| Year 2003-2004 News
& Magazine Articles
M.
Isabel Valdés
Niche: Hispanics
Published:
, April 2003
Source: America Demographics Magazine
In the February 2003
issue of Vanity Fair, a reader asks advice columnist
Dame Edna whether she should learn Spanish.
"People say
that everyone will be speaking Spanish in 10 years,"
she writes. Dame Edna's advice: "Forget Spanish.
Who are you really desperate to talk to? The help?"
lf Dame Edna's response was meant to be humorous,
M. lsabel Valdés didn't find it at all amusing.
"It is unbelievable to me that after all these
years, there is still such ignorance," says Valdés,
who has dedicated her life to studying the needs of
Hispanic consumers and teaching marketers how to reach
this growing and influential segment of the population.
"But as a researcher, I know that she represents
a certain share of the American public." For
more than 20 years, Valdés has conducted market
research among Hispanics and worked as a marketing
consultant to many Fortune 100 companies. In 1986,
she founded market research firm Hispanic Market Connections
(now called Cultural Access Group) in Los Angeles,
where she developed standardized testing and language
segmentation tools to help companies better understand
Latino consumers' needs, regardless of their primary
language. Most recently, she founded lsabel Valdés
Consulting in Palo Alto, Calif. She has also written
three books, the most recent of which is Marketing
to American Latinos' A Guide to the In-Culture Approach,
Part 2 (Paramount Market Publishing, 2002).
The "in-culture"
approach to marketing, a term Valdés coined
more than 15 years ago, asserts that reaching Hispanic
consumers isn't about translating words into Spanish,
but about creating messages that resonate with Hispanics.
This requires knowledge about how long the individual
has been in America and an understanding of his culture
and life stage. ”What makes us different as
consumers," says Valdés, "isn't just
our color or race, but that we were raised in cultures
that see the world very differently. Marketers, for
whom reaching a particular demographic group would
benefit their bottom line, need to put on the culture
glasses, do the research and see their consumers for
who they are, not who they think they are."
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