By Sherri Hansell

Here’s what you missed at the January 23, 2014 program, Redefining Mainstream: Multicultural Marketing and the Changing Landscape. A panel of speakers moderated by Jake Beniflah, PhD, Executive Director for the Center for Multicultural Science spoke about the exciting opportunities in the multicultural marketplace. Held at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, the audience was eager to hear how some of the big brands are creating new media to attract customers from the growing ethnic marketplace.

Topics covered were the media landscape, the consumer, and organizational change. The panel consisted of Christian Martinez, Head of U.S. Sales for Facebook; Maria Lopes-Knowles, Chief Marketing Officer of Pulpo Media; and Patty Silk, Global Insights Lead, from the Clorox Company.

The media landscape is shifting with the new bi-cultural, bi-lingual Hispanic marketplace. Christian Martinez led the discussion about the new digital media landscape. Digital media is surpassing traditional media within the Hispanic culture because users skew younger. They tend to be early adopters and are online and digitally savvy on mobile platforms. Hispanics access Facebook with more frequency than the general marketplace. Patty from Clorox, mentioned that digital media takes the complexity out of communicating. You can turn language on and off in whatever language the consumer prefers.

Maria from Pulpo Media addressed the bicultural, bi-lingual Hispanic consumer.  This new hybrid marketplace wants to be part of the general market. They are raised in Spanish speaking homes and learn English in schools. You can no longer reach them purely with Spanish. They may not be bi-literate. She talked about the multilingual “Live Mas” campaign Taco Bell is currently using in their ad campaigns and the rise of combinations of languages in the media marketplace.  “Live Mas” is a “wink”, not Spanglish. It does not offend either the general marketplace or the Hispanic marketplace.

How do you create an organization that can work effectively in the new multicultural marketplace? At Clorox, the Hispanic marketing initiative has been moved from a centralized core to being dispersed throughout the company. They look to creating partnerships between general market and Hispanic agencies so there is more coordinated thinking. At Facebook they have a team of experts and provide salespeople the tools to talk about Hispanic offerings and also how to reach out to smaller multi-cultural clients.

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