Juan Tornoe

Hispanical Incorrectness

Hispanical Incorrectness /hiˈspanikəl_ˌinkəˈrektnis/ : The inappropriate use of language, ideas, policies, and behavior resulting in an offense to the Latino community as a whole or to an individual Hispanic.

Latinos, Cars, and Ford Motor Company

An interview with John Felice, General Manager Ford Lincoln Marketing

By Juan Tornoe

Through my good friend Alvaro Cabal, I had the opportunity to connect with John Felice last week. As mentioned above, John is the man at the wheel – pun intended – of all marketing efforts for Ford. He was kind enough to share with me many interesting insights on what’s going on in the industry, and specifically at Ford in regards to the Hispanic consumer and his company’s efforts to establish a strong relationship with Latinos.

Enjoy…

Juan Tornoe: Over the last year auto sales volume growth among Hispanics has over indexed in comparison to the General Market. What has Ford specifically experienced regarding Latino auto purchases?

John Felice: According to the data we have through June 2011, the Hispanic auto market is growing and recovering faster than its general market counterpart. Specifically, the Hispanic market has increased 23.8% and the general market has increased 17.5%

Year over year Ford’s Hispanic car mix has increased +6.0 ppts, 32% to 38%. Hispanics are back buying vehicles and looking for full efficient small cars with great design and features that complement their lifestyle. Ford Focus and Ford Fiesta are hitting that sweet spot.

If I was to pick a strategic priority for us, the one thing we could do better and put more emphasis on is growing our relationship and customer base with the Hispanic consumer.

It is time to raise awareness about the importance of the Hispanic consumer, because now Ford has a wider vehicle portfolio, beyond the trucks and crossovers; now we are right in the process of launching world-class small cars and crossovers. That gives us a great opportunity to have the right products at the right time for the Hispanic consumer.

Interestingly enough, each year we get our dealers together from around the country, and next week they are going to be here in Dearborn for our annual dealer meeting, and as the marketing guy, one of the few things I am talking about is the importance of the Hispanic market for them and their business. That’s how important it is to us.

JT: Could you share with us the themes that you will be covering during that meeting?

JF: We want to make sure that all the dealers are aware of the growth and importance of the Hispanic market, so we will be sharing some of the demographic trends, some of the industry trends – which I just mentioned. Also, we’ll share some hopefully eye-opening statistics around recent Census data showing the distribution of the Hispanic market; because people usually think of California, Texas and Florida, buy you look at the growth and it is everywhere in the U.S.! It’s not just a regional opportunity. Then we will be sharing them some of the marketing platforms that we have to improve our marketing to Hispanics. Things like increasing efforts in our Tier 2 (our Dealer Association), that is, working with our dealers collectively in our advertising to dedicate more resources to the Hispanic Consumer. We will also talk about some of our other very successful platforms, like Drive One 4UR School, which is a very successful community base program that we’ve had for many years, where the local dealer partners with the school and they set up a test drive event at the school property, and for every test drive there is a donation made to the school. Then the dealer gets to go to the school to support one of their sports teams or a building project, presenting them with a check for $4 or $5 thousand. It is a great win-win program because we get people exposed to our products and we get to give back to the local community. This year we have done these specifically targeting areas with high-density Hispanic populations, having all the language and making sure we have bilingual staff present. We are going to be expanding this effort going forward. Then we will talk specifically about them, about their staffing in their dealerships; do the local dealership’s sales and service teams reflect the community. 


JT: I understand that not only Latino auto purchases are increasing, but also there is a shift in the types of vehicles they are buying… Tell me what has Ford seen on this regard.

JF: A couple things we are seeing is a continued shift in segment preference, obviously Trucks and SUV’s have always been an important segment for the Hispanic market, but we are seeing more and more buyers – and this have been a trend over the last 10 years – shifting to smaller cars. That may be driven a lot by fuel efficiency or the makeup of the industry, but it is one of the trends we are seeing, especially towards the C Segment (like the Ford Focus or the Honda Civic) or the CD segment (like the Ford Fusion or the Toyota Camry), small and mid-sized cars.


JT: What are the main reasons Hispanics are migrating towards small cars, as you mentioned earlier?

JF: We have seen the same trend in the general market; in recent times fuel efficiency is so much more important, as gas prices have risen from $2 per gallon to $3 or $4 per gallon. The economic elements of that have given consumers the motivation to think about other alternatives. Do they really need the capability of a big SUV or can they have a car instead? The other systemic issue in the industry is that traditionally in the U.S., small cars have been “cheap and cheerful”, haven’t been with the latest technologies and features and all the things that consumers – both Hispanic and general market – want in a vehicle. This has quickly changed. For example, the new Ford Focus has all the latest technologies, has best in class fuel economy, the MyFord Touch and SYNC Technologies, Active Park Assist where you can literally take your hands off the wheel and the vehicle will parallel park itself, just by using the gas and break pedals. That is technology that you would only find in luxury cars before!

So again, the two big trends or key drivers would be the strength of the product offering in smaller vehicles and fuel efficiency.

We feel we are in a very good position to be in the right place at the right time with a product portfolio for the Hispanic consumer.


JT: What has Ford specifically done through their marketing efforts to connect with the Latino consumer?

JF: Part of it is having a dedicated Latino agency – Zubi Advertising – that works with us to be relevant to the Hispanic consumer, so we try to tailor our marketing messages specifically. It is a very important part of our marketing strategy to make sure that we are relevant and bilingual in our marketing communications. Also, we are very specific in tailoring our creative and other marketing assets to resonate with the Latino consumer; we get a lot of help from Zubi on that and that won’t change.

But, as I mentioned before, something that will be a specific point of discussion during our dealer meeting, is our engagement with our retailers and getting them more active.  I believe that is it very important to us to reach the Latino consumer at the community level. This is done through people and marketing platforms. If you take a very successful platform, like Drive One 4UR School and make it relevant, through having the right language capabilities and everything else, it can really help you connect with the Latino community. So we are evaluating our internal programs to do that.

We have three forms of auto advertising here in the U.S. We have Tier 1 or The Factory – my advertising, Tier 2 or dealer associations, and then we have Tier 3, which is your local dealer advertising. We have always had a Hispanic effort at the Tier 1 level; we are greatly expanding our Tier 2 advertising through various initiatives in Latino advertising; and the next step is to work with our retailers to not only advertise but to work to better meld into the fabric of the Latino community. Those are some of the things that we will be talking about in the meeting next week.

JT: Are there any media outlets that have you notice working better for Ford in reaching out to Latinos?

JF: We use several of the traditional media outlets – TV, radio & print – that have been utilized to reach out to Hispanics, but we have also found success away from traditional media in more experiential events where you interact with the Latino community vs. just trying to run advertising on various dedicated media.

Digital has also been a very successful media; with penetration in social media outlets such as twitter and facebook. We just opened our new facebook “Ford en Español” page; it is in a soft launch, so it is not officially out there, but it is coming up. Also, through Zubi, our Hispanic marketing team, we are working online with AOL, Univision, and Terra; the have been really successful platforms for us. We launched a very successful program for the Ford Fiesta called, “Ready pa’ tu Mundo” (ready for your world), which included a feature called a Slider, where you go from full Spanish, into Spanglish, or full English. 

JT: Anything else you would like to ad?
 
JF: I want to emphasize my personal passion to raise our awareness and market presence with the Hispanic Consumer. It is to me a tremendous strategic opportunity to Ford Motor Company; we have the right products at the right time.  

Note: Interview conducted on September 23, 2011

The Truth About Hispanics Online

By Juan Tornoe

Don’t get me wrong by what I am about to share with you. I am Google’s #1 admirer and avid customer, using them for just about anything I do online, on a daily – or should I say minute by minute – basis. Bottom line, I am not in a crusade to discredit them in any way, shape or form. Still, there are certain minor details or nuances that seem to have passed undetected on their recent outreach efforts to sell Google as the ultimate tool to reach Latinos. I’m certain that using the web, and Google specifically, is a great way to reach out to a very interesting segment of the Hispanic market, but you must really understand the different segments of the Latino community before making any serious investments to connect with them; you must really know your customer.

Google’s insightful results come directly from interviewing 4,117 Hispanics who are anywhere within the English-Spanish language spectrum, and are US residents age 18+, INTERNET USERS, who in the next 6 months intend to purchase items within at least one of the following categories: Auto, Retail (like a pair of socks at The Gap), Tech, and CPG (I’m guessing a pack of Trident gum counts). A quite broad, although interesting range of people.

Now let’s take a look at the pool from were this individuals were taken from. There are several estimates out there that put the number of Latinos currently online at least at 60% of the entire US Hispanic population. What is not mentioned along with such headlines is that “being online” is defined as “accessing the internet at least once a month for information or entertainment.” At the same time, we have been informed that only 1/5 of online Hispanics are “power users”, defined as those who spend 24 hours a week – about 3.5 hours a day – on the web. According to this last definition only about 12% of Latinos are “online power users.” A much less exciting number than the previously mentioned 60%, don’t you think? It takes one spending three and a half hours a day online to be considered a power user? In that case, I am a Triple-Platinum Ultra Super Power User! But I digress…

So, all the great information included in the Google “Four Truths About US Hispanic Consumers” presentation is definitely useful and worthy of notice, BUT it does not apply to the almost 47 million Latinos living in the US today, nor to the approximately 30 million Hispanics who access the web at least once a month, but it does to the 6 million (give or take a hundred thousand or so) Latino Power Users. Hey, although Latino Power Users still represent the population of a small country, and more importantly the kind of customer most companies salivate over (or should be salivating over), there are 24 million “online Latinos” for whom these numbers might not fully reflect their current web usage.

The Pew Hispanic Center reported in 2010 that 47% of Spanish-dominant Latinos use the internet, compared to 74% of bilingual Latinos and 81% of English-dominant Latinos. By taking these numbers into consideration along with the information shared above and the wealth of data included in the Google presentation, it is likely that most of those Latino Power Users are either English-dominant or bilingual.

Curiously, the Google Insights report along with its case study videos actually reinforces this fact. The “Four Truths About US Hispanics Online” as well as “Connecting with Hispanic Moms Online” videos show English-dominant Latinos sharing how they are connected to the web on a constant basis visiting sites like TED, The Weather Channel, Newsweek, facebook & Gmail (using English language interfaces), The Colbert Report, Fandango, Sports Authority, Macy’s, Orbitz, searching for “best price for tvs” on Google… You get the picture.

Then, when you watch the case studies for Kraft and General Mills, you see takes of the same English-dominant Hispanics, actually navigating the web in English combined with others takes of the corporation’s staffers sharing their success stories and of their Spanish Language websites.

Yes, Kraft’s Comida y Familia and General Mills’ Que Rica Vida are Spanish-only websites that, independently of the great results they are certainly getting, I don’t believe are the first choice for obtaining this kind of information on the web for the “cream of the crop” Latino Online Power User that is being presented.

There is one thing that is being overseen here: Hispanic Marketing is NOT Spanish marketing! The Latino market is quite complex and diverse, with a wide range of levels of acculturation, assimilation, language preference, etc… When you are marketing to Latinos, it is quite risky, and inaccurate, to say that you are helping them navigate life in the US… What about those 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ generation Latinos that have only been exposed to this lifestyle since the moment they were born? They might just be listening to Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” on their iPads, as one of them is actually doing on one of these videos!

Yes, I am using and will continue to use the internet and Google specifically to reach a very profitable segment of the Latino Market, and recommend you do as well. Yes, I believe there is a great opportunity to reach out to Spanish-dominant Latinos using the web – as Kraft and General Mills have been doing – and will continue preaching just this. Still, you must be careful on how you build your case; the worst thing that can happen is having many advertisers jump into the “Reaching Latinos Online in Spanish” bandwagon, just to become disenchanted because their results don’t meet the high expectations that were set. It is much better to follow one of Tom Peter’s formulas for success: under promise and over deliver.

Reach Latinos through 'the culture,' speaker urges business leaders

March 22, 2011
By Ron Cammel

The growing Latino market is diverse and cannot be reached by clichéd sales pitches, Juan Tornoe told hundreds gathered for the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce awards ceremony Monday at the JW Marriott.

But that did not stop him from having some fun with stereotypes.

Tornoe, a national business consultant and blogger of Hispanic Trending, summed up the growth in the U.S. Hispanic population quite simply: Salsa now outsells ketchup.

But he was serious about businesses reaching the estimated 47 million Latinos in the United States, or 16 percent of the population, whose buying power has grown much faster than the non-Hispanic population’s.

How does a business connect?

“It’s the culture, stupid!” he said.

“Hispanic people overwhelmingly say they want to preserve their families’ culture,” Tornoe said. “If you speak to the heart of the Latino community, it goes a long way.”

He said Latinos value social harmony, social flexibility and social speed — they tend to become friendly faster. It’s important for sales people to spend a little more time on the small talk and getting to know a person in the Hispanic community before talking business, he said.

And family comes first, he said. Hispanic women are a growing force in Hispanic-owned businesses, not for the wealth, but to look out for the interests of their families, he said.

Don’t assume Hispanics want to be spoken to in Spanish, he said. The large majority of Hispanics who use the Internet regularly, for example, use English sites.

If you want to joke around with “Spanglish,” be careful, he cautioned. Some advertisements have turned off the Hispanic community. Regular English-to-Spanish translations are difficult enough: A T-shirt hawked after the pope’s visit to Miami read in Spanish, “I saw the potato.”

Tornoe said businesses reaching out to Hispanics need to remember the broad range of income, education and social levels, while recognizing some common cultural characteristics.

But in any case, the Hispanic market is here to stay, he said. “It’s not a matter of when you reach them. You will. It’s a matter of understanding them.”

Source: MLive.com

Cuidado con las Jergas de los Distintos Segmentos del Mercado Hispano

Por Juan Tornoe

De la forma en que hoy en día el mercado segmenta a la comunidad hispana, pareciera que todos somos un uniforme y gigantesco bloque de 17 millones de individuos que aumenta en número cada día. En muchos casos, como lo he mencionado anteriormente, hasta se considera que mercadear a hispanos es mercadear en español. De ser este el caso, que no lo es (hay un gran número de latinos que no hablan español en lo absoluto), sería contraproducente asumir que el español es una lengua estática la cual se puede utilizar de exactamente la misma manera en cualquier parte del planeta en el que se hable. Debo recalcar que estamos hablando de conectar emocionalmente con personas para persuadirles a hacer lo que queremos que hagan, o sea, mercadearles nuestros productos o servicios.

Buena suerte tratando de mercadear sus productos en Colombia utilizando jerga, modismos y regionalismos de Argentina o México. De la misma manera, la comunidad hispana en los Estados Unidos es tan diversa y está tan dispersa a nivel nacional que se debe tomar en consideración su composición en el mercado que usted desea alcanzar antes de comenzar a crear una campaña publicitaria o cualquier otro tipo de comunicación.

Al hablar de composición del mercado me refiero a los porcentajes de los subgrupos de la comunidad hispana que habitan en el territorio que usted sirve (ya sea desde un vecindario hasta la nación completa). ¿La mayoría son mexicanos, cubanos, portorriqueños, dominicanos, salvadoreños, colombianos, o nicaragüenses? Aunque el mayor porcentaje de los Latinos son de origen mexicano, es un error asumir de primas a primeras que el utilizar modismos mexicanos es la mejor forma de hablarle a su público. Por ejemplo, aproximadamente el 45% de dominicanos viviendo en Estados Unidos radican en la ciudad de Nueva York; de igual manera, 50% de los cubanos viviendo en este país residen en el condado de Miami-Dade en la Florida. Otro dato interesante es el hecho que a nivel nacional, los salvadoreños en el 2008 por primera vez en la historia sobrepasaron en número a aquellas personas de origen dominicano, convirtiéndose en el cuarto grupo hispano en cuánto a cantidad de población, atrás de los mexicanos, portorriqueños y cubanos, en ese orden.

¿Cómo le afecta esto a usted y a su negocio? Déjeme darle algunos ejemplos. Algunos artículos/productos tienen nombres completamente distintos dependiendo del origen de las personas a quien se dirija. Lo que para un mexicano son “frijoles”, para un chileno son “porotos” y para un dominicano son “habichuelas”. En otras situaciones la mismísima palabra tiene otro significado y hasta puede tener un significado completamente opuesto. “Ahorita” para un guatemalteco significa “inmediatamente”, mientras que para un costarricense la misma palabra quiere decir “eventualmente”.  Estos son ejemplos “para todo público”; existen otras palabras que son de uso común y corriente para un grupo pero que son vulgares para otro; se debe tener muchísimo cuidado.

Así puede usted comprender porqué es importante conocer a fondo a su público, conocer su jerga, sus modismos y hasta los acentos con los que hablan. Haciéndolo logrará comunicarse con ellos de una manera más poderosa, más efectiva, ganando tanto sus mentes como sus corazones, todo gracias a que usted hizo un esfuerzo adicional en conocerles mejor y utilizar este conocimiento para comunicarse con ellos de tal manera que se establezca un vínculo emocional más fuerte con su empresa que con la competencia. En esta época en que todo consumidor es bombardeado constantemente por miles de mensajes publicitarios, esto hará la diferencia entre que su mensaje publicitario se diluya con todos los demás o que sobresalga y acapare la atención de su clientela. 

Regionalized vs. "Walter Cronkite" Spanish

By Juan Tornoe

So you have come to the conclusion that you must reach out to Spanish dominant Latinos utilizing ads in their language. Now the question is what kind of Spanish should you use? Well, Spanish Spanish right?

Well, it is not always as simple as that.

When reaching out to Spanish speakers you first need to define the specific segment of the market you will be talking to. It can go from reaching all Spanish-dominant Latinos in the U.S. to those in a specific city or even part of a city, and everything in between. For example, around 45% of the Nation’s Dominicans live in New York City, and about 50% of Cuban-Americans live, no wonder, in Miami-Dade County. If you are marketing your products and services in Los Angeles, you need to take into consideration that there resides the biggest concentrations of Central Americans in the United States; Salvadorans being the second-largest immigrant community in the city.

Even though more than 65% of all Hispanics are from Mexican descent, you cannot immediately assume that reaching out to all Latinos using Mexican dialect will be an immediate home run.

You must take into consideration that different words in regionalized Spanish have the same English meaning, and that a specific Spanish word may have different meanings in Spanish – and English - depending on the community you are talking to.

Some examples:

• A car is a car all across America; in México a car is called a “coche”, in Guatemala a “carro”. The interesting thing is that in Guatemala, a “coche” is a pig, not a car!
• Depending on the country of origin of Hispanics beans can be referred in Spanish as “frijoles”, “habichuelas”, “porotos”, or “frejoles”.
• The Spanish term “guagua”, for Cubans is a bus while for Chileans is a small child.
• “Ahorita” means “right now” for Guatemalans, while for Costa Ricans has the exact opposite meaning, “later”.

 

Indeed, even though the majority of Hispanics in America are from Mexican descent, the percentage distribution varies a lot depending on the location you are aiming to reach them at. IF you are one of the companies that cater to the entire nation and have budget allocated to do Spanish advertising it is quite safe to say that utilizing Journalist Spanish, that is Spanish without any regional wording, accent or undertone: Walter Cronkite Spanish, would work just fine for you. Now, if you really have deep pockets and want to connect in a much deeper emotional way with all your audiences, create message variations for your campaign adapting to the demographic/ethnic makeup of the different regions you will target; this is what separates the men from the boys when marketing nationally.

For the rest of us who market day in and day out to clients in a specific city or region, my strong suggestion is that you do your home work and figure out the composition of your Spanish speaking clients and prospects as far as country of origin/heritage comes, and adapt your message accordingly, using as much as possible regional words, accents and even slang to get your message across in the most powerful and relevant way.

Spanish dialects vary, just as American English has differences with British, Australian and even Canadian English, eh? Please do keep this in mind for your next Spanish language advertising campaign.

Hispanic Marketing is NOT Spanish Marketing

By Juan Tornoe

There is a big misconception amongst many in the business world that marketing to Latinos equates doing so in Spanish. Given the fact that out of the 21 Spanish- speaking countries in the world, the United States ranks at a whopping número 2, you can partially understand why corporate America is under such impression.

To make right decisions it is of utmost importance to have access to straightforward facts coming from reliable sources. This fact could not be more critical as when deciding in which language to market to the largest minority in the country.

Looking at recent numbers from a Simmons national survey on Hispanics, we encounter the following information regarding language usage: 22% use only Spanish, 32% use mostly Spanish, 10% are fully bilingual, 22% use mostly English, and 14% use English only. Slicing and dicing it in different ways we can see that in one way or another 86% use Spanish while 78% use English; also we can see that 54% are Spanish-dominant, 10% are bilingual, and that 36% are English-Dominant. These aren’t obscure, hard to get numbers, so it makes you wonder why Latino outreach efforts don’t always reflect this reality.

It saddens me to see that almost every time a company “discovers” that Hispanics could actually be buying from them in larger numbers and decides to make an orchestrated effort to turn them into customers, their trailblazing efforts usually go from, at the very best, a direct translation of their current English ads (be it in print, electronic, radio, or my un-favorite, adding a Spanish voice over to an English TV ad). This approach by itself, is lame, many times counterproductive, and exudes a lack of understanding of the Latino market as well as the willingness to learn more about it.

What about those English dominant Latinos, all 36% of them or almost 17 million, give or take a few hundred thousand? The standard answer I get when asking this question is, “We already got them covered with our general market campaign.” Not necessarily, I reply. Knowing little or no Spanish is not the same as being fully assimilated and/or acculturated into the mainstream America. They may not be watching the latest telenovela on Univision, but it is very likely that the advertising they are being exposed in English language channels is not utilizing any Hispanic cultural insight to capture their attention in the current hyper-fragmented media landscape.

Then there are the 4.7 million bilinguals (or 10% of the Latino market)… Do you advertise to them in English, Spanish or both?  I would say that this highly coveted segment of the Hispanic market should have the option to learn about your company in their language of choice. If you are selling cookies, cola, or any other widely used consumer packaged good, it is likely that a good English language campaign – with at the very least a tidbit of information that speaks to their culture – will do the trick. But if your product is more complex, unfamiliar, or an individual is not acquainted with its industry jargon in English, a fully bilingual person might be much more receptive to information in Spanish. I know, I’ve been there & done that myself.

Yes there is certainly room, and I believe there will always be an interesting market to reach with Spanish advertising, but it is a part, not the whole, of Hispanic Marketing. 25+ Million Spanish dominant Latinos living in America today are quite an interesting target market, don’t you think?

Bottom line, we are way beyond “se habla español” when marketing to Latinos.

Product Labeling for the Hispanic Market

By Juan Tornoe

Not all Latinos speak Spanish. This is a market truth many fail to recognize. On top of that even if a Hispanic is bilingual, you should not immediately assume you will be able to reach him or her in Spanish. Many of us either because we are more comfortable with it or want/need to practice it, will go to the English language copy.

That said, I strongly, emphatically, and urgently encourage you to always aim to provide bilingual labeling for your products. There are two strong reasons for doing so. First, there are enough Spanish dominant Latinos out there that want your product – anyone’s product for that matter – to justify stamping product description, any required product fact, an your promotional calls to action “en Español.” Simply picture yourself walking into a store in Seoul, South Korea – assuming you are not fluent in Korean –desperately craving for a whatchamacallit. You stroll down the aisles until you finally find them… There are 8 different brands, with bold letters and bright colors hollering for your attention. One problem though, you can’t read Korean, so all these attention grabbing efforts are Chinese to you! Finally, you notice that one brand just happens to include English – although in a smaller font and clearly including less information than that in Korean - on its label. Ah! You grab it and dash to the cash register, wons (Korean mulah!) in hand. Did you care if this was the number brand in town or if their advertising campaign was the most creative and/or the one with the vastest reach, if the packaging material was the most slick or if its design was far superior to the rest?   Did it matter if the ingredients (or contents) satisfy your every need and requirement? Of course NOT! What mattered was that you were able to find what you were looking for and made sure, through reading the label in your language, that it was good enough and it satisfied your immediate want. This happens every day across the entire good ‘ol U.S. of A. to Spanish dominant Latinos going down millions of aisles looking for the products they need. Are you connecting to them? 

The second reason for adding Spanish to your product’s labels has to do with the psyche of bilingual and English dominant Hispanics. Going back to the Seoul example from above, let’s say that you are fully bilingual in English and Korean; under exactly the same set of circumstances mentioned, you would be able to select a given brand you previously knew about and now have right there in front of you, or if you were not familiar with any of the brands available for that product line, you would be able to review the package and labeling to make a decision on which specific one you would end up buying.  How do you suppose you’d feel while scanning through all the different whatchamacallit options when suddenly you realize that one of those is making the effort to reach out to YOU in your mother tongue? I assure you, if you’ve never experienced something similar, that you get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. There is a somewhat subconscious emotional connection between you and the brand that’s talking to you in the language that you are most familiar with, that cares enough to go the extra mile, to invest a little more to make their product available to you and those who find themselves in a similar position. That emotion most often leads into action and right there and then, if your product has what it takes, you have a golden opportunity to convert these individuals into loyal customers. Isn’t that’s what’s all about.

One final word of advice: Do invest in having a professional translate your labeling information; an expert that not only understand the language, but understand both marketing and cultural issues in order to assure that the correct messaging is being delivered.

When Bad Translations Happen to Good People

I was thrilled to learn earlier today that the Internet Innovation Alliance was launching an effort to reach out to Spanish speakers in the U.S. informing them about their efforts to achieve universal broadband availability and adoption, "Because every American should have access to broadband Internet". 

Unfortunately, when I eagerly visited the site, I stumbled into a welcome message, in big bold letters which greets visitors to the Spaniard (as in from Spain) section of their site, rather than the Spanish Language one (as in "En Español"): Bienvenido a IIA Española.

 

There are other translation mistakes on this page snapshot, but the one mentioned above stands out because of how prominent it is, not to mention that it appears twice.

That's why I always say that a good translation is worth MY weight in gold!

‘Hispanically’ speaking: translation and persuasion for Spanish-speaking America

August 14, 2009

By Juan Tornoe

When marketing to a culturally & ethnically diverse audience in the United States, you really need to put your money where your mouth is if you want to secure a specific segment of the community as loyal, long-term customers...

Please visit Lingo24's International Marketing Blog to continue reading this post, which was my first contribution to their blog.