The New Market Definition for “Hispanic”
What kind of Latino/a are you?
If you’re like me your answer should be: What are the choices? Or better yet: Who’s asking?
Within the community we’ve always known there were different kinds of Latinos. You can be Salvadoran or Peruvian, Mexican or Puerto Rican. And even within the Mexican community there are nuances: there’s a difference between and Oaxacan and a Sinaloan, a recent immigrant and a multi-generational Mexican-American, Chicano, etc…
Marketers and politicians have never had a tolerance or a cabeza for such things. They’re impulse has been to build a huge pile and call it Hispanic. Many of us reject that term and call ourselves Latino. But that doesn’t begin to define the whole. Mainly because there is no whole.
Whenever I’m asked if I identify as Hispanic of Latino my first reaction is to say: Define Hispanic and Latino. Depending on the definitions I answer accordingly. It makes for quicker understanding. Then I explain, if there’s time or interest, the differences.
Marketers are beginning to catch on. Fox News Latino reports:
A study (by Communispace and Starcom MediaVest Group Multicultural (SMG)…says the old way of gaining insight using parameters like Spanish-language dominance, Spanish-language media consumption, and the amount of time a person has been in the U.S., is too narrow. They state that with parameters like these, a number of those identifying themselves as Latino are being excluded.
We sense that a primarily demographic approach was narrow, one-dimensional and irrelevant to the very audience we were trying to reach,” wrote authors Manila Austin and Josue Jansen.
More and more Latinos are identifying primarily by national origin and marketers now have the task of convincing their clients to address specific, self-categorized, groups.
“If marketers want their products and messages to resonate, then targeting and tailoring to specific countries is imperative.”
Good luck with that.
There’s a reason marketers invented the Hispanic community – it packages Latinos into a clean, affordable, understandable, compartment. How do you pitch a mobile phone service to a third generation-Venezuelan-Texan-American?
The generally accepted reflex had been to do a commercial in Spanish – then pat the nice Hispanic in the head and ask for their business. But that implies that all Latinos watch Spanish television, or that they watch it exclusively. We know that’s wrong.
An interesting aside about this story is that more Latinos (read here immigrants) are retaining their Spanish fluency while becoming fluent in English. 70 percent of young Latinos use Spanglish with their friends. But, the language of preference for filling out the survey was English.
The conclusion:
“In general, we are moving to a more fused culture where language is only a subset of a larger Latina cultural identity.”
Now go sell that to Procter and Gamble.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by ChazWags]
