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Meet Tania a 'New Latina'

Affluent and educated, a younger generation fuels shift in perception

Tania Marquez is a Phoenix advertising executive who not only specializes in Arizona's Hispanic market, she is the Hispanic market.

The 29-year-old Latina marketing manager with Cramer-Krasselt, a national advertising agency with a Phoenix office, also is one of many Latino advertising professionals who are defining, quantifying and selling to the fast growing Hispanic market in Arizona. Her main job responsibility is to develop strategies that will capture the hearts, and dollars, of Latino consumers for C-K's clients.

And she has a big job, because the state's Hispanic market has evolved into the fastest growing segment of the Arizona consumer market.

Hispanic buying power is $21 billion in Arizona, and expected to reach $31 billion by 2009. Our state is now the ninth largest Hispanic market in the United States, according to Datos 2006, an annual study compiled by the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Arizona State University and Salt River Project.

Hispanics comprise one-quarter of all Arizonans. Arizona is home to 1.6 million Latinos, of which 500,000 are recent immigrants. And Latino consumers spend more than non-Latinos in many retail categories, such as groceries and children's clothing.

Valley marketing executives say that some hot growth areas of Latino consumers include the areas of health care, housing, financial services and products, and arts and culture.

In addition, the picture of Hispanics that emerges from recent studies on the burgeoning Latino population shows radically different profiles than the ones held by most non-Hispanics.

For instance, Latinos shift from Spanish to English with each generation. By the third generation, English dominates. About 75 percent of Arizona Latinos speak English only or are bilingual.

The new data acts as a stereotypes buster, and demonstrates the growing influence of Latinos on Arizona business growth through their collective buying power.

The statistics also portray Latinos as imbedded through Arizona communities, instead of being segregated in barrios by language, geography, or economics.

The reality is that now when people talk about any aspect of Arizona society - business, politics, education, health care - they cannot do so any more without taking the Hispanic market and influence into account.

NEW LATINO

Latinos like Marquez are mirrored in studies conducted on the Hispanic market locally and nationally. These studies include Datos, the 2006 SRP Arizona Business Study, the New Latino Track Study, and Scarborough Research.

For example, Tania was brought here as a baby from her birthplace in Mexico. She attended Xavier private high school and got her degree from Arizona State University. Like many Arizona Latinos, she's acculturating into U.S. society and achieving the American Latino Dream, while remaining proud of her Mexico roots.

Marquez grew up in two cultures, Mexican and U.S., and is what marketers refer to as a "Bi-Bi" (pronounced "bye bye."), which means bilingual and bicultural.

Other marketing labels for Marquez are New Latina (young, educated, professional, mother or child-bearing years, active consumer) and New American (English dominant, Internet savvy).

Her preferred language in public is English, but she still retains some Spanish. At home she switches back and forth, depending on which family member she is talking to.

"I see my grandmother, who speaks Spanish with some broken English, and my 4-year-old niece who answers her back in English," Marquez says.

Like Marquez, the Hispanic marketing industry in Arizona is young.

Arvizu Advertising and Promotions, one of Arizona's first Latino-owned agencies, was founded in 1991 to serve a then-fledgling Hispanic market.

Ray Arvizu, the company's founder, says the state's Hispanic population then was about 12 percent of the total population. Today it's doubled to 25 percent. Arvizu says he saw the potential, but did not expect the population and market to grow as quickly as it has.

That today Arvizu's hometown agency is rated the No. 1 ad agency in billings for all advertising companies in Arizona by the Phoenix Business Journal is a measure of how the Hispanic market is becoming the dominant consumer demographic in Arizona.

MARKET EVOLVING

The Arizona Latino market has changed dramatically over the past two decades. This change is influenced by:

- In-migration from other countries, particularly Mexico
- Low median ages and high birth rates among Latinos
- A growing affluence fueled by education
- The growing numbers of Arizona Hispanics speaking English, and
- The continuing process of acculturation of successive Latino generations.

Ricardo Torres, CEO of Latino Perspectives Media, has been working in the Arizona Hispanic market for two decades. In 2004 he co-created Latino Perspectives, a monthly magazine in English geared toward Latino readers.

He remembers the days when companies thought they could sell to Hispanics simply by converting their ads into Spanish. These days, he says, the model for Hispanic marketing has changed from defined by language to being defined by country of origin and lifestyle.

"We're not all recent immigrants or fully assimilated," Torres says. Increasingly, marketers are discovering that most Hispanics are neither part of a monolithic culture of Spanish-speaking immigrants nor fully assimilated into Anglo-dominated U.S. society.

Nereyda Lopez, a principal with Molina-Lopez advertising agency, points out that the Hispanic market in Arizona is segmented into complex subcultures. "The market is changing dramatically," she says.

Lopez says that although the Arizona Hispanic market is ever more complex, the new research actually makes the key to reaching them simpler.

"The success of a company in the Hispanic market today depends on what they are selling and if they know how to target the segment they are marketing to," Lopez says.