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How to Market When Everyone is Hispanic
With 94 percent of its residents Latinos, Laredo, Texas, is a marketing enigma for local advertisers
December 01, 2005
By Luis Clemens
Leave your preconceived notions about Hispanic marketing outside the city limits of Laredo, Texas. English-language spots run on Spanish-language radio. Spanish-language ads appear in English-language newspapers and local businesses actively market to customers in Mexico, on the other side of the border. The Webb County city of some 200,000 is 94 percent Hispanic, as of the 2000 Census, but a the majority of advertising by local marketers is in English.
"It creates a lot of confusion for a lot of people who are not familiar with the market," says Luis Villarreal, a native of Laredo and radio consultant. Villarreal wears many hats, including marketing consultant to a car dealership, which is one of the largest local advertisers.
Villarreal complains that Hispanic agencies representing automotive companies tell him "'We need to use Spanish media [because] Laredo is [overwhelmingly] Hispanic.' " Wrong, he says. "[I tell them] 'Guys wait a second, you can't take your budget and dump it into Spanish.' Some of it is just ignorance and not understanding the very basic differences within the Hispanic community."
And the most basic difference among Hispanics in Laredo is language. A large number of Laredoans have difficulty communicating solely in Spanish. "We call the Spanish spoken here Tex-Mex. National advertisers use proper Castilian Spanish as opposed to how people here talk Spanish," says Greg Morgensen, COO of the Paul Young Automotive Group. "They try to be too perfect."
Using grammatically correct Spanish is a mistake that Joe Garcia studiously avoids. Garcia is the owner of Graphitiks Advertising and knows full well that the proper translation of "down payment" is enganche. Still, in Spanish-language print ads for a local home builder he deliberately uses "down payment." Garcia also does a fair amount of political advertising and says, "[When] a candidate announces he is running for office in Spanish you would use [the verb] postular but we don't use it because many people don't understand that word." Garcia considers it just a fact of life on the border between Texas and Mexico.
There are more than 1.2 million Latinos living in 11 south Texas counties that are more than 85 percent Hispanic. The vast majority are not recent arrivals. Not surprisingly, longstanding residence has bred a high degree of assimilation among many Laredoans.
What is surprising, though, are some of the trappings of acculturation. The most popular professional sport in Laredo is not baseball or soccer or any other bastion of Latino athletic prowess — it is ice hockey. "Until a few years ago there was no ice in town; aside from the ice in your drink," says Joe Dominey, director of broadcasting for the Laredo Bucks. Last season, the minor-league hockey team had an average attendance per match of more than 6,200 in the local 8,000-seat arena.
Acculturation is the best framework with which to make sense of Laredo, according to Jyotsna Mukherji, who teaches marketing at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. Particularly so with the touchy issue of language preference, she says. Everything is available in Spanish ... there is also the other dynamic that in order to separate themselves from the lower class some choose not to use Spanish." However, it is difficult to avoid Spanish altogether in Laredo.
The reality is English and Spanish routinely rub up against each other in many local conversations, which led Francisco Barrientos, owner of local ad shop PM Design Group, to develop a Spanglish campaign for the Laredo Medical Center. "It was a very successful campaign because the actual ad had both languages in there and that is what happens at the kitchen table here along the border," says Barrientos. "It is just a very common practice with the target audience that we want." He concedes clients often resist using Spanglish and for the most part insist on English-only.
Except, that is, when they are trying to reach customers in Nuevo Laredo on the other side of the border. When Barrientos placed a small Spanish-language ad for Westwind Homes in one of the Mexican papers the phones rang off the hook.
The reality of one border, two languages and multiple levels of acculturation means that making sense of this hyper-Hispanic city is a tough task for marketers. Barrientos says the challenging in Laredo "is like reinventing the wheel with the Latino market."
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