Marketers Split on Using English to Reach Latinos : Concentrating on Spanish Language Ads Can Also Be a Mistake, Some Contend

Last year, Pepsi-Cola held a nationwide contest aimed at Latino consumers. The grand prize winners were to receive $150,000 toward the purchase of a house.

In Los Angeles, the contest was promoted primarily in Spanish. But in Albuquerque, N.M., the campaign was advertised mostly in English.

Pepsi’s reasoning: Most Latinos in Albuquerque had lived in the United States for generations and tended to use more English. In contrast, most Latinos in Los Angeles are relative newcomers and rely more on Spanish.

Carolyn O’Keefe, a marketing manager for Pepsi-Cola, says, “Just as you can’t generalize about the Anglo community, I’m not sure you can generalize about the Hispanic community” and assume they all understand Spanish. If surveys find that most Latinos speak English in a certain area, O’Keefe says, “you speak to them in English. We go with their needs.”

O’Keefe is one of a growing number of executives who have urged the use of English, as well as Spanish, to win the attention of this fast-growing pool of consumers. Using English, however, complicates the job of courting Latino consumers, and the practice has sparked some disagreements among Latino marketing experts.

At a recent conference sponsored by the Mexican American Grocers Assn., magazine publisher Arturo Villar surprised many by advocating the use of English along with Spanish to reach the majority of Latinos.

“You are not reaching most of the people if you use only Spanish-language channels,” said Villar, who publishes Vista, an English-language magazine aimed at Latinos. “Marketers who want to reach the whole Latino market need to use both languages.”

Others see it differently. James M. Loretta, a vice president at Strategy Research Corp., a Miami market research firm, says that to reach the majority of Latinos “I would use Spanish. It is the language that talks to them--to their heart.”

Estimates vary on what language the nation’s 20 million Latinos use. Market Development Inc., a San Diego research firm, estimates that 70% of Latinos can fully understand advertising in Spanish. Another 21% can understand advertising in Spanish just as well as they can in English. Only 9% cannot understand ads in Spanish.

However, researchers agree that the Latinos who can speak and understand English account for about 80% of the group’s $130 billion in annual purchasing power. And, thanks to assimilation, more and more Latinos will begin to rely on English.

Using only Spanish to reach Latinos is “a little simplistic,” said Ron Faber, a University of Minnesota professor who has studied Latino consumers. “That’s going to be more and more incorrect as time goes on” as Latinos begin to assimilate, he said. “Language dies out to some degree.”

The growing use of English among Latinos complicates efforts to reach the Latino market.

“You have to walk such a fine line from a creative standpoint,” said Henry Adams-Esquivel, a linguist and vice president at Market Development Inc. If advertisers are not careful, he said, “they can fall into a stereotype.”

For example, Adams-Esquivel says English-speaking Latinos often resent ads that feature characters speaking in heavy Spanish accents, men with bushy mustaches and women wearing their hair in a bun. “The English-speaking Hispanic does not want to seem himself portrayed like that.”

About 18 months ago, Lucky Stores considered installing Spanish-language signs in the interiors of 22 of its Los Angeles area supermarkets in predominantly Latino neighborhoods. But the idea was rejected in interviews with shoppers--Latino shoppers, in fact.

“There were some folks who took offense,” said Dick Fredericksen, the chain’s senior vice president of sales and merchandising. “They looked at it as if we thought they couldn’t read or understand English. These were Latinos that simply said ‘we don’t need any special treatment.’ ”

As a result, Lucky’s decided to install bilingual signs--in Spanish and English--in only four of its Los Angeles-area stores.

But not everyone agrees with the use of both Spanish and English in signs or advertising.

“The Hispanic tends to find it somewhat offensive,” said Adams-Esquivel of bilingual advertising. “The mixture is not a language. They say ‘do it one way or the other and do it well.’ ”

Several arguments advanced have been advanced for using Spanish in ads, even if they are directed at English-speaking Latinos. For the vast majority of bilingual Latinos, a message delivered in Spanish is about as believable as one in English, said Faber at the University of Minnesota. And, Faber added, the use of Spanish in an ad “does seem to create a desire for the product.”

The reason for that may be found in upbringing, researchers say. Nearly 93% of all Latinos say their first language was Spanish, according to Strategy Research Corp. “Usually one does not lose his native language within one’s lifetime,” Adams-Esquivel said. “One continues to use it for very personal decisions.”

Support for the continued use of Spanish is widespread among Latinos, marketing experts say. “We are firm believers in the use of Spanish,” said Villar, the publisher of Visa magazine. “We don’t think Spanish should be forgotten.”