Seeing Green in Valley’s Multicolored Market

Psst. Here’s a tip for businesses that want to make more money: Do more to reach out to ethnic consumers.

Over the years, the San Fernando Valley has changed from a fairly homogenous suburban enclave to a multihued mini-megalopolis, with rapidly growing numbers of Latinos, Middle Easterners, Asians and African Americans. A fresh new crop of potential consumers has money and is willing to spend it at businesses with an appealing pitch.

Sounds pretty basic.

Still, a surprising number of businesses in the Valley make little or no visible effort to woo potential wallet-bearing ethnic customers. That’s especially true outside of the northeast Valley.

Things are changing, local business experts say, and they cite an upcoming event as evidence.

On Saturday, the Mid Valley Chamber of Commerce, one of the largest in the Valley, will host its third annual Latino Consumer Expo, designed specifically for companies that want to tap into the burgeoning Latino market.

“If you want to do business with the Latino community, this is the expo you want,” said Nancy Hoffman, chief executive officer of the Mid Valley Chamber. The annual event held at Panorama Mall (adjacent to Wal-Mart), attracted about 5,000 consumers in its first year and more than 6,000 last year.

Several Valley business leaders described it as the only large-scale ethnic marketing effort they were familiar with in the Valley.

Why aren’t there more events or programs aimed at consumers of varying hues? No doubt it’s partly the nature of small business, which makes up the bulk of the Valley business structure. Too often, experts say, small business pays little attention to marketing of any kind, let alone targeting a specific ethnic group.

Beyond that, too many businesses have yet to reach the realization that it’s not as much about black or white as it is about green.

“Businesses should be tapping into different markets,” said Ross Hopkins, chairman of the United Chambers of Commerce, an umbrella group for 23 chambers in the San Fernando Valley. “If there are people out there with money and you’re not going after them, you’re not doing your job in trying to build your own business.”

While the population of nearly all ethnic groups in the Valley has increased substantially in recent years, the growth in the number of Latinos has been phenomenal.

Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that while the number of African Americans in the Valley grew by 50% between 1980 and 1990, to nearly 50,000, the number of Latinos more than doubled, rising to 385,184 in 1990.

And the upcoming 2000 census is expected to show even more growth in that market.

“I’d say you could double that,” said Carlos Garcia, president of Burbank-based Garcia Research Associates. Businesses, mostly national firms, come to Garcia to learn how to reach the Latino and African American markets.

He could think of only one local client--Glendale-based Nestle.

Nationwide, Garcia said, it is estimated that the Latino market boasts $1 billion a day in purchasing power. And with an estimated 20% of the Latino market residing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, clearly some of that money is ending up on the balance sheets of local firms.

But Garcia and others noted that several factors work against large-scale marketing efforts in the Valley, similar to those seen downtown and in eastern L.A.

For one, even though the perception remains that Latinos are clustered solely in the northeast Valley, growing enclaves in North Hollywood, Reseda and Canoga Park prove otherwise. The same is true for the Valley’s spread-out African American population.

A diffuse target is harder to hit.

Chamber officials routinely lament the lack of ethnic businesses on their membership rosters. More ethnic business owners could push for more target marketing efforts.

But the biggest stumbling block thus far to increased marketing, business leaders say, has been the lack of education. Business owners must be schooled on the how and the why, and not everyone is a quick study.

“It was a hard concept for a lot of our board members,” said Hoffman, describing the early efforts to launch the expo. “Even they thought you have to be a Hispanic business” to need an ethnic marketing program.

But the light bulb went off. And now between 40 and 50 companies, including names like Pacific Bell and Chase Manhattan Bank, will show their wares to an inquisitive throng from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The expo gives these firms a chance to impress and inform, via printed brochures and knowledgeable staffers. Consumers leave with more information on potential service providers and the businesses come away with scads of leads.

This year Hoffman noticed a definite increase in interest from the financial services sector, from banks to insurance brokers.

Garcia sees that as a sign of recognition from the financial community of the tremendous growth in the number of Latino-owned businesses in the Valley and throughout Los Angeles.

“Their interest is in the Latino entrepreneur,” said Garcia, noting an uptick in marketing efforts to Latino business owners nationwide. “They’re going to need banking, they’re going to need loans and insurance. These are very, very prime targets.”

And businesses that establish a “strong beachhead” among business customers will ultimately be better positioned to reach consumers, he said.

Richard Dominguez, who heads the Mid Valley Chamber’s expo committee, sees the event as something that could eventually be expanded to reach out to other ethnic groups, a sort of United Nations approach to marketing.

“This could be a starting-off point,” said Dominguez, former president of Industrial Bank. “Each year it gets a little easier to manage.”

Hoffman noted that once publicity began circulating about the expo, an angry phone caller labeled the event racist, asking why there was no white expo.

As a business reporter, I see no difference between marketing to ethnic customers and marketing to brides or anglers or skiers. You appeal to a group of consumers with like interests and try to get them interested in you.

As an ethnic consumer, I’ve bristled for years at promotional campaigns that exclusively featured blue-eyed blonds and seemed unconcerned about attracting me as a customer. So I see nothing wrong with companies finally waking up to the realization that the way to our wallets is through an approach that’s aimed at a broader segment of the populous.

So to those who foresee more overt efforts in the future I say, it’s about time.

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Valley @ Work runs each Tuesday. Karen Robinson-Jacobs can be reached at Karen.Robinson@latimes.com.