Marketing to a Diverse Audience: The Value of Localization

October 16, 2012 By

Today’s businesses invest a significant amount of time and money toward capturing the attention of targeted demographic groups of Americans, particularly Latinos. According to Deliver Magazine’s Multicultural Marketing Roundtable, the purchasing power of America’s 10.4 million Latino households exceeds $1 trillion. Businesses are aware of the spending power of Latinos, and though their efforts to market to this demographic are rooted in finance, when done right, targeted marketing can have a broader reach. Localized marketing to a diverse audience is also a way to show support and thanks to the communities in which a businesses operates.

According to Forbes, Latinos are more likely to turn away from brands that are only interested in selling to them, rather than empowering their cultural relevancy. Latinos represent a new type of consumer who is less likely to set aside their cultural identity when other subgroups may move toward the mainstream. “Brands need to find new ways to engage with Hispanics,” says Monica Gil, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs and Government Relations at Nielsen media research. “It’s time for companies to understand the behaviors that drive Latinos to connect emotionally with their brands. Until they do, they are leaving revenue and market growth opportunities on the table.”

Chicago-based Cardenas Marketing Network creates brand experiences that resonate with Latino audiences. CMN produces over 700 live events each year nationwide including concerts, grassroots campaigns, soccer matches and mobile marketing tours. They specialize in localized marketing by designing interactive campaigns take a brand’s marketing messaging directly to Latino consumers. Instead of relying on static advertising, CMN encourages the target audience to engage with the brand in a meaningful way, building trust and loyalty.

Marketing to a diverse audience doesn’t just mean showing a photograph of the target audience and using the same marketing message from the “mainstream” campaign. Using targeted language and cultural references is imperative to reaching a diverse audience. Likewise, photography should be authentic. Businesses are wise to avoid obvious stock photography. How can your target audience trust you if it seems like you don’t know them?

The bottom line is that by creating localized, meaningful connections with members of the target audience they are trying to reach, businesses can lead successful multicultural and cross-cultural marketing campaigns. Language is a major part of brand awareness and marketing. Multilingual Connections provides culture-focused and culturally-relevant document translation for marketing needs across a variety of industries. Contact us for a free quote on your marketing translation project.

Filed Under: Business, Cultural competency, Latino Culture, Marketing, sidebar2

What Identity means to Latinos in America

June 7, 2012 By

As a language translation agency, we’re intrigued by cultural identity studies, particularly among those cultures whose languages we translate. Recent research conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that even though American Latinos are united by a common heritage language, they are divided on cultural labels. In fact, 69% of those polled say they do not share a common culture among other Latinos/Hispanics.

Some interesting findings:

Hispanic vs. Latino: 51% of those polled had no preference on the term, however when the preference is expressed, “Hispanic” comes in at 33% over “Latino” at 14%.

Cultural identity – not as clear cut as some might think: 51% say that most often they use their family’s country of origin to describe their identity. That includes such terms as “Mexican” or “Cuban” or “Dominican,” for example.

Regarding language: 38% of all respondents identify as Spanish-dominant, 38% are bilingual and 24% are English-dominant. Among those born in the United States, 51% are English-dominant.

- 87% believe English language skills are essential for successful life in the U.S.

- 95% believe preserving Spanish language skills for future generations is important

What does this all mean to us? The U.S. Census predicts that Latinos will be the largest minority population by 2050, and Spanish will continue to be a major language in this country. It’s going to be increasingly important for businesses to prepare for an even greater influx of this demographic, that, if not bound by cultural identity, is bound by a common heritage language.

Here’s a great article from HispanicBusiness.com that summarizes the lengthy study.

Filed Under: Demographics, Latino Culture, Spanish, Workplace diversity Tagged With: , , ,

Multilingual Milwaukee Avenue

May 18, 2012 By
A storefront on Milwaukee Avenue near Belmont Avenue contains Spanish, Polish and English.

A drive up Milwaukee Avenue (or should we say a bike ride along the avenue’s seven-mile bike lane) from its downtown origin at Kinzie to the northwesternmost reaches of Chicago is a tour of the city’s rich linguistic history.

The Chicago History Museum calls immigration Chicago’s “hallmark characteristic,” and Milwaukee Avenue remains a loose but living timeline of settlement, particularly Polish and Latino, but also German, Russian, Jewish and Korean.

The biggest influx of Polish immigrants came to Chicago between 1850 and 1950, due to political turmoil including the Second World War. The triangular intersection of Milwaukee Avenue at Ashland and Division streets became known as Polish Downtown, and swaths of the Avenue are still home to recent immigrants and the descendants of those original settlers.

A little later in history, Latino settlers took residence along Milwaukee Avenue heading north. By 1929 Chicago was known to emigrating Mexicans as the largest colonial outpost outside the Southwest (NIU.edu). Because the area surrounding Milwaukee Avenue north of downtown, known as Jefferson Township, remained unincorporated until 1889, it may have seemed a natural fit for new settlers, and Latino immigrants followed suit. Nowadays, could anyone visit Logan Square without overhearing conversations in Spanish between multiple generations?

The present linguistic and cultural lines are not so clear cut, but it seems that as immigrants poured into Chicago, they settled along Milwaukee Avenue starting in the industrious downtown and then heading northwest as populations grew. Milwaukee Avenue could be Chicago’s longest multilingual street, where storefront signs in Polish, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Lithuanian and Korean contain no English translation, and even monolingual English speakers know that zimne piwo means “cold beer” in Polish.

While so many other Chicago avenues and boulevards have transformed into the streetscapes of Anymetropolis, USA, Milwaukee Avenue has retained the characteristics and the languages of its scores of settlers. The avenue has a cultural staying power – perhaps those immigrants were onto something when they developed neighborhoods of their families and compatriots. Over the years, the residents and their cultures have blended and relocated and spread to such an extent that the City could rededicate the street as Multilingual Avenue.

 

A storefront on Milwaukee Avenue near Belmont Avenue contains Spanish, Polish and English.

 

 

Filed Under: Chicago, Latino Culture

Creating a safe work environment for Hispanic employees

May 24, 2011 By

Last week I presented a session at the 69th Annual Wisconsin Safety & Health Conference. In the US, there are approximately 50 million Latinos – one in six Americans (and 1 in 4 children!) – and the Hispanic population accounts for over half of US population growth in the last decade. I shared some eye-opening statistics, such as the following:

  • 14 people die every day at work.
  • The workplace fatality rate among Latinos is 13.5% higher than for US workers overall.
  • Of the 11,303 Latino workers who died from work-related injuries from 2003-2006, 34% worked in construction.

Why is the fatality rate so much higher among Latinos? For starters, Latino immigrants work in high-risk jobs, such as construction, at a higher rate than the general population. Then there’s the language barrier. Approximately 65% of low-wage immigrant workers are Limited English Proficient (LEP), and not surprisingly, OSHA estimates that over a quarter of workplace injuries are attributable to the language barrier.

But it’s not just language; it’s culture, too. Among Latino immigrants, safety is often viewed through a different lens. Back home, there are far fewer government inspections of work sites, and in the event of a violation, a bribe often makes it go away. Workers may be required to risk their safety, as workers are often perceived is dispensable. Is this in every work site? Of course not. But it’s not uncommon.

In the US, these workers often fear that a complaint about unsafe work conditions or a request for personal protective equipment would cause them to lose their job. And what about reporting workplace injuries? There is the same concern. Moreover, for undocumented workers, a fear of deportation frequently serves as further motivation to quietly self-treat injuries that should be reported and treated. There’s also the perception that safety regulations exist to protect American-born workers, who aren’t as “tough,” as well as the perception that the government doesn’t truly care about immigrant workers and their well-being.

So what can you do to improve the safety of your workplace? Some suggestions:

  1. Ensure that safety materials are reader-friendly and translated into the language(s) of your workforce. But that’s not enough: lower levels of literacy mean that you need to be sure to then train people – in their language – to ensure that these procedures and policies are understood. This can be done by hiring an interpreter or by using a bilingual supervisor.
  2. Consider offering job-specific English as a Second Language training. This will help improve safety, productivity and engagement, and it will also help increase your pool of internal promotion candidates.
  3. Consider offering job-specific Spanish training (as well as other languages of your workplace). With a focus on safety expressions and other key vocabulary, your managers will significantly increase their communication skills while at the same time developing your employees’ trust.

Workplace safety is too important to cut corners. Don’t let things get lost in translation!

-Jill Kushner Bishop, PhD

Filed Under: Employment, English in the Workplace, Immigrant workforce, Latino Culture, Safety, Spanish in the Workplace, Workplace diversity

Tackling bilingual childrearing one blog post at a time

May 27, 2010 By

When Roxana Soto and Ana Flores retired from careers in TV and print journalism and became mothers, they were both amazed at the misinformation and lack of resources for parents who wanted to raise their kids bilingually and biculturally. So, they started SpanglishBaby, an online community dedicated to raising bilingual children.

SpanglishBaby is more than a blog (although it does have excellent daily blog posts with expert advice). It’s committed to providing resources to answer any and every question that might arise. Sections include ‘Must Reads,’ ‘Daily Learning,’ ‘The Culture of Food,’ ‘Ask an Expert,’ and ‘La Tiendita,’ among others.

La Bloga writes about SpanglishBaby:

According to Soto, Spanglish Baby‘s first year has been full of both challenges and surprises. Among the former she cites the typical trials of starting a blog: building consistent traffic and creating fresh and interesting content. A loyal readership has emerged over the past months and, to celebrate this and its successful first year, Soto and Flores completely redesigned the blog, allowing readers to navigate the site more easily and to have a more participatory role. They’ve also added five regular contributors who, according to the editors, provide fresh perspectives on bilingual parenting on a weekly basis.

Check it out here! www.spanglishbaby.com

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Education, Latino Culture

‘Motivos’ Latino youth magazine inspires students

February 17, 2010 By

MotivosMotivos, a bilingual Latino youth magazine (by and for youth) out of Philadelphia, is more that just a publication. On a Friday night, when the last thing on most teens’ minds is work, a half a dozen of them are huddled around a table in a basement room of Benjamin Franklin High School, talking about fonts.

The magazine is a for-profit enterprise that has been operating out of the high school since 2008. Virtually all of it is written, edited and illustrated by 14- to 24-year-olds under the direction of founder Jenée Alicia Chizick. Chizick is passionate about educating and motivating the often under-served teens.

“When you’re not educated it’s harder to get into decision-making rooms,” Chizick told an audience during an author series at the community workshop Taller Puertorriqueño in North Kensington in November. “I wanted to make sure from the get-go that the students that the magazine employs were in the decision-making rooms, so part of the model is that those schools that subscribe in bulk to the magazine then can choose one or two students to serve on the advisory board.”

Schools see the magazine as a way to boost enrollment of underrepresented students. Amid the student-penned poems, cultural columns and relationship advice, readers encounter occasional articles supplied by a university admissions department.

Chizick has already inspired many students who now go to college and are seeing opportunities abound. “‘Everything that she does, she has a reason for it and she explains it,’ said Keisha Frazier, a Motivos contributor studying broadcast journalism at Temple. Frazier said traveling to the National Council of La Raza annual conference with Chizick a few years ago was a life-changing experience.”

Read the full profile here.

Filed Under: Education, Latino Culture

May we recommend…

January 15, 2010 By

…a really amazing food blog called The Homesick Texan. Really as much about Hispanic-American culture/nostalgia as it is about food, the blog features gorgeous photos, mouth-watering recipes, and great stories about living the Tex-Mex life.

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/

Flautas

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Demographics, Latino Culture

Will Texas rewrite the history books and nix Latino leaders?

January 15, 2010 By

Should names of the likes of Cesar Chavez and other Hispanic historical figures be erased from the history books? Some people in Texas seem to think so, and so the State Board of Education will put the question to a vote.

The online magazine Latina Lista takes a strong stance against this in an editorial titled “Latino leadership needed to counter TX State Board of Education’s attempt to write minorities out of history.”

The article cites a new study from the Southern Education Foundation that reports that for the first time in history, more that half of students in the 15 Southern states are children of color—African-American, Hispanic and Native American. Latina Lista sees this as a blatant reason not to cut minority leaders out of the textbooks.

These SBOE board members, along with their appointees, who adhere to the perspective that it is repugnant to teach children about the historical contributions of Latinos and African Americans show they are no better, and given recent quotes attributed to some who were involved in setting the Social Studies standards, are essentially rewriting U.S. history to conform to their distorted views of how they wish to see the United States.

Click here to read the full (heated) opinion.

Filed Under: Cultural competency, Demographics, Education, Latino Culture, Politics

‘Cestas,’ a Latino community banking model, popping up in the U.S.

January 14, 2010 By

A “cesta” (“basket,” in English) is a lending circle in which 6 to 12 individuals contribute a monthly sum of money, and the pooled funds serve as a credit line for the members involved. It’s a model that’s well known in Latin America, but cestas are only now beginning to pop up in the U.S.

An organization called the Mission Asset Fund (MAF) is helping cestas in California link to the credit market, so that the peer-to-peer groups can establish credit histories. In San Francisco, 44% of households have no credit history at all, and more than half of Latino adults don’t have bank accounts.

“This data is very discouraging,” says MAF executive director José Quiñonez. “But we decided, really our whole approach has been, to try and view the community from a positive perspective, to appreciate what they have, not what they lack, and to build on what they have.”

The cesta banking model has been called a breakthrough, and one that non-profits can replicate. Members must act democratically to decide how much to contribute, and who has priority to withdraw their credit. Groups are usually founded among family members or circles of friends where there is a high level of trust. “The pressure to obey the agreed rules, however informal, is more social than legal.” The goal for most members is to get out of credit card debt with other lenders, and expand business operations.

To read more about cestas and how they’re growing in Latino communities around the U.S., click here.

Filed Under: Business, Demographics, Global business, Latino Culture

Hispanic baby names are down

October 13, 2009 By

TimeSince 1880, the Social Security Administration has been tracking popularity of baby names. And even though the Hispanic population in the US is on the rise (by 2025, 30% of all American children will have some Latino ancestry), Spanish names are down in the US. Time Magazine reports.

First, Time looks at some findings from a recent Pew Hispanic Center study:

As recently as 1980, just 9% of U.S. kids under 18 were Hispanic, compared with 22% today. Only about a tenth of that population are first-generation Latin Americans — meaning they were born outside the U.S. More than half (52%) are second generation — born in the U.S. to at least one foreign-born parent; and 37% were born in America to American-born parents.

What happens, of course, when an immigrant group heads toward assimilation, is that each successive generation gets more educated and more proficient in the national language. Another thing that happens is that parents start moving away from baby names like Guillermo and closer to names like William.

“When [immigrant or later-generation] parents name their children, they are combining their own attachments and affinities with their hopes and aspirations for their children,” says Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University and a second-generation Hispanic American.

In the past decade, “Juan” has dropped in popularity from the 48th spot to 66th. “Guillermo” slid from 369th place to 470. Names like “Angelica” and “Manuel” have seen downward drops as well. Many girls’ names seem to survive the crossover better than boys’ — the ‘a’ at the end of the name (Maria,Victoria, Diana) seems to do better than an ‘o’ (Antonio becomes Anthony; Marco becomes Mark).

The Time columnist wraps up his thoughts with this statement: “If the Elisas and Jorges and Angelicas of this era are fated to go the way of the Moeshes and Mitzis of an earlier one, the consolation is that with such nominative extinction comes melting-pot belonging. That’s always been at the heart of the American experiment — and it likely always will be.”

But there will always be two schools of thought: parents who want to honor their heritage with a Spanish name, and those who wish to assimilate to make the “mainstream” more comfortable. As another blogger points out, “if you pick an ‘assimilated’ name to fit in, do you perpetuate the myth that those without assimilated names are ‘out’?”

See other posts about Hispanic names:

Click here to read the full article in Time.

Filed Under: Demographics, Immigration in the US, Latino Culture Tagged With:
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