s easier than ever to stay informed on trends, topics of interest, gossip etc.  Rather than waiting for a printed magazine or newspaper to arrive or for the 5 o’clock news to start, which by the time we read it or view it is already out of date, we can turn to our laptop, tablet, smartphone or go-go-gadget whatever to find the latest news via RSS feed, podcast, videocast, chat room, widget, smartphone app etc.  The immediacy of information acquisition provided by digital technology these days requires all brands to continually adapt in order put their information closest to our grasp if they want to sell the most, get the most donations, have the most downloads, be talked about the most or whatever their goals are.

As of now, it’s an all-out race to get ones brand into the newest and greatest digital media.  Why?  Because you said so.

Related articles

• 80+ New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed (mashable.com)
• It’s a Facebook World (wir-sprechen-online.com)
• 5 Trends Affecting how we Consume Digital Content (hudsonhorizons.com)