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HISPANIC MARKET OVERVIEW 2019 Powered by HispanicAd.com
This mindset dates to the mid-2000s, when Carl Kravetz served as Chairman of what was then AHAA
and members including Mr. Lopez Negrete worked on the 2008 Latino Identity Project.
He comments, “We adopt language. We adopt certain things that are contextual factors of culture. But
there are not culture identity markers.”
Mr. Lopez Negrete invites a reporter to imagine a jigsaw puzzle, where one sees the big pieces – those are the markers of identity. The smaller pieces then are built around those bigger pieces. This metaphor is how he wants all marketing professionals to consider the Hispanic consumer of 2019.
It will help in getting them to perhaps understand that, in his opinion, not all acculturation is the same.
“We’ve all had different models of this integration if you will,” he says, noting the IAG Research index used in the late 2000s, championed by such industry pioneers as Lionel Sosa and Ernest Bromley.
“This integration resulted in this really bilingual, bicultural middle, and I think marketers are
conveniently interpreting it wrong,” Lopez Negrete believes. “There seems to be confusion or blindness – yet it is more important than ever to play to those cultural markers of identity.”
This is where Lopez Negrete’s natural passion powers the words that flow from his mind.
“It’s weird that marketers are so willing to use non-ethnic work to cover multicultural basis, whether it
is Hispanic or African American or Asian,” he says. “They are so afraid to use multicultural work driven by multicultural insights in their mainstream work – and I only say it to illustrate how ridiculous it is when you see how multicultural the mainstream is. You’d think it would make more sense to drive to that then use non-ethnic work to cover the base. Why are marketers so intent on suffocating the multicultural work?”
Suffocate. That’s a strong word. Why does Lopez Negrete use it?
“Marketers always start with the question of what’s so different about this,” he explains. “Instead, they should ask what is important to these multicultural audiences. Then you start holistically with a plan that is going to win all of the segments.”
It is why Mr. Lopez Negrete thinks clients were braver and more willing to take leaps 15 years ago then they are today.
Is it the political climate of today? “In my heart I think no but it is certainly harder now, even when there is so much talk about it,” he admits.
Mr. Lopez Negrete spoke with Hispanic Market Overview on June 7 in Houston, one day after his attendance at the American Advertising Federation (AAF) MOSAIC Awards at the Diplomat Resort in Hollywood, Fla.
While he was largely pleased with the work honored, he still wonders if marketers are still just checking “the D&I box” without representation and participation and not “just casting.”