The lust for Latino lucre

One in six Americans is Hispanic. In politics, ignoring the Latino vote is suicidal, which is why the Republican Party is at last getting serious about immigration reform. In business, ignoring Latino tastes is equally risky, which is why American firms are at last getting serious about pursuing the Hispanic dollar.

Between 2000 and 2010, Latino buying power more than doubled, says the Selig Centre for Economic Growth. Mitt Romney's drubbing by Hispanic voters last year was a wake-up call not only for his fellow Republicans but also for his fellow plutocrats.

"CNN was saying the Republicans would become dinosaurs, and some CEOs said: 'Wait, what about us?' " recalls Roberto Orci of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies.

Wooing Latino consumers is easier said than done, however. As they grow richer and more numerous, their tastes are changing, too. One sign of the shift is language: When Latino advertising was born in the 1980s, a largely immigrant audience could safely be addressed in Spanish. Today, most Hispanics were born in the United States and only 23 percent of young ones prefer Spanish to English. This year Univision, the biggest Latino broadcaster, will launch Fusion, an English-language news station, in a joint venture with ABC.

Spanish will persist for some products, particularly those aimed at fresh immigrants. Yet its relative decline presents new opportunities, says David Morse of New American Dimensions, a market-research firm. Marketing to Latinos was once a niche affair. Now it can be at the heart of a campaign. Latino ad agencies have recruited staff from ­general-market firms and have snapped up accounts for mainstream brands.

LatinWorks, an Austin, Texas-based agency, has won accounts for Bud Light and Target; Lopez Negrete in Houston works for Kraft, the food giant.

In some ways Latinos remain distinct. Their median age is 27 (a decade younger than the national median). They live in larger family units and are more likely to be found in certain places: 62 percent reside in California, Florida, Texas or New York, though the population is dispersing.

Claiming that Hispanic families spend 15 percent more than average on baby food, Beech-Nut, a purveyor of such products, recently joined forces with Goya, a Hispanic-food firm, to launch a range of guava- and mango-flavored goodies. However, makers of the kind of pre-prepared foods popular with time-poor Americans are struggling to sell to Latina mothers, since many prefer "healthy" fare that can be home-cooked.

Some brands target young Latinos via the social-media sites they love to browse on the smartphones they are snapping up at faster rates than their non-Latino peers. Savvy advertisers also find ways, in Morse's phrase, to "wink" at Latinos without alienating others.

Salvador Padron, who runs a multicultural research team at PepsiCo, describes a global ad campaign that showed images of a football game on a Brazilian beach. Other advertisers aim for accurate depictions of contemporary Latino life. A recent spot for Tide detergent shows a middle-aged Latina lauding her detergent in Spanish while her teenage granddaughter glances up from her phone to translate the woman's eulogy into unaccented English.

Large firms such as Pepsi and Procter & Gamble make campaigns Latino-friendly from the start, rather than adding a Hispanic tweak later or simply translating an ad into Spanish. For example, ads for Pepsi Next featured William Levy, a Latino star, in both English and Spanish versions. They touted the fizzy drink as having "less sugar" rather than "fewer calories," since few Hispanics consciously count calories.

Among retailers, Wal-Mart, which advertises heavily in Hispanic media and employs bilingual staff, stands out; Chiqui Cartagena at Univision, the author of a new book on marketing to Latinos, calls the firm "the best example of a brand that gets it now that didn't get it ten years ago."

One reason may be bad numbers. ­Isabel Valdes, a consultant, says it is impossible to measure Latino consumption precisely. Traditional methods of gathering data do not account for Latino peculiarities, such as spending lots of money in small, independent shops.