DIVERSITY PERSPECTIVE 5-1
Communicating with the Hispanic Teen Market
A few years ago, Jeff Manning, the executive director of the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB), was considering ways to reverse a decline in milk sales in the heavily Hispanic southern California market. As he reviewed a report on the Latino market, a potential solution to the problem came to him: target one of the fastest-growing market segments in the United States, which is Hispanic teenagers. The results from the 2000 census show that over the past decade the Hispanic market grew by 58 percent, compared with only 3 percent for the non-Hispanic white segment, and another 35 percent jump for Hispanics is forecast over the next 10 years. Moreover, the ranks of Hispanic teenagers are projected to swell to 18 percent of the U.S. teen population over the next decade, up from 12 percent in 2000. Nearly one in five children born in the United States today is of Latin American descent, and more than half of all children in Los Angeles alone are born to Latino mothers.
While marketers are recognizing the importance of appealing to the Hispanic market, they are also finding that communicating with this fast-growing segment can be very challenging and requires more than creating an ad in the Spanish with tried-and-true Hispanic themes. They have to decide whether to use ads with a Hispanic-focused creative, dub or remake general market campaigns into Spanish, or run English-language ads and trust that they will be picked up by bilingual Hispanics. Contributing to the challenge is the fact that Hispanic teens often live in two worlds: one rich in traditional Latino values, such as strong commitment to family and religion, and the other in which they eagerly participate in mainstream teen America. They bounce between hip-hop and rock en Espanol;watch Buffy the Vampire Slayerwith their friends and Spanish telenovelas(night-time soap operas) with their parents; and blend Mexican rice with spaghetti sauce and spread peanut butter and jelly on tortillas.
Advertising and marketing executives have different perspectives on how to best reach these “young biculturals.” For example, research Manning conducted for the California Milk Processor Board on targeting English versions of its popular “Got Milk?” ads to Hispanic teens found that they reacted enthusiastically to the ads. The CMPB had considered doing the ads in Spanglish (a combination of English and Spanish) but found that the language used was not a major issue for teens, as they reacted to ideas, not language. However, a 2000 study of Hispanic teens by the Roslow Research Group found that advertising to bilingual Hispanics in Spanish is significantly more effective than advertising to them in English. English ads were 28 percent less effective than Spanish ads in terms of ad recall, 54 percent less effective in terms of persuasion, and 14 percent less effective in terms of communication.
The California Milk Processor Board has decided that it is important to develop ads that appeal to bicultural teens. Recently its ad agency worked with Latino students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to develop a commercial based on a Hispanic cultural myth that has long been used to scare kids straight. When Hispanic kids misbehave, their parents threaten that La Llorona(“the weeping woman”) will come to claim them. Basically she’s a boogiewoman for bambinos. In the spot the ghostly figure, clad in flowing gown and veil, wails as she wanders through a house. Walking through a wall, the specter enters the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Rather abruptly, her tears terminate. “Leche!” she exclaims, lunging at the half gallon of milk needed to wash down the Mexican pastry she clutches. But sadly for La Llorona,the carton is empty, so the tears resume and the “Got milk?” tagline appears.
While the La Lloronaad targets bicultural teens through mainstream media, it relies on only one word of dialogue and thus may appeal to non-Hispanics as well. In fact, marketers are finding that by targeting Hispanic youth they may also attract the more general teen market. Many have noted the tremendous popularity of Hispanic entertainers such as Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, and Shakira, and their crossover appeal to non-Hispanic teens. As one agency executive notes: “It’s very cool to be Hispanic at this age. It almost makes them more attractive, exotic.”
Four others are the major communication functions and processes: encoding, decoding, response, and feedback. The last element, noise, refers to any extraneous factors in the system that can interfere with the process and work against effective communication.
The sender, or source,of a communication is the person or organization that has information to share with another person or group of people. The source may be an individual (say, a salesperson or hired spokesperson, such as a celebrity, who appears in a company’s advertisements) or a nonpersonal entity (such as the corporation or organization itself). For example, the source of the ad shown in the opening vignette is the EDS company, since no specific spokesperson or source is shown. However, in the Rolex ad shown in Exhibit 5-1, Olympic gold medalist Picabo Street is also a source since she appears as a spokesperson for the company.
Because the receiver’s perceptions of the source influence how the communication is received, marketers must be careful to select a communicator the receiver believes is knowledgeable and trustworthy or with whom the receiver can identify or relate in some manner. (How these characteristics influence the receiver’s responses is discussed further in Chapter 6.)
The communication process begins when the source selects words, symbols, pictures, and the like, to represent the message that will be delivered to the receiver(s). This process, known as encoding,involves putting thoughts, ideas, or information into a symbolic form. The sender’s goal is to encode the message in such a way that it will be understood by the receiver. This means using words, signs, or symbols that are familiar to the target audience. Many symbols have universal meaning, such as the familiar circle with a line through it to denote no parking, no smoking, and so forth. Many companies also have highly recognizable symbols—such as McDonald’s golden arches, Nike’s swoosh, or the Coca-Cola trademark—that are known to consumers around the world.
The encoding process leads to development of a message that contains the information or meaning the source hopes to convey. The message may be verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, or symbolic. Messages must be put into a transmittable form that is appropriate for the channel of communication being used. In advertising, this may range from simply writing some words or copy that will be read as a radio message to producing an expensive television commercial. For many products, it is not the actual words of the message that determine its communication effectiveness but rather the impression or image the ad creates. Notice how Spellbound perfume in Exhibit 5-2 uses only a picture to deliver its message. However, the product name and picture help communicate a feeling of attraction and fascination between the man and woman shown in the ad.
To better understand the symbolic meaning that might be conveyed in a communication, advertising and marketing researchers have begun focusing attention on semiotics, which studies the nature of meaning and asks how our reality—words, gestures, myths, signs, symbols, products/services, theories—acquire meaning.
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