| Year 2003-2004 News
& Magazine Articles
Latino
Business Leadership Awards
Eduardo
Rallo of Pacific Community Ventures and consultant
Isabel Valdés are two leaders changing the
face of business and boosting the community.
San
Francisco Business Times
October 2005
Marketing
approach keeps soul and heart in sight
 Isabel
Valdes
Title: Author, CEO
Company: Isabel Valdes Consulting
Education: M.A., Stanford University in communications
and education
Age: 56
Any company can translate
a billboard or web site or radio commercial into Spanish,
but it doesn't Valdes mean the targeted audience is
going to respond.
That is where Isabel
Valdes' expertise comes in. For the past two decades
Valdes has made a career out of teaching corporate
America to respect and effectively communicate with
Latinos. In 1986, she founded market research firm
Hispanic Market Connections (currently called Cultural
Access Group) in Los Angeles, where she developed
testing and language segmentation tools to help companies
better understand Latino consumers.
She calls it, "marketing
for a share of the soul and marketing for a share
of the heart."
"What makes
us different as consumers," says Valdes', "isn't
just our ethnic race or language, but that we were
raised in cultures that see the world very differently."
As a native of Chile
who spent much of her child- hood in Germany, Valdes
learned early on how to navigate multiple cultures
and traditions.
The president of
Isabel Valdes Consulting in Palo Alto, 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 is based on the belief that
reaching Hispanic consumers isn't about translating
words into Spanish, but about cre- ating messages
that resonate with Hispanics.
Valdes is a trustee
of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institution, a member of
the Board of the National Hispana Leadership Institute
in Arlington, Va., and of the Mexican Museum of San
Francisco. She also lectures at Stanford.
Valdes said it's
crucial for Latino businesses to take advantages of
the resources available to them, such as the National
Hispana Leadership Institute, and to dream big. She
sits on the Pepsi Co. Latino and Hispanic Advisory
Board, which helps the cor- poration market to and
to develop products aimed at the Latino community.
She said the company is eager to contract out with
Latino-owned businesses, but that most are too small
to handle the demands of such a large company.
"Which large
corporation can hire you if your sales are only $5
million?" she said. "We always talk about
the strength of small Hispanic business. I want to
hear about large Hispanic business - that is the next
frontier."
- ].K. Dineen.
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