in Hispanic Economics
The Hispanic population in Utah has grown to about 229,386 or almost 10 percent of the state’s overall population according to recent U.S. census data. Diaz estimates the number of Hispanics is quickly getting closer to 12 percent for the state, of the roughly 16 percent total minority population. “Hispanics are definitely the largest minority in Utah,” she says, noting that cities like Salt Lake and Ogden have much higher saturation percentages. “The decade following 1990 saw our Hispanic population increase some 158 percent,” remarks Diaz, citing that the trend will continue, based on the estimate that by 2050 one in five Americans will be of Hispanic decent.
Utah’s businesses are responding to the obvious purchasing power of such a large population segment—which is estimated to be around $2 billion. Wells Fargo Bank continues to open bilingual branches, while Zion’s Bank is increasing the numbers of its Su Banco locations and has formed a multicultural retail region in Utah and Idaho. Holmes Homes also recognizes the community as a growing force in the area and is planning to sponsor a Latino home festival. Advertising agencies such as W Communications and Love Communications have added Hispanic branches to their operations, just to assist their clients in reaching these specific markets.
Many of these companies are turning to immigrants who start businesses and whose primary markets are their own ethnic communities as some of the best resources for learning smart minority-targeted marketing strategies.
Duvan Botero is one such gold mine of insider knowledge. He plied his personal familiarity with Latino culture to create demand for his product—a salsa dance experience—and has been successful tapping into this fast-growing market for about six years now.
Botero grew up in Columbia and spent weekends on a family ranch surrounded by the famed Columbian coffee plantations in the foothills of the Andes. As a child, he remembers telling his father, “Dad, let’s open up a club right here.” He can’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be around music. As a tenacious 25-year-old, he opened Mambo Club, which has become one of the longest running dance clubs in Salt Lake––not an easy feat for the notorious here-today-gone-tomorrow life of club ownership.
Botero points to his marketing know-how as a reason for his success, along with his belief that he has surrounded himself with loyal and honest employees. In May of 2004, he decided to end his joint venture at Mambo to open a new club called Karamba on 2100 South in Sugarhouse, which, at the time of this interview, catered to some 900 new customers.
Another Hispanic business-owner, Anna Marie Fereday, also branched out from creating a product targeted to her ethnic community to helping other businesses reach that segment of the population. Her idea to start the first Spanish yellow pages in Utah began with a desire to give her Spanish-only speaking parents a resource to find the information they needed to navigate a new country. “I was going around with them, showing them everything. They felt like little children,” she says.
So 13 years ago, Fereday started the Hispanic Yellow Pages using her own money to produce a simple 16-page two-color guide distributed to a few thousand people. At that time, there was not much in the way of local resource information in Spanish. She remembers driving around in her brown van and trying to hook people on buying an advertisement in her new publication. “I remember people saying, ‘I didn’t know there were Hispanics here in Utah,’” Fereday says.
At that time there were only about 20,000 Hispanics in the Salt Lake Valley. “I felt like I was in the jungle,” she says, “cutting my way through.” Today, the Hispanic Yellow Pages has evolved into a 320-page four-color publication with a circulation of 80,000 people across the state. The guide lists state and city government contact information, a calendar of Utah events in Spanish, and includes advertisements from all kinds of local businesses. Fereday painted her truck bright yellow and her product is now known in the Hispanic community as an important information source.
Botero not only helps businesses market to the Hispanic community, he also works to help the Hispanic community increase its influence on and in business. He is a member of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, helping young Latinos in public schools see the value of an education and their power as future business leaders. He founded the Columbian Association of Utah to unite the 3,000-some Columbians living in Utah, and also created the first Utah Salsa Congress, a three-day event around Labor Day that showcases some of the best Salsa dancers in the West.
Botero estimates that of Utah’s Hispanic population, Mexicans make up about 70 percent and Latinos (a combination of people from such countries as Columbia, Argentina, Cuba, and Chile) amount to about 30 percent. His eye is fixed on that 30 percent because he knows the Mexican crowd in Utah already has a half-dozen places to dance on the weekend: clubs like Tropicana, La Rumba and Mexican cowboy bars. “I focus on a niche market within a niche market,” Botero says.
He can immediately gauge the effectiveness of his marketing efforts by observing the sheer numbers of dance-goers who enter his club on a given night. He began targeting individual groups from Latin countries by inviting them to a special club night to celebrate their own culture. On Friday nights he rotated planning parties for people from such countries as Peru, Columbia, Argentina and Chile. He experimented with advertisements in different Spanish media channels like Telemundo, Univision and Bustos Media, which each target a different part of the Latin community. “I have been able to test all the different media channels on an individual basis,” Botero says.
When creating advertisements for specific targets, the devil is in the details. “You’ve got to have the right ingredients,” he says. “Everything could be right, but if I play the wrong Cumbia”—type of dance—“nobody will show up. You have to know enough about their culture so you can create a response.”
Fereday agrees. She recommends that corporations interested in marketing their products to Hispanics should take a jovial approach. “Hispanic people are warm; they like to feel welcome,” she says. One message that works well with Hispanics is to associate things with a fiesta or frivolity. “We like to have fun,” she says.
Fereday has practiced this marketing style and branded her Hispanic Yellow Pages by being involved in the community and by creating celebrations like the Hispanic Fiesta Days, which she started eight years ago and has blossomed into an annual event attended by thousands.
Fereday says she taught herself how to market to the Hispanic community and feels that many Anglo-based businesses only take a surface approach to enticing that segment of the population. Awkward translations of advertisements are just one example. She points to a few corporations that missed the mark: one hospital advertisement had 10 lingual errors and another bank’s ad used incorrect grammar.
Besides good translations, she says businesses need to be appropriate in the marketing messages that they create or else they might offend the very people they are trying to attract. “Corporations say, ‘We have Torres here, she speaks a little Spanish,she is our VP of marketing,’” she laments. “But Torres may have grown up in Texas and may not understand the culture or may not have grown up dancing on the weekends. You have to go to the native culture.”
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