Teresa Menéndez

When it didn’t exist, the Latinas we recognize this month often built the infrastructure. Teresa Menéndez was definitely one of them. Teresa started her path in market research via a work study program at Florida State University that helped her fund her education. At that time, the Florida State Legislature had granted monies to FSU to assess the economic impact the influx of Cubans would have on the state. Upon graduation, Teresa was hired by a local research firm, where she managed general consumer research projects for Coca-Cola. While Teresa found that work to be interesting, she was passionate about assignments where she could utilize her knowledge and skill sets in Hispanic research beyond Florida, and she began searching for firms that specialized in the Hispanic consumer audience and with projects that were national in scale. In doing so, she realized there were only two, and in 1980, she founded Menendez International Hispanic Research.

In this early era of Hispanic market research, Teresa found two key challenges. First, the number of reputable research facilities that offered bilingual services and capabilities was extremely limiting. Teresa spent years working with research facilities to offer training that markedly improved the quality and consistency of capabilities so that marketers and agencies would have the ability to field the important research that would inform their strategies and campaigns. Second, there were no standards nor practices around how marketers defined the Hispanic consumer audience and its various sub-segments. As such, Teresa worked to identify and establish standard norms, consistency and rigor on how marketers defined the Hispanic consumer segment, including heritage, language spoken at home, years living in the U.S., media consumption habits, and other factors. This enabled brands to define their Hispanic segments and sub-segments in a granular yet consistent way so that more sophisticated and deep analyses could be conducted across a brand’s category and competitive set.

Teresa’s groundbreaking work led to a 32-year career of collaborating with some of the most reputable Fortune 500 brands, including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, The Ford Motor Company, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate-Palmolive, General Foods, RJ Reynolds and Pfizer, as well as Spanish-language media companies, including Univision and Telemundo. Because of her vital work and thought leadership, Teresa was often asked to speak at industry conferences and served on juries for awards competitions. She was nominated for the Hispanic Business “Hall of Fame” and named on the “Hispanic Who’s Who” listing. She was an active member of the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Research Association, the Qualitative Research Consultants Association and the National Association of Female Executives. She served on the Ethnic Education Subcommittee for the Advertising Research Foundation, and her work was published in industry trade publications of the time, including The Hispanic Report, Potentials in Marketing and Marketing News.

Today, our industry at large, both Hispanic agencies that helped build the Multicultural marketing infrastructure and the relative newcomers that have entered the arena, still benefit greatly from the foundations and best practices Teresa helped establish. For that reason, she is included in our list of guerreras in Hispanic marketing.