Isabel Valdes and Jake Beniflah of Advertising Age (AdAge) magazine recenlty discussed the trials and tribulations faced in the Hispanic market, as investment opportunities are sought after, and the need for newer, more accurate forms of tracking data and sales.
“Most consumer product and service companies gather all sorts of multicultural demographic, psychographic and behavioral data and have made great strides in marketing and advertising to these customers. However, tracking sales remains poor: What percentage of corporate sales and growth is generated by purchases of each of the different consumer groups: Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American and Asians?,” they ask in their article.
Many corporate managers rely on multicultural retail sales data provided by syndicated measurement companies, which quantify how much of a product is purchased by a given demographic group. These numbers are crucial because they measure who purchased what, and are used to make business decisions, including budget allocations for marketing, advertising and product and service innovation.
However, multicultural-consumer sales data tends to be incomplete. In other cases, syndicated retail data under-represent urban and hard-to-reach consumers, including non-English speaking Hispanics or Asians.”
AdAge says that this under-representation of sales makes it difficult to budget accurately. A company’s effort to “guesstimate” and fix sales data that is incorrect, isn’t the most accurate way to document revenue and, ” what and how much is being purchased by multicultural consumers.”
To alleviate the inaccuracies, corporations need to push for more accurate systems of measurement, and open the dialogue between large retailers, independent companies, small shops, and data companies, to work together to find a solution.
Only then will corporations be able to increase profit, and make the most efficient business decisions.