Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Juan Faura: Hispanic Marketing Grows Up
Hispanic Marketing Grows Up - Juan Faura
I picked this one up blind off the shelves, and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic. The author is the principal of noted Latino marketing agency Cultura and a former director at Cheskin. Juan's credentials are impeccable, and the book is everything you would expect from someone with his impressive background. First of all, I love the conversational, personal, yet authoritative tone. It's a welcome departure from the stuffy, phony writing I oftentimes associate with business books. It's much more like reading a blog or interview transcript.
Second, the book is absolutely crammed with insights, despite being relatively short. It's the product of hundreds of interviews and years of experience, all distilled into easily digestible but powerful nuggets. There are about a dozen composite profiles of different Latino consumers, chapters on acculturation, media, and other topics, but what really hit home for me were the 30 "perceptions and realities" about the Latino market, in which he lists typical assumptions we make about the Latino market and his take on them.
For example, the Latino market is broadly divided into people that speak primarily English, primarily Spanish, and those who are bilingual. The conventional wisdom is that primarily Spanish-speaking people prefer to consume Spanish media, but it turns out that isn't necessarily the case for a variety of reasons- social, political, cultural, and economic. Faura lists 29 more insights like this, all concise, impactful and very readable.
What I like is that he doesn't tell us that everything we thought we knew is wrong, that all the conventions of Latino marketing are wrong. Instead, he says they're basically correct, but that marketers need to understand their nuances and details in order to effectively understand the audience. It's a nice change of pace from the blowhards and pundits that crowd the business book market, and the book is worth reading for anybody in product development.
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