Should you market to Spanish speakers in the United States? If you decide that it’s a good idea, should you also consider targeting other non-English-speaking communities based on national origin, ethnicity, or race? Each one of these is a big decision with major implications for market awareness and revenue.
Let’s consider Spanish. Roughly 13% of the American population is of Hispanic origin. Depending on whose numbers you use, many prefer to spend part of each day speaking in Spanish. A lot of that happens at home with family members, watching Spanish-language TV, and looking at Websites in Spanish.
New market research shows increasing levels of assimilation into the mainstream population, indicating that at some point in the future Latino will become an ethnic group such as Italo-, Irish-, or any other hyphenated Americans. But today about 40% of the Hispanic population was born outside the U.S., and most of those hang on to their competence in their mother tongue. Their children and grandchildren are less functional in Spanish but have some interest in their culture, heritage, and language. Combine that with continued annual migration from Spanish-speaking countries, and some demographic clusters come into view.
How do most American businesses react to this opportunity? Decades after being discovered by the U.S. census, the big American Latino community remains an underserved demographic. For sure, many businesses offer callers the option of interacting in Spanish, and some provide Website content as well, but our research during the past few years has found that most don’t.
In my research into this demographic, I’ve been tracking the ability of companies to handle inbound communications. For my most recent report on the topic, we sent questions to 102 retail Websites in both English and Spanish. More than half of the English and Spanish inquiries went unanswered, even though we used the structured Web forms, whenever we found one, intended for communicating with customers and prospects (80% of the companies offered such a form).
There is some good news and bad news here. First the good news: This year’s reply rate to the Spanish questions was better than that of three years ago when we received just a handful of answers to our first investigation into e-mail response. The bad news is that more than half of the companies didn’t respond to all the English-language inquiries. That’s English-language questions, four out of five sent via Web form, to U.S. retailers. This performance tell us that their ability to respond to inbound communications is broken, regardless of language.
The reality of Website globalization is that corporate communications and commercial sites receive Web form communications and e-mails in a variety of languages. What’s the impact of not responding to prospects’ inquiries or providing less-than-useful information when you do? Given the Web’s role as the first stop on the way to a customer’s relationship with your company, you can ignore online inquiries at your own peril. Or you could decide to excel at the task. Considering the small number of companies that bothered responding to our inquiries in either Spanish or English, it wouldn’t be too difficult for some firm to really meet the needs of Spanish-speaking consumers in the United States.
Finally, you should be aware that multicultural marketing in the States has a political taint to it. Nearly every spring brings government debates about what we should do with the many illegal immigrants in the country. This year has been no exception. In March former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich argued against offering voting information in “any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up” to vote. Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan took his 2006 book “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America” on the road and railed against the influx of immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere.
The political climate will always be part of the debate, but you should avoid the Grand Guignol of American immigration and race politics and focus on the much more practical issue of marketing to minority, ethnic, or multicultural populations in the U.S. If you acknowledge that there is a large population that today might prefer or require interactions in another language, your course is set – it’s time to invest in staff, technology, and processes to improve your interactions with domestic multicultural segments.
Donald A. DePalma, Ph.D., is the founder/chief research officer of Common Sense Advisory, based in Lowell, MA, and author of “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”
Other articles by Donald A. DePalma:
Five Global Considerations Every Marketer Needs to Think About
When Machine Translation Comes Knocking
Global Naming “Gotchas” Trip Up Microsoft and General Motors
Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters to Global Marketing
What Happens When Going Global Goes Bust?
Knowing When It’s Time to Take Your Brand Abroad
Global Marketing: Money + Web + Local Experience = Success
Global Marketing: Triage and Nuance
Global Marketing: Toe Dippers, Stubbed Toes, and Second Bouncers
Network
