Guest blog by Michelle Martinez, a Detroit-based business writer and editor,
My name is Michelle Martinez, and if you’re an advertiser, you want me.
OK, not me, but my demographic: I’m a young(ish), educated Latina. Like 80 percent of every other Latino in the United States, I was born here; I make many of the buying decisions for my family, as most women do; and I’ll listen to you in either Spanish or English, as long I sense that you know me.
And that’s hardly easy.
It’s not because I’m such an international woman of mystery (although it makes me feel better about my minivan to think so), but because to speak to Latinos, you need to speak to them in the language that occupies their day-to day lives.
But tread carefully. For many of us, language is personal.
For plenty of Latinos, language and how we use it, changes with whether we’re at work or at home, whether we’re talking to our grandmother, our child or our neighborhood friends. For many of us, communicating at home has long involved a mix of English and Spanish.
About 56 percent of Latino households are Spanish dominant; but 26 percent speak English and Spanish equally and 18 percent either speak English only or are English dominant. Collectively, Latinos have about $862 billion of disposable income; more than any other U.S. ethnic group.
Advertisers have caught on to this and dutifully launched "Spanglish" ads, although with mixed results. The most well-known campaigns include those from the U.S. Army, Toyota for its Hybrid Camry, Dr. Pepper and McDonalds. I’ll confess that hearing Spanish on primetime mainstream TV makes my ears perk up, but I’ll also confess that some of the ads I referenced produced plenty of eye rolls and sighs.
Click play to see Toyota Camry Hybrid ad
I admit, I’m no stranger to the "carro," or the "washeteria," or starting a sentence in Spanish and finishing in English. But that’s at home. Hearing Spanglish in the public sphere can range from annoying when used by strangers trying to "connect" with me, to off putting when it comes from a model or actor that probably doesn’t talk that way when they’re not in front of a camera.
And that would be because like many people in the U.S., I’m more interested in authentic voices that reflect natural contexts than in heavy top-down messages produced by the best demographic information available
—could be my Gen X’er status flaring up…but that’s another conversation.Advertisers have, for the most part, figured out that Latinos are a diverse community with different histories, cultures and yes, even languages. Some have even figured out that communities in Tejas are quite different from those in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Miami. But here is the next hurdle; figuring out how to talk to those of us that are as conversant in Seinfeld and Gray’s Anatomy as "Manana es para Siempre."
Figure out a way to speak to the many voices that I use in my life, and I’m more apt to listen, and maybe, buy.
This is a reminder that relevancy is what counts. If you know me as a person, you have a better idea of what will be meaningful to me and as a result a chance to get me to react.
Posted by: Michael Morin | November 13, 2009 at 09:40 AM