Hispanic Marketing
Spanish Language on English Television
Phoenix is proving to be one of the great sports cities of the West. It is home to four major professional sports teams, a university known for athletics, last year’s unforgettable Super Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and will soon be the home of USA Basketball. Adding to its resume, Phoenix was the host-city of this year’s NBA All-Star weekend. For four days Phoenicians and visitors got to see the superstars of the NBA participating in every activity imaginable from autograph sessions to community service events. They all came together that Saturday night to display their million-dollar talents in the Skills Competition, 3-Point Shootout, and the always highly anticipated Dunk Contest. The festivities ended on Sunday with the one event that started it all: The All-Star game. Twenty-four of the world’s best basketball players convened on one floor for the sole purpose of electrifying every person tuned in to the high-flying spectacle.
This year’s game pulled in an estimated 6.8 million viewers. This number, however, does not include the millions more viewing across the globe on every continent. The NBA currently has 77 international players from 32 countries and territories. Of these international athletes, 15 come from Spanish-speaking countries, making Spanish the dominant foreign language. That is more than enough to form an entire Spanish-speaking team.
Like all similar sporting events, the half-time show of the All-Star game always showcases well-known musicians. This year, R&B artist John Legend headlined the half-time party. About a minute into his performance, a face unfamiliar to mainstream America joined Mr. Legend on stage to complete the duet, singing his portion in Spanish. Juanes became the first foreign-born musician to co-headline such an event, and do so in his native tongue. Unknown to America’s majority, Juanes is the most winning Latin Grammy artist of all time.
Considering the international fame of the NBA, the decision to put English and Spanish-speaking musicians together was a no-brainer. This demonstrated that the NBA is intimately familiar with its fan base and sees even more potential to expand its brand not just into more Hispanic households here in America, but in every other Latin American country in the world.
Even local businesses understand the value of marketing themselves in Spanish on English outlets in their respective markets. In the Phoenix metro area, a Food City commercial can be spotted on any one of the affiliates during primetime hours. Food City, in an attempt to compete with the more established food supermarkets of the area, is running a single ad in which both English and Spanish are spoken to advertise products and prices. In a vocabulary lesson sort of way, as a picture of beans appears on the screen, the narrator’s voice is heard saying the name of the product in Spanish with a bit of flare. “Frijoles!” Next comes the price, but in English, “Seventy-nine cents per pound.” The Spanish lesson eventually ends with Food City’s slogan: Mucho Value.
Why doesn’t Food City just stick to running Spanish ads on Univision or Telemundo? A Spanish ad on any other station might seem like a needle in an English-speaking haystack. The answer is the same reason why the NBA invited a Spanish-speaking musician to sing in Spanish during an English telecast in America.
Currently, Hispanics account for 15% of the U.S. population and approximately half of the nation’s overall growth in recent years. Hispanics make up the nation’s largest minority population, and the numbers are increasing at a rapid rate. In Phoenix, more than 60% of Hispanic households still predominately speak English at home. This does not include the unknown percentage of Hispanic households that, despite speaking Spanish at home, can still communicate effectively in English outside of their home.
With these marketing decisions comes something else as an intangible bonus to the NBA and Food City – the value of being known as businesses that will cross the marketing border to reach out and communicate to an untapped, and often ignored, segment in a competitive and aggressive environment. While some will consider these decisions to be that lost needle, the value that the NBA and Food City gains among Hispanics will, in turn, be a diamond in the rough.
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