ATLANTA: While brands can see there are profits to be made in appealing to the fast-growing Hispanic community in the US, marketers and research firms have been slow to implement effective, research-based targeting, according to an industry figure.

In a WARC Best Practice paper, How market researchers can effectively engage Hispanic consumers, Ana Raquel Martin of SKIM Atlanta, explains that this community is made up of a series of diverse consumer profiles driven by a system of overarching cultural values.

“Traditional survey designs meant to uncover racial, socio-economic, or linguistic characteristics often fall short of capturing the motivators at play for individuals from Hispanic backgrounds,” she says.

The “Hispanic community” is far from consistent in the traditional demographic sense, Martin notes, as the term refers to the broader socio-cultural background of a group that evinces a particular commitment to family.

Survey designs also “generally fail to identify the attitudinal and behavioral variations at play during and after the cultural assimilation process that is so central to the lives of many US Hispanics”, she adds.

But as the number and purchasing power of Hispanic households grows, so specialized market research will be become increasingly valuable, particularly as marketing campaigns which display a disingenuous approach to Hispanic cultural values will tend to get a negative response.

“Providing language and self-identification options during the screening process will serve as easy, complementary measures to help engage and convey understanding to Hispanics across the bicultural values spectrum,” Martin advises.

In addition to recognizing this dualism in the lives of Hispanic consumers, researchers need to be aware of the age gap that sees a divide between how younger and older Hispanics approach issues like technology, multiculturalism and language.

By taking these factors into account, researchers can expect to generate worthwhile results, as empirical evidence indicates that “Hispanic individuals are more likely to positively rate their survey-taking experience and are more willing to take longer, more demanding surveys”.

Further, individuals self-identifying as Hispanic “appear to display a more powerful positivity bias in their responses than do their non-Hispanic counterparts”.

Sourced from WARC