Imagine: You have a successful brand in the US, a good team to run the system, and a refined process to put work on automation.
Now, you want to expand to the Hispanic market. You blindly trust your team to bring you exceptional results.
The first marketing campaign and everything comes crashing down. Now, your brand is a laughing stock in the local market, and you find yourself scratching your head.
This is the story of one of the best Brewing Companies in the USA.
After successfully running Coors in the USA, when the brand planned to appeal Hispanic audience, the campaign failed miserably.
Reason?
Translation fails. Coors is not the only brand that made hilarious translation mistakes; there are some billion-dollar brands like Benz, General Motors, Mitsubishi, and American Airlines in the line as well.

If you are running a business and want to make sure you do not end up making the same mistakes, here are a few tips to help you create a winning campaign for your Hispanic customers.
Tips To Win Over Hispanic Customers
Focus On Diversity
While running a business, most brands narrow down their dominant audience. While this is an excellent strategy to understand where the brand will be spending its maximum budget, it makes other potential customers feel unwelcome.
This is the reason big brands are now hiring inclusive cast. Nearly every big fashion brand or tech brand hires ethnic models. An ideal strategy is to hire multiple models from different ethnicities and races. However, to save money, brands also hire ethnically ambiguous models.
Apart from hiring diverse models, the brand also needs to make the customers feel heard. For instance, Cox is an internet service provider in the US. To make their Hispanic customers feel valued and heard, the brand has dedicated Cox Servicio al Cliente en español, creating a win-win situation.
Understand the Audience
Growing up, I always thought that people in Spain speak Spanish.
Imagine my surprise when I realized I was wrong.
Well, I am not the only one. Even big brands do not fully understand the scope of the Hispanic audience. In reality, the Hispanic audience is predominantly Latin Americans. Within the US, the majority of the Hispanic audience is from Mexico. Apart from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, and Honduras make up the rest of the Hispanic population.
While targeting the Hispanic audience, most businesses try to generalize campaigns for the Spanish-speaking population. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Hispanic population is diverse and has individual differences.
For instance, people from Mexico might share the same language but do not have the same culture or ethnic associations as people from Cuba or Puerto Rico. While designing a campaign, it is very important to keep these differences in mind and use these differences to keep things relevant for every population.
Pick the Right Language
If I say, “Finger licking good” or “Just do it,” most people will know what it means.
However, to make a campaign so successful that it becomes brand recognition, the marketer needs to pick the right language. Most marketers think that choosing a language means you just pick the word to convey the message; however, in real life, content plays a very important role in making any campaign successful.
While choosing a language, the brand needs to determine what kind of tone they want to pick or what can help them grab the attention.
While Spanish seems like an obvious pick in the case of the Hispanic audience, marketing experts recommend using Spanglish instead. The majority of the second-generation Hispanics in the US are not very fluent in Spanish, but they still want to relate to the culture. Using Spanglish offers them a middle ground.
Use Colors and Flavors
Hispanic culture is very vibrant. From their upbeat music to their fun flavors and bright color choices, everything in Hispanic culture is very bright. This is the reason Hispanic fashion brands use a lot of colors, big floral prints with a pop of color in everything.
When everything is so vibrant, do you think your boring monochrome ad will gain the same level of attention?
To make sure your audience likes and vibes with your ad campaigns, make sure to pick the right color, font, and beat. For instance, one of the best and most well-known movies “Coco” uses strokes of different glowing vibrant colors that make every scene come to life.
Go Beyond General Marketing
You launched a successful ad campaign for your English audience, and now, you are thinking of replicating the same for your Hispanic audience.
Well, let me warn you not to do it. This tactic might work for big brands, but for small struggling brands, this will only result in bleeding money.
In the world of digital marketing, your campaign is more than beats, color, and the language you choose. So, using the same marketing campaign for every type of audience will only harm your brand.
A good way to solve this issue is by using the A/B testing method. Use digital testing across different platforms to understand what is more relatable for the audience.
Top Hispanic Campaigns for Inspiration
- Pepsi’s “Viva Hoy”
- Nike’s “Juntas Imparables”
- P&G’s “Orgullosa”