Hispanic Customers for Life

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in-culture and share-of-heart marketing. In this book she shows how the U.S. Hispanic market is shifting from a majority of customers who are unacculturated to a majority who were born in the United States and are melding the two cultures together in ways that make them an unprecedented marketing challenge.
The Hispanic market is experiencing its most important socio-demographic and cultural shift since its emergence as a powerful and distinct U.S. market segment. Hispanic Customers for Life: A Fresh Look at Acculturation, explores the present Hispanic generational crossover, providing insights, data and tools to manage the generational and acculturation differences among U.S. Hispanics, immigrants and their U.S. born offspring.
Ms. Valdes, a marketing expert, is recognized as the creator of the In-culture marketing approach. A lecturer and public speaker, Ms. Valdes has been studying and writing about the Hispanic market for more than 20 years. Her earlier books, Marketing to American Latinos, A Guide to the In-Culture Approach, Parts I and II, are classics used in many universities around the country and on the bookshelves of most multicultural marketers.
Although most news media speak of Hispanic consumers as only or mostly immigrants, in fact, in 2006 only 19.9 million Hispanics living in the U.S. were first generation or foreign born, whereas 24.8 million or 55 percent of the total were second, third or more generations and born in the United States. Add the 3.9 million Puerto Rican Islandersalso American citizensand the true size of the U.S.born Hispanic market today is nearly 29 million.
The growing segment of U.S. born Latinos poses unique business, marketing and communications challenges and opportunities. Ms. Valdes describes how to target them successfully for marketers of all kinds of products and services.She notes that there are two basic marketing platforms for Hispanics born in the United States:
The young millennial Latinos,the second generation youth marketchildren, teens, and young adults born to foreign-born parents.
The traditional Latinosthose born to Latino families that have been U.S. citizens for two or more generations.
By 2016, it will be a different Hispanic market altogether; the vast majority of Hispanics aged 20 to 29 will have been born in the United States. These Hispanic Twentysomethings will constitute a significant market segment - well acquainted with U.S. culture, however, as Ms. Valdes emphasizes, often born to at least one parent who was foreign born. Thus, straddling two cultures. In an important departure from the usual ways of viewing this market Ms. Valdes segments it by age and generation, highlighting the waves of acculturation per segment, simplifying a complex marketing landscape by helping marketers understand how different levels of acculturation change Hispanic consumer expectations and hence their responses to marketing messages. The Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia estimates that U.S. Hispanic purchasing power increased dramatically during the 1990s and has continued to rise into the 21st century, from $212 billion in 1990 to $736 billion in 2005, a 347 percent increase over the 15 year period.
Buying power is defined as the total personal (after-tax) income that consumers have to spend on goods and services, or disposable personal income. By 2010, Jeffrey Humphrey, director of the Selig Center, projects Hispanic buying power will top $1 trillion. By 2050, some estimates place the value of Hispanic consumer marketplace between $2.5 and $3.6 trillion.
The growing relevance of emotional marketing to build HeartShares, the how to's and new gold standards are described and illustrated with business case studies.
An additional value of the book is a comprehensive list of Hispanic-related websites, including marketing and advertising companies, trade organizations, non-profits, media, and researchers.