Fast Company: Latina Marketing Maven Ignores Stereotypes, Turns Profit
by Racialicious Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson
Fast Company recently profiled Alicia Morga, founder and CEO of online-marketing firm Consorte Media.
The opening paragraphs of the article reveal exactly what is wrong with the advertising industry:
Every marketer, pollster, and advertiser knows this much about Hispanics living in the United States: They are deeply family oriented, and their families are big. So when Alicia Morga, founder and CEO of the Hispanic-focused online-marketing firm Consorte Media, first started working with ad agencies on home-financing campaigns, she was told to use cheery images of happy, home-owning families. Problem: “The pictures of the big, brown family turned out to be the lowest-performing creative among Hispanics,” Morga says with a laugh. “By far.” What worked instead were simple shots of well-kept homes with white fences and lush lawns. “It’s aspirational,” she explains. Who knew?
Anyone who bothered to think outside the caja would know–and Morga does. In less than two years, she and Consorte Media have changed the thinking on how to find Hispanic Web surfers in the United States and convert them into customers, replacing the stereotypes that often typify minority-targeted marketing with insights gleaned from rigorous data collection and analysis. And she has built a business that’s already profitable, scored big-name clients including Best Buy and Monster.com, and completed two rounds of venture funding worth $10 million. Her secret: “Data works. There’s too much of the anecdotal in this marketplace.”
I am not sure why marketers want to overolook things that are fairly obvious. Perhaps it is the need for quantifiable, packaged data. I used to work for a market research aggregator and some of the reports that came across my desk for loading were sketchy, at best. Much of the research targeting specific ethnic/racial/gender/age demographics were heavily biased, used to essentially justify pre-existing stereotypes.
A coworker and I occassionally amused ourselves by opening some of the reports and laughing about what the researchers said our demographic wanted. Apparently, according to an older report targeting the African-American market, I am supposed to be single, very religious, overweight, and respond well to food images and church choirs. I guess that’s what the deal was with this Nivea ad.
As a gamer, I was socially awkward and probably spent a lot of time alone. (I was also a guy. Girl gamers had a very small segment near the end explaining how we need pink to relate to video games and we prefer games that were more feminine with a focus on relationships, cooking, or shopping. No I’m not kidding.)
I am not saying all market research is bad – on the contrary, there were some very well researched and thorough reports out there that did crazy things like actually poll the market. Or observe trends. Or conduct focus groups. Still, there were a great many companies who seemed like they couldn’t bother to even do that basic amount of research.
So, I can’t say I was surprised to see the language barrier brought up in the article as another key stumbling block:
The language barrier is obstacle enough for many marketers–the most infamous example is a Spanish-language version of the “Got Milk?” campaign, in which the mangled-in-translation tagline ended up meaning something akin to “lactation.” But Morga emphasizes that the demo “is not monolithic”: One-third of U.S. Hispanics are English-dominant, one-third speak primarily Spanish, and one-third are fully bilingual. And Forrester Media analyst Tamara Barber adds that “it’s not just about language. It’s about culture.” U.S. Hispanics are incredibly diverse, hailing from more than two dozen countries–and that jumble of mores, traditions, and cultural quirks renders generalizations problematic.
What? Latin@s speak English?
¿Desde cuándo?
And Hispanics/Latin@s in the US are diverse? (Meaning everyone isn’t Mexican?)
I think I just heard the sound of heads exploding on Madison Avenue.
[Image taken from the Fast Company website]
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Javier von Westphale wrote:
I agree with Alicia, Latinos are a diverse group and marketers need to move beyond looking at hard data to justify stereotypes or perceived best practices that are not longer valid. We are passed the direct translation to Spanish-language and typifying a Latino demographic segment by the “brown” color. Marketers and advertisers need to embrace and engage the Latino culture and identity that straddles within two cultures and different acculturation levels.
In 2006 only 19.9 million Hispanics living in the U.S. were “first generation” whereas 24.8 million or 55 percent of the total were second, third or more generations and born in the United States. To reach this growing and valuable consumer segments, marketers need to create personal relevant experience and emotional links that speak to them.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 6:00 pm ¶
HighJive wrote:
LaToya,
Your mistake is in thinking that marketers targeting minorities are using research to inspire the work. Actually, another dirty little secret in the advertising industry is that little research is done against minority targets (at least when compared to research for White audiences). Marketers will lean on their minority shops’ staff minorities to make the work culturally relevant. Actually, marketers use their minority shops’ minorities to perpetuate stereotypes, forcing them to integrate heavy-handed cultural cues. Marketers rarely consider what the audience might want to see or how the audience would prefer to be represented. Rather, marketers insist on pushing their own personal, individualized perceptions of what the minority audience should be. The saddest part? The majority of minority advertising agencies ultimately submit to the clients’ demands.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 8:04 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
HighJive –
I wouldn’t call it a mistake – I would call it a different perspective. I am sure that what you say happens on the daily in advertising. But from my market research view, I saw the client lists. I remember who was buying what.
So I will agree with you on the research is lacking bit. I still think lazy researchers play a role in this – but then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if half the research purchased was sitting on someone’s desk, unread, as a CYA document.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 8:09 pm ¶
HighJive wrote:
Not sure “lazy researchers” is the right term. I suspect they fall into two camps:
1. Inadequately funded researchers.
2. Unqualified researchers (i.e., not having enough understanding of an audience in order to properly conduct and interpret the research).
To be honest, I’m a little out of my element here. You might want to contact Pepper Miller at The Big Tent at adage.com. She’s actually written about research at that blog; plus, she co-authored a book on targeting Black consumers. Also, if you’re interested, one of the better books detailing Latino consumers is Hispanic Marketing by Felipe Korzenny and Betty Ann Korzenny.
Posted 06 Mar 2008 at 12:10 am ¶