Take it in Stride
Perhaps you should take your insights in daily recommended doses, perhaps you should take the deep dive, but when 1 out of 5 babies being born today are Latino, you can't take it for granted anymore. Not to worry. We'll help you swallow the pill. This dedicated section of the website is designed to enhance your supernatural ability to understand the cultural and marketing points that will make a profitable business difference to your company or organization. Pace yourself. Subscribe to the Latino ID newsletter and notice how your sensitivity to this marketplace will grow exponentially in the months to come.

Is my Hyphen Showing?
The Latino hyphen never wielded as much power as it does today.  It separates two worlds of influence within a single individual.  Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican-American, etc., how do you market to this hyphenated Latino?  When does an immigrant become eligible or obligated to use the short horizontal line to identify his or her position in the United States?  Are baby Latinos born hyphenated?  Are they conceived with the hyphen if their parents had their hyphens intact?  Will it hurt to remove a hyphen placed by the federal government?   These certainly are interesting questions, but the most important question is what can we, as marketers, learn from the hyphenated second, third, fourth or fifth generation of Hispanics living in the United States?  

You can learn a lot from a hyphen.
Tons actually.  A simple hyphen can often help measure the level of Spanish language proficiency, product or brand familiarity, American pop culture immersion, income, or even political affiliation and much more. Of course, it takes a bit more than spotting a hyphen to arrive at these conclusions, but this indicator can teach us a great deal about Hispanic-American markets.   Many marketers unfamiliar with the degrees of separation between recently arrived Mexicans and people of Mexican descent who have never actually lived in Mexico, erroneously lump all into a convenient Mexican-American category.  That is acceptable as long as these marketers are prepared to deal with the double-edged consequences of the hyphen.  

Generalizations and assumptions can cost a marketing program dearly.
Lumping can create unreasonable expectations.  It can also cause an advertiser to overspend -- all because his or her marketing partner could not tell the difference between a valid customer and waste.   Perhaps this is more than you want to know about hyphenated Latinos, but at Schola we don't take this nuance for granted.  I've seen it become the difference between marketing success and failure.  For a specific example of what I'm talking about, just give me a call and I'll elaborate.  By the way, when you dial my phone number, 210-892-0737, you don't have to include the hyphen.  But, if you decide to e-mail me, j-ramirez@latinomarketing.org, a forgotten hyphen will make a big difference.  Go figure.

Is Your Marketing Message Within the Latino Antenna Range?
We all have some innate system that enables us to pick out the stuff that really matters.  For example, if you’re name is Paul, you can hear the human voice say "Paul" much more easily than any other word.  You’re tuned in to that word because there is an emotional attachment assigned to the combination of letters that make up the sound pronounced "pol."  In marketing terms, this is your brand.

The same principle holds true for Latinos.  This market has its own built-in antenna discriminating between what is relevant and what’s just noise.  For example, if you were born in Guanajuato but now live in the United States, your antenna will be hyper-sensitive to any messages related to Guanajuato.  Similarly, if you drive a Range Rover, you can’t help but notice other Range Rovers on the highway, while you’re totally oblivious to the Geo Trackers moseying down the road.  But guess what?  Somewhere down the road, the Geo Tracker aficionado is noticing every Tracker on the road.

Introducing: Stealth Advertising Messages
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the advertising out there has reached Stealth status.  It has managed to secretly come and go without the targeted customer ever noticing it.  How can this be if we, product-consuming humans that we are, have such sophisticated antennas?  It’s simple.  We aren’t using the right frequency.

Many marketers have discovered the benefits of a synthesized message strategy.  It cuts through clutter by engaging the consumers' tracking mechanism with a frequency that they are programmed for and even look forward to receiving.  Latino marketing, when crafted correctly, works the same way.  Regardless of how healthy a competitor’s Latino marketing budget, there still exists the opportunity to rise above the noise with a strategically calibrated and hyper-potent, Latino-relevant message.  Media delivery is of course extremely important, but a well-conceived media plan is useless without the between-the-eyes insight that can create the heightened awareness needed for the consumer to take action.

Now for the clincher… There is one piece of advice that’ll always work to help you craft the "supremo" relevant, portal-opening, antenna-magnet message that will ultimately make a huge marketing difference.  To make this a little more interactive, I have taken the liberty of writing the advice in Spanish.  But don’t worry, a handy English/Spanish dictionary will help you decode the message.

No asumas nada.  No uses formulas. Habla de tu marca con sinceridad desde un punto de vista latino.  Llégale al corazón latino.  Y sigue leyendo aquí en latinomarketing.org.

Finally, if you’ve read this far, you’re obviously interested in tuning in to the Latino market frequency.  It also means that I succeeded in cutting through the tens of thousands of passing words, sounds, and images that you could have chosen to focus on during the last few minutes.  Cool!  Signing off now.