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Targeting Hispanics starts with organizational readiness, says Terry J. Soto, who recently wrote the book Marketing to Hispanics.

The rapidly growing Hispanic population in the U.S. is one of the most sought-after market segments this decade, with purchasing power in the United States expected to reach as much as $1 trillion by 2007.

But for many companies targeting this lucrative marketing segment, success isn’t always guaranteed.

Even companies with a reputation for well-planned and –implemented programs often fail to do their homework, apply the necessary analytical frameworks, and set the foundation, resulting in false starts and initiatives that don’t achieve the necessary internal traction.

In her book Marketing to Hispanics: A Strategic Approach to Assessing and Planning your Initiative, Terry J. Soto, President and CEO of About Marketing Solutions, provides an in-depth view of the strategic planning process companies need.

‘It’s critical that you begin your strategic planning process with some groundwork that involves assessing your organization’s readiness to serve Hispanic consumers’, says Soto. ‘Unless your company specifically targets Hispanics, your business model wasn’t created with Hispanics in mind, so there will be areas within your organization that aren’t set up to integrate this market’s requirements into their daily operations.’

Start by asking yourself a series of questions:

- Do you know what your company needs to deliver? You’ll know this from having done an extensive external assessment that covers not only the market’s needs and preferences, but also what your competition is doing to address them based on industry trends.

- Do you know which parts of the organization will be affected or will affect your ability to create a competitive advantage? In other words, do you know where your strengths and weaknesses are across your strategic, operational and organizational areas?

- Based on this discovery process, what critical issues or barriers will surface, that will need to be addressed within your Hispanic market strategy and the implementation plan that result from it?

Unless you’ve assessed what’s possible in your organization, you won’t be able to develop, much less implement, a strategy that your organization is willing, able and ready to carry out.

Source: Progressive Grocer

With almost 5 million people out of work, Germany’s labor market might seem a manager’s dream when it comes to filling jobs - easy pickings from a sea of desperate applicants.

Not so for entrepreneur Martin Hubschneider when he needs top talent for his software firm in Karlsruhe, Germany. He’s got to look far and wide, searching for the skills needed to develop the complex customer relations programs his CAS Software sells. “For a year now, it has been harder to find employees in the information technology field, particularly highly qualified ones,” Hubschneider said. Bosses like Hubschneider are confronting a paradox: In a country with unemployment of over 10 percent, there is a deepening shortage of skilled workers in some industries.

Rich European nations like Germany and France have been cracking down on immigration in reaction to concerns about joblessness, but many economists say Western Europe needs precisely the opposite approach: attracting foreign labor to offset a graying population. Over the next decade and beyond, experts say, more overseas workers will be needed to keep companies like Hubschneider’s competitive, prop up shaky pension systems and fuel economic growth.

Many leading economists and politicians say Germany, France, Great Britain and other western European countries could use a point system like the kind used by Canada, New Zealand and Australia, where prospective immigrants get graded on meeting skills criteria. In June, France passed a law that stiffens rules for immigrants but makes it easier for those with special skills to get in. But the notion of a point system has been slow to catch on in Europe and faces strong resistance from center-left parties.

The eastern expansion of the European Union has often been cited as a way to ease the labor crunch. But here, too, there is a problem: Most of the new members that joined in 2004 also have low birthrates. Poland’s, for example, is 1.3 children per woman - far lower than the 2.1 needed to maintain steady population. Fresh supplies of labor, it seems, may have to come from farther afield - the EU’s near neighbors such as Ukraine or Turkey, which have ambitions of joining the bloc, or from China or India.

BITKOM, Germany’s high-tech association, reported in its annual survey that 33.1 percent of member companies reported having difficulty recruiting, up from 22.6 percent last year and 14.9 percent in 2004. Some economists argue that a point system would promote social equality in the host nation.

Jakob von Weizsaecker, a former World Bank economist at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, argued recently in a policy paper that attracting highly skilled immigrants depresses wages in the professional sector, reducing the overall income gap. In contrast, he said, a bias toward low-skill immigrants causes wages to fall toward the bottom of the economic scale, increasing wealth inequalities.

Moreover, favoring workers with higher skills would make it easier for existing immigrants to find jobs in the low-income sectors hardest hit by unemployment, reducing the risk of an ethnic underclass, von Weizsaecker argued.

But for now, many companies are looking at homegrown solutions. Hubschneider’s CAS Software, which makes software that helps companies keep track of their customers, is working with the nearby University of Karlsruhe to develop candidates among both foreigners and Germans. “We need very well educated people, who understand the culture well,” he said.

Source: workpermit.com, August 17, 2006

In Europe many advertisers and ethnic media interact in local European languages when targeting second-generation Turkish, Moroccan, Asian or other ethnic consumers. On the contrary, in the U.S. many advertisers and ethnic media are used to address consumers in specific community languages such as Spanish, Cantonese, Russian or Hindi.

But this trend is changing, according to Teresa Bouza of Agencia EFE. We have already seen that the new MTV TR3S channel will use a mix of the Spanish and English language as well as a mix of English- and Spanish-language music to target the Latino youth in the U.S. Now Toyota, McDonald’s and Reebok are among heavyweight companies increasing their use of English-language advertising when seeking to reach U.S. Hispanics, especially younger ones born in their parents’ adopted country. These companies are leading a new marketing trend that, according to some experts, has enormous potential.

“I worked at Univision for three years and I quit because I realized that most Latinos don’t watch television in Spanish,” said Robert Ross, president of AIM TV, which produces two programs a week in English for a young Hispanic audience. He said Hispanic young people “are very Latino, but they live their life in English.”

McDonald’s says it wants to reach out to second-generation Latinos and will be devoting a growing proportion of its Hispanic-targeted marketing budget to ads in English, even though the overall percentage remains small. “Speaking only in Spanish limits us a little,” Rick Marroquin, McDonald’s director of marketing for the Hispanic market, told EFE. He said that “85 percent of our media advertising budget for the Hispanic market goes to Spanish-language publications or TV.”

Executives with automaker Toyota, which recently filmed a new bilingual commercial, are also looking for the best way to reach out to second-generation Hispanics. Kim McCullough, marketing manager at Toyota, said that “Latino youth are multi-cultural” and move in two different cultural and linguistic circles. For that reason, she said the company often opts for bilingual commercials that have a universal message and in which the actors switch effortlessly from one language to the other. Shoe manufacturer Reebok is another company seeking to appeal to young Hispanics in English, having launched a Website in that language last year. The website is heavily focussed on popular music styles like reggaeton, currently hot among the Latino youth.

In 2004, 65 percent of Hispanics living in the United States had been born in that country, up sharply from the 1970s and 80s when most Latinos had been born abroad, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics. The Pew Hispanic Center, meanwhile, estimates that by 2020 75 percent of Hispanics will have been born in the United States.

Hispanics make up the biggest minority in the United States, numbering just over 40 million in an overall population nearing 300 million.

Main source: Teresa Bouza of Agencia EFE

The popularity of YouTube is growing at an astronomical rate, as web traffic to the video-sharing site grew 75% just in the week ending July 16, from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Traffic to the site has grown nearly threefold since January, making it the fastest-growing site online. Still without an ad model, YouTube is signing sponsorships as its web traffic soars.

The number of web pages viewed on the site has grown at an even faster pace, increasing 515%, from 11.8 million in January to 72.4 million in June, Nielsen finds. The average time spent at the site has increased 64% during the same period, from just more than 17 minutes to nearly 28 minutes.

The users of YouTube are from culturally diverse backgrounds (just like many other large mainstream communities) but the characteristics of YouTube as a video-sharing community is giving us something more. YouTube is giving us an insight view into a wide variety of different cultures and languages, both within and outside the United States. The large number of users with an Asian background is striking, as well as the large number of music videos from different cultures and continents.

In about a year and a half, founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have watched YouTube go from a video-sharing site for their friends to the most-visited video service online, attracting more than 20 million U.S. users in May - compared with 11.1 million for Microsoft’s MSN Video. The two have become the envy of every media company from New York to Los Angeles, as evinced by Mr. Hurley’s belle-of-the-ball status at last month’s elite Allen & Co. media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Still in the process of building its advertising model and sales team, YouTube is experimenting with a number of sponsor partnerships. Last month, NBC struck a deal with YouTube to promote its fall TV lineup just months after ordering the site to take down copyrighted video. Under the terms of the agreement, NBC is creating an official NBC Channel on YouTube to house its fall preview with exclusive clips to promote shows such as “The Office.” And earlier this month, Walt Disney tapped YouTube to promote “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” with rich-media banner ads.

Men are 20% more likely to visit YouTube than women, with unique audience composition indexes of 113 and 88, respectively, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Visitors between 12 to 17 years old index the highest among the various age groups, at 142. They are nearly 1.5 times more likely than the average web user to go to YouTube.

Source: Advertising Age