My father was born in Argentina to Ukrainian parents.  When he moved our family to the United States in the 70’s we lived in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago.  My father’s parents hadn’t taught him Ukrainian because they wanted him to “fit in” in Argentina but living in the Ukrainian Village and not being able to speak Ukrainian made him feel like a piece of his identity was missing.  He, therefore, vowed to make sure his kids spoke fluent Spanish. For that, my brothers and I will be forever grateful since we’ve all benefitted tremendously in both our business and personal lives from being able to communicate in Spanish.

As a Hispanic market researcher, I’m sometimes asked how long the U.S. Hispanic community will continue to speak Spanish. 

When I was growing up I used to fear the ‘empacho’.  An empacho in Latin America is akin to indigestion but it’s not cured with antacid.  My aunt was a curandera from Argentina.  Curanderas are folk doctors in Latin America and are often consulted for physical as well as spiritual ailments.  If she saw that I was lethargic or otherwise not feeling well she would squint at me and announce “This child has an empacho!”  This is usually when I would run.  There are two cures for an empacho, one involves using a tape or ribbon that measures where in your body the empacho is and the other one 

I just finished taking a survey sent to me by a local arts venue where I’ve attended events in the past.  The survey asked me to indicate how often I go to cultural events and I noticed a strange urge in myself to overstate the number of events I go to in order to make myself feel more cultured than perhaps I really am.  I believe I successfully fought that urge but as a consumer market researcher it’s worrisome to me to think that I’m probably like most people and usually want to say the right thing and highlight my positives while downplaying or downright ignoring perceived negatives.

I saw a similar phenomenon first hand a few years ago after conducting some focus groups for a Spanish language television commercial and later running the ad through quantitative testing. 

“I never dated a Hispanic before.”  I heard these words from a girl in college that I was courting. Her words stopped me cold.  I was wondering where this “Hispanic” was and realized it was me.

I’m Argentinean of Ukrainian descent on my father’s side and Slovenian, Spanish and Italian on my mother’s side.  We moved to Chicago when I was four and lived in the Ukrainian Village where I attended a Ukrainian Catholic grammar school and was an altar boy in the Ukrainian church.  For much of my childhood I identified as Ukrainian even though we spoke Spanish at home.  I knew what it meant to be Argentinean and Ukrainian but I had no idea what being Hispanic meant. 

Marketers frequently struggle with whether they should communicate to Hispanic consumers in Spanish, English or both. In an ideal world, where budgets aren’t an issue, “both” would likely win out. This being the real world, it’s often necessary to decide where to allocate limited resources. When making this decision, marketers often turn to Census data for Hispanic market trends but the numbers often create more questions than answers. For example, according to the 2009 American Community Survey 70% of Hispanics speak Spanish at home but 77% speak English only, well or very well. Therefore ...

When initially thinking about the title for this blog, I wanted to come out with a bold, attention grabbing statement such as “2012 is the year of the MROC”. Then I realized that the market research blogosphere is flooded with these types of claims and this type of hyperbole made me realize that one cannot say that 2012 will be THE year of the MROC, but for your organization it should be.

I left one of the leading Hispanic Market Research agencies, Garcia Research Associates (recently purchased by Knowledge Networks & subsequently purchased by GfK) to start ThinkNow Research because I believe so strongly that the MROC is the future of market research, specifically Hispanic Market Research.

A few years ago, I compiled a list of Classic Hispanic Marketing/Translation/Advertising blunders.  As more companies enter the Hispanic advertising arena it might be useful to remind ourselves how things can go wrong if we’re not careful. There is some debate as to whether some of the following may be apocryphal such as the often stated Chevy Nova example but the point is that as new companies move into the Hispanic space they should be aware of the challenges of translating ad copy.  So here’s my list. Enjoy. 

• A major airline wanted to advertise its new leather first class seats and it translated its "Fly In Leather" campaign literally, which meant "Fly Naked" (vuela en cuero) in Spanish. 

• A beer company’s slogan, "Turn It Loose" was translated into "Suffer from Diarrhea" in Spanish.

• A candy manufacturer’s “Cajeta” means caramel to Mexicans, but to others in Latin America it refers to female anatomy.

Can you conduct Online Research among U.S. Hispanics?

We frequently get asked this question. The answer is a qualified “yes”. I say qualified because the online U.S. Hispanic population is decidedly diverse and having an understanding of its composition is required before engaging in any market research among this population.  Before setting quotas for a particular survey you need to first ask yourself which Hispanic population are you trying to read. I’m often surprised by requests to test Spanish language creative among acculturated, non-Spanish speaking Hispanics or requests that assume a homogenous whole.