In last week’s weekender, we explored how, despite dedicating a month to Hispanic heritage, marketers and advertisers do not reach this same demographic year-round. And while Hispanic consumers remain an underserved demographic group, Hispanic Heritage Month might serve as a springboard for brands to improve.
In addition to spotlighting Hispanic and Latinx-owned brands and products, this year’s campaigns have a strong vein of giving back to the community. Here are just a few:
Apparel and home goods:
-
Nordstrom x Christina Martinez is a collaboration with the popular Mexican-American artist, whose art prints have been adapted for apparel and home goods.
-
Neiman Marcus is featuring Hispanic and Latino-founded brands, including Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta, in window displays at 14 of its US locations. The displays were developed with multicultural insights gleaned from the company’s consumer insights team.
- For its part, Target is calling their celebration “Latino Heritage Month” and is partnering with Latino creators for a “Más Que” collection of brands, as well as debuting a “Latino-Owned” badge to promote specific products. It is also promoting its investments in the Latino community, including the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and Hispanic Heritage Foundation.
- Interestingly, the “Más Que” website landing page is written in Spanglish, a combination of Spanish and English that is spoken by around 40 million people in the US.
Consumer packaged goods:
-
Procter & Gamble released “Powering Progress,” a film demonstrating how Hispanic progress is a net positive for the US.
-
Mucinex launched its “Our Community Needs You Well” campaign, highlighting Latinos dedicated to helping communities stay healthy throughout the pandemic.
Lifestyle and travel:
-
Travelocity created a dedicated landing page highlighting eight potential trips connected to Hispanic Heritage in the US and abroad.
- The campaign is based on a recent study by the travel aggregator, which found that 84% of Latino parents in the US have brought their children on culturally-infused trips domestically, with 49% of Latino parents using these trips to teach kids about their heritage.
Food and beverage:
- Restaurant chain El Pollo Loco launched its “For Your Consideration” campaign, spotlighting 11 Hispanic chefs for nomination in the 2022 James Beard Awards.
- The chain highlighted that Hispanic Americans account for nearly three in 10 US restaurant and food service workers.
- Furthermore, despite 23% of the country’s executive chefs being Hispanic, only 2.4% of James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef and Outstanding Chef award nominees had been Hispanic as of 2018.
The big takeaway: Many of these brands seem to be doing the legwork to show they’re catering to the Hispanic community, but the reality is that this consumer demographic would likely prefer to be seen and heard on an ongoing basis, rather than just one month of the year.
- While 35% of Hispanic consumers believe that all brands should include Hispanic Heritage Month in their marketing and advertising, a greater amount (39%) don’t care if brands do it or not, per an August 2021 study by Collage Group.
- “It's not just the size of the media buy; it's the human capital, research, agency partners, production. Show a genuine long-term commitment to this growing segment,” said Lee Vann, executive chairman and co-founder of Captura Group, in Forbes in August.
Also worth noting: As the third-party cookie is on track to be deprecated, it may be harder to target and treat this already-overlooked customer uniquely.
- 78% of Hispanic consumers don’t believe brands adequately target them, and 66% notice bilingual ad campaigns since they “reflect their own experience,” per Hispanic digital media company H Code.
- 35% of Hispanic consumers are bilingual and 21% prefer both English and Spanish in streaming ads, per 2019 research from streaming audio service Pandora.
- If an advertiser has less confidence a particular consumer speaks Spanish, they’re more likely to serve them up an English ad to be safe—when the Spanish ad could have come across as more targeted.