Direct Selling News Article
How To Reach Hispanics - Even If You Are Not Hispanic
by Dr. Jo Ann Piña
Why should I be interested in reaching Hispanics, you wonder. Be interested only if you intend to expand your business this decade and reap the rewards for years to come. As the multicultural population in the United States has exploded, so has the market potential. Multicultural consumers are big spenders. Consumer purchasing power for African Americans in 2002 was $688 billion, and $344 billion for Asian Americans in 2003.
Hot, Hot, Hot Market
The Latino market, $653 billion strong, is the hottest market today. Based on statistics released by the Census Bureau in July 2005, Hispanics account for half of the U.S. population growth from 2003- 2004. That's a growth rate more than three times that of the total population, a trend that's likely to continue.
What does that mean to you? It could mean explosive growth if you capture your share of this hot market. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, minority purchasing power may surpass $2 trillion by 2015. Yet, today, many of these markets remain untapped. Why?
Secrets to Harnessing Your Share
Companies and entrepreneurs often miss market penetration because of a failure to understand the target group's cultural values and customs. To effectively influence and persuade in a multicultural and global economy, proficiency in cross-cultural communication is essential.
How can you frame your message to target groups like Latinos? The secret to reaching Latinos is understanding their cultural values. By understanding Latino cultural values, you can pinpoint communication subtleties and bridge the cultural gap.
It's more than just translating your materials from English to Spanish or re-shooting your infomercial with diverse talents or alternate endings. It is really crafting and framing your message specifically for Hispanics in a way that touches them.
Reaching Hispanics essentially requires training your team to:
- Achieve cross-cultural communication proficiency
- Re-craft their 30-second networking pitch
- Adapt their approach and follow-up in a way that meets Hispanic core values
Why is that important?
Bridging the Cultural Gap
In all cultures, dominant values and beliefs shape and motivate behavior, including communication styles. The challenge mainstream Americans face in assessing a culture different from their own is that the process is most often unconscious and the values deep.
To truly understand what drives behavior, we must explore the beliefs and values below the water line. More often than not, Americans are personally unaware of their own culture until they leave it.
If you've traveled to a foreign country, you know what it's like to be the outsider, hampered by language, social and cultural barriers. Ironically, it takes this type of interactive experience to heighten our awareness of our own culture and values. When people of different cultures come together, they focus on the external level unaware that what really drives behavior (like purchasing behavior or communication styles) exists deep below the water line.
Misunderstandings occur when one culture's behavior or communication style is misinterpreted by another culture. Most importantly, marketing and sales campaigns fail when cross-cultural misunderstandings occur.
While conducting research for my CrossTalk book Getting Across: Your Message, Your Ideas, Your Meaning, I focused on 17 principal Hispanic cultural values and compared them to mainstream American values. The contrast is fascinating and helps explain why crafting a pitch based on mainstream American values misses the mark.
For you to get a share of the huge Hispanic market, it's crucial to recognize that the Hispanic population is composed of recent immigrants, long-standing immigrants, naturalized citizens and American-born Hispanics.
As with any racial, cultural or ethnic group, Latinos experience a psychological process involving three distinct stages of identity development:
- Traditional
- Transitional
- Transcultural
A new immigrant to the United States may begin at the traditional stage. With time, he will move into the transitional stage. In contrast, a 25- year-old Latino who was born and educated in this country will face fewer cross-cultural communication challenges, as he has had more than two decades to negotiate his way through life experiences. This may place him more in the transitional stage. As he becomes more comfortable in meshing his values with mainstream expectations, he reaches the transcultural stage.
Traditional Stage
Latinos generally embrace traditional values, applying them to workplace communication and interactions. As with most of us, they are generally not conscious of how their values drive their behavior and may not recognize mainstream American cultural values.
Transitional Stage
Latinos may experience racism and bias in their workplace, recognizing a disheartening clash with mainstream American values.
At this stage, Hispanics may adopt some mainstream values and communication styles. To accelerate this process, they may choose to associate primarily with non-Hispanic colleagues, which invites criticism from Hispanic friends or co-workers.
Transcultural Stage
Transcultural Latinos usually realize they can choose which cultural values they want to keep and which mainstream values they would like to adopt.
Much depends on country of origin, degree of acculturation and generation. They typically associate with other Hispanics who serve as role models when it comes to operating effectively under mainstream cultural rules.
Latino consumer decisions in the traditional and transitional identity stages are influenced by recommendations from community leaders. Even in the transcultural stage friends and family members have tremendous influence on buying activity. Find the informal leaders in a community or in a family and you'll reach a limitless pool of customers and prospects.
Know Your Customers' Values
Know your customers' values and you'll have insight into their likes, dislikes and even their needs. Realize that even if all the Latinos in your city speak Spanish there may be other cultural nuances you must know. For example, you must market differently to a mostly Cuban American market in Florida than you would to a Mexican American market in Los Angeles.
What must you truly understand to penetrate the Latino market and experience quantum cash flow? Recognize that each culture has a hierarchy of values, and the strength each value has on behavior such as buying decisions or communication is influenced by how high in the hierarchy a value is situated. The higher the value, the stronger the influence.
At the top of the Latino values hierarchy is family. Money is important, not so much for financial freedom, but for the difference it can make to all family members who are in the interdependent circle whether in the United States or back in their homeland.
Family
Hispanics value for family and collectivism (the group) is so strong that it is like an umbrella that shadows and influences all behaviors, decisions and actions. Family members' needs and aspirations are more important than individual aspirations. There are strong ties of loyalty, unity and reciprocity between nuclear and family members.
Listen actively to your customers and prospects so you can reframe your sales or marketing pitch with benefits that directly meet their needs and touch what is important to them. Remember, the majority of immigrants use alternative remedies and rely less on visits to Western doctors than the more transcultural Latinos.
How can your health products help my mother's and grandmother's arthritis? What can your air purifier do that others can't to help my grandsons who have asthma and allergies?
Think beyond nuclear family to include the large extended family siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and even special friends like the compadres. How do your real estate or insurance offerings benefit the entire family? If you need a translator, form a strategic alliance with a bilingual Hispanic and have them do the translation.
Relationships
Maintaining relationships is essential to Latinos. In fact, sensitivity to the needs of the in-group before meeting their own needs is common. Use referrals to gain an appointment, since friends and community leaders are highly influential. Take your time establishing rapport and connection before you try to do business. Practice relationship marketing.
Make sure you follow up and maintain a strong, personal connection with your team and especially with new recruits. The stronger the connection, the more likely the success, and this means more than just e-mails. You want a strong, personal relationship, where loyalty can truly benefit your income.
Loyalty
Hispanics are very loyal to their family, friends, elders and bosses. That loyalty can extend to product loyalty. It all begins with loyalty to individuals remember, relationships are very important in this culture.
Capitalizing on this loyalty can really build your business. Sometimes even if a better offer or product comes along, loyalty to you and your product/services keeps them from switching. Best of all, this loyalty can spread rapidly through the family and soon you'll have many ambassadors promoting for you.
The payoff?
You'll increase your power, your influence and your bottom line profits and cash flow.
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