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Hispanic Business Magazine’s 2007 Woman of the Year Event Will Feature Blouse and Handbag Drive to Benefit Dress for Success Nonprofit

Published April 25, 2007

NEW YORK -- A thoughtful approach to targeting Hispanic small and medium-sized business owners will bring great results.

This was a key takeaway from Denise Marcilio, the marketing director for small and medium business in the personal systems group for the Americas at Hewlett-Packard Co., who was also the keynote speaker at the 14th annual DMA Directo Days conference.

“If you are going to do something in the Hispanic market, understand that it has to be a long-term commitment,” she said. “Once you start showing the numbers and providing ideas, and [proving] that you can bring results to the table, then you start getting trust and confidence from your stakeholders.”

Ms. Marcilio manages HP’s diversity initiatives for the SMB segment focusing on the Hispanic market and women-owned businesses.

Ms. Marcilio explained that there are about 2 million Hispanic-owned small and medium-sized businesses in the United States today, which generate $270 billion in sales per year. In 10 years, that number will increase to 8 million, Ms. Marcilio.

“Basically this growth had been driven by Hispanic women,” she said.

A concern for companies is how to communicate with these owners. Ms. Marcilio said that when HP has surveyed Hispanic business owners, in general, they said they prefer doing business in English.

While some HP sales reps work on a deal with Hispanic small and medium-sized businesses using both languages, closing a deal is done in Spanish.

HP has done several campaigns to target Hispanic small and medium-sized businesses, and many are focused on the Web. For example, it has launched a U.S. Hispanic small business Web site, presented in Spanish, and built to highlight the full portfolio of the company’s products and services for Hispanic-owned small and medium-size businesses.

It also has created several successful interactive campaigns using direct mail, including one launched that won several awards called “Recipe for your Business.”

“The campaign was dropped to high- and low-potential customers, and drove people to the Web,” she said. “It was done in both languages, and it was successful both internally and externally.”

It also has experimented with Spanish-language catalogs, along with a “Hispanic page” in a general market catalog.

While both worked just fine, Ms. Marcilio said the company has seen the best results from the U.S. catalog with one Hispanic insert.

“It worked much better then when we did everything to the Hispanic market only,”she said. “When you blend both things, that’s when it works better for us.”

The median age for the general Hispanic market is 27 (for the general population, the median age is 41); the average household size is 3.5 (2.4 for the general population); and half of all Hispanics are white-collar workers, middle class or higher, own their own homes and are married.

“We tend to think that Hispanics are low-income, that they had to cross the border, or that they are suffering because they have a family of 15 to support,” Ms. Marcilio said. “Please don’t stereotype Hispanics. Hispanics are no longer what they used to be when they were back in their countries. They stop at red lights, come to meetings on time and watch American Idol.”

In terms of marketing to Hispanics, Ms. Marcilio said direct mail should always drive traffic to the Web.

“Direct mail is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “At HP, the direct mail pieces have to drive people to the Web. The mail pieces have be so strong, so compelling and so perfect that it drives the person to the Web. The Web is where you can tell your entire story. Call volume and lead generation is most likely to happen through the Web.”

Ms. Marcilio said Hispanic consumers have a story of their own that marketers should know.

“When we talk about Hispanics, we are talking about somebody in a family who left something in their country of origin,” she said. “That is the starting point of an entire story that builds the cultural insight of the Hispanic market. There is this little piece of pain...of leaving the family...because they wanted something better. They wanted to try something new. That’s how everything started.”

Source: Seattle P.I.