Looking at Hispanic Behavior Online

Dr. Felipe Korzenny
Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication
Florida State University

eMarketer: What are best practices for sites and marketers that want to reach the Hispanic audience?

Dr. Felipe Korzenny: Spanish, as long as you don’t make it too regional or too colloquial, is pretty much understandable to everybody. US Hispanics have formed a new sense of kinship with people from other Latin American countries. It’s almost like a reaction to the way that the census has classified us and the way that they’ve talked about us over the past 30 years or so.

Even though we might not use the label “Hispanic” because we find it annoying, we have a commonality with people from Latin America. We share 400 years of dominance from Spain that has left a huge amount of cultural heritage in Latin America, regardless of the country.

“I don’t think it works to say, ‘This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.’”

Hispanics have a lot of commonalities, and it’s OK to talk about a group that has these sorts of common roots and interests. It doesn’t work well to try to segregate people. I don’t think it works to say, “This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.”

A lot of what has to happen is contextual cultural customization—a little bit like what Google does with ads. That means when I’m on MySpace in my customized site, the intelligence of the tool should include cultural cues to make me feel more at home along with the language and types of conversations. Of course, it might be mixed between Spanish and English.

The integration of networks is really the value. The growth in social networks is going to come from integrated sites, not necessarily from those who are trying to segregate because of where we are in this country. You don’t just have one group of friends.

That is the reason why MySpace has both—I mean having people having two sites, one in Spanish and one in English—but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish-language site is for Hispanics only, or that the English-language site is for non-Hispanics only. There’s a lot of overlap.

eMarketer: Would you say that Hispanics are more responsive to online ads?

Dr. Korzenny: That’s hard to generalize.

“Talking about Hispanics as a whole group is difficult.”

Talking about Hispanics as a whole group is difficult. The less acculturated are more likely to be more responsive to advertising than the more acculturated. The more acculturated Hispanics are a little bit more cynical and less attentive to advertising.

Even in traditional media, Hispanics will be more responsive to ads because of the fact that they were in many ways just beginning to learn about their new consumer environment. But Hispanics online might be more responsive to cultural cues, like if I’m on Google and see an ad for a CD by María Dolores Pradera. It’s more based on how these different new tools and sites understand people’s tastes and preferences than whether Hispanics in general are more receptive.

eMarketer: What misconceptions do marketers have about Hispanics?

“There’s a lot of ignorance about the market.”

Dr. Korzenny: There’s a lot of ignorance about the market. Hispanics have more blogs and personal Websites than anybody else. Marketers need to start paying attention to this.

Emerging minorities are the ones making the biggest difference in the online world and in the adoption and use of technology. It’s bringing them to a set of values that they have for social networking and connectivity.

Older non-Hispanic whites, who are still being targeted by marketers, have been disconnected for a longer period of time. They don’t have as strong a need for that personal connection, and also they are less technology-oriented.

Marketers need to start paying attention to the opinion leaders, the people driving innovation. They’re young and Hispanic.

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