Welcome to the Kleber & Associates blog! Here’s the latest on Marketing Home Products to Hispanic Americans: Marketing to a “Race” or “Ethnic Group?”
Recently, K&A created a “Marketing to Hispanic Americans White Paper” in order to define the group that is continuing to grow in influence in the home and commercial building products sector. Our goals were to get to know this audience – not just demographically – but to understand their perceptions and behaviors to make home products’ marketing programs more relevant and efficient, and thereby, more successful, for our client partners.
As our team embarked upon this research, the question “are Hispanic Americans a race or ethnic group” frequently arose. After much discussion, we settled on the latter, and further defined this group:
“ . . . with origins in Latin America and Spain and for which are often divided into sub-groups including Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, Dominican Americans, Central Americans and South Americans, among others.”
Recently, I came across an article in MediaPost (one of my favorite publications for research information), written by Juan Tornoe who authors the blog “Hispanic Trending,” which spoke to our agency debate about the identity of Hispanic Americans.
“The Latino community is nothing short of a genetic kaleidoscope,” he said in the article “What Race Are Hispanics?”
He further pointed out that even the U.S. Census Bureau states “Hispanics can be of any race, any ancestry, any country of origin.” And that the most important thing to remember is that by identifying Hispanic Americans as an ethnic group doesn’t pigeonhole them as a particular race, or set of standards that they can’t move away from, yet “defines a particular outlook in life, a state of mind, a way to interpret and respond to outside situations and stimuli.”
The bottom line is that Hispanic Americans are a diverse ethnic group of individuals with similar heritages, state of minds and outlooks on life. Despite the race versus ethnic group debate, they continue to be a vital component of the success equation for home and building products manufacturers and marketers.
For more information about Marketing to Hispanic Americans, e-mail Steve Kleber at sk@kleberandassociates.com or tweet him at @stevekleber for a complimentary, advance copy. Click here to view Tornoe’s complete MediaPost article “What Race Are Hispanics?”
