ARTICLE REVIEW

Advancing to the Next Level of Latino Marketing: Strike First, Strike Twice,
James Lowry, Alex Ulanov, Thomas 'Tigre' Wenrich, February 15, 2003, The BCG Publications
Latinos are responsible for eight percent of total spending in the United States, yet less than three percent of spending on marketing is directed at them. Although Latinos' geographic concentration makes them relatively easy to target, their cultural diversity presents a challenge. A few companies, however, have risen to that challenge and launched new products and line extensions, and created new demand in the United States as well as in the home country. This article seeks to understand the variations among the market's cultural groups, analysed them closely, and found creative new ways to leverage them. Here are five guidelines for becoming a third-generation Latino marketer:
>Segment your market by country of origin, age and marital status, and degree of acculturation. Under stand how and why different groups use particular products and services and where they might overlap.
> Favour local marketing over mass advertising, through focused media purchases and local tools such as outdoor ads, radio commercials, promotions, direct marketing, and event sponsorships.
> Develop a rich understanding of Latinos' lives and behaviours, and resist taking the easy route of simply translating English advertisements into Spanish. Don't be afraid to appeal to specific subgroups in products, messages, and channel strategies.
> Make the brand's Latino marketing program a priority for top-level management and develop a comprehensive platform to address it. Invest in long-term efforts and stay involved with communities. Use internal and external people who understand the community and the nuances of its many segments.
> Track market share city by city and determine where the next round of growth will occur.

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The Customer Has Escaped,
Paul F. Nunes, Frank V. Cespedes, Harvard Business Review,
Nov 1, 2003
Every company makes choices about the channels it will use to go to market. For instance, traditionally, customer demographics guided the decision to sell through a discount superstore or a pricey boutique. It was a fair assumption that certain customer types were held captive by certain channels. The problem, the authors say, is that today's customers have become unfettered. As their channel options have proliferated, they've come to recognise that different channels serve their needs better at different points in the buying process. The result is "value poaching." For example, certain channels hope to use higher margin sales to cover the cost of providing expensive high-touch services. Potential customers use these channels to do research, then leap to a cheaper channel when it's time to buy. What does this mean for your go-to-market strategy? The authors urge companies to make a fundamental shift in mind-set toward designing for buyer behaviours, not customer segments. A company should design pathways across channels to help its customers get what they need at each stage of the buying process. Customers are not mindful of channel boundaries-and you shouldn't be either.

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Optimal Marketing,
Marcel Corstjens, Jeffrey Merrihue, Harvard Business Review,
Oct 1, 2003
Companies selling multiple products in multiple territories face the difficult question of how to allocate marketing resources. But comparing the profit potential of, say, razors in Germany with batteries in the United Kingdom is a difficult analytical task that demands reams of data. Finding the optimal answer is only half the battle. The rest involves the political and organisational challenge of shifting the money around. One company, Samsung, overcame these challenges by using hard data, not intuition, to allocate its marketing dollars. Marketing executives undertook an intensive 18-month project to gather diverse and detailed information about more than 400 possible product-category and country combinations. It collected all that data in a single, easy-to-access site and used the software's analytical power to predict the impact of different allocation scenarios. Such what-if testing enables management to find the budget allocation that will yield the highest total marketing ROI. Samsung also worked to anticipate and defuse organisational resistance to change.