Posted: September 25th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »
This post originally appeared on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics column.
How much do Mexicans spend annually on trips into the U.S.? Forty billion dollars annually, according to Jennifer Stefano, CEO of Border Billboard, who spoke at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference recently, citing a number of Scarborough and chamber of commerce studies.Do retailers credit this revenue toward a U.S. Hispanic audience or a foreign, Latino (Spanish-speaking) consumer? Either way, the 206 million people (Bureau of Transportation, 2008) that cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. every year increasingly represent a critical piece of revenue for retailers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
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Posted: September 3rd, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »
With computer prices falling, Internet users skyrocketing and no borders on the Internet, how can marketers turn their international Spanish-language web site visitors into revenues? That is the question that Juan Tornoe and I will answer in our panel discussion at SXSW Interactive in 2010. Please submit your feedback, suggestions and vote for the panel here on SXSW’s panel picker:
Some of the questions that we will answer include:
1. How do consumers cross geo-political boundaries to find, read about and buy what they want?
2. How can marketers understand those trends and then formally create products for international markets?
3. Why did The Home Depot shut down its Spanish-language site for U.S. Hispanics only 4 months after launching it?
4. In contrast, why did Best Buy embrace their visitors from Mexico and Latin America on their Spanish-language e-commerce site for U.S. Hispanics?
5. When will Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese bypass English as the top languages online?
Posted: August 25th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International | 1 Comment »
Christine Webster-Moore, the VP of Business Initiatives at Best Buy, recently outlined three goals for how Best Buy wants to increase their sales among Hispanics and Latin Americans at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference:
1) We need to be more fluid in how we invite Spanish-language users to our web site including US Hispanics, Mexicans and visitors in our border stores.
2) We need to provide more creative ways to have our customers buy. We need to experiment more with programs like Flexicompras, our store within a store that provides lease to own solutions for poor or no-credit consumers. In the markets where Best Buy offered this service, their market share increased by 3-5%.
3) We need to go deeper into mobile and social media.
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Posted: July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »
This article originally appeared on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics column.
How can you grow e-commerce by targeting the 25 million Hispanics online? Let’s look at a case study comparing two major retailers and how they managed their “U.S. Hispanic” sites. We can learn a lot from their successes and mistakes.
The Home Depot vs. Best Buy
The Home Depot launched its Spanish-language e-commerce site for U.S. Hispanics in early 2009, hoping to reach a new audience and grow a new profit center. After only four months, The Home Depot shut the site down because many of its visitors came from Latin America and Spain. The site was set up to accept credit cards only from the U.S. Nevertheless, Spanish-language consumers internationally very clearly communicated their interest in home improvement content online and e-commerce by visiting The Home Depot’s “U.S. Hispanic” site.
Since The Home Depot has 75 stores in Mexico, many Mexicans already knew the brand and easily found the site via search. They were surely pleased that the retailer was “speaking their language” online. Unfortunately, The Home Depot’s organizational structure (U.S. versus Mexican business units) clashed with the international, borderless nature of the Internet and its “U.S. Hispanic” e-commerce venture failed.
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