Why we should use Spanglish to market to Spanish speakers in North America

by | Nov 14, 2017

Guest post by Brad Meehan, Adobe AEM expert. Since 2008, he has implemented numerous large-scale Adobe AEM installations for a variety of clients and industries, such as FedEx, Ford, SAP, Kellogg, Eloqua/Oracle, MasterCard, Barclay’s Premier League, Honeywell, and Carlson Hotels. See more about him below.

One word: Spanglish

Hispanics have accounted for more than half of the nation’s growth in the past decade, yet we spend less on marketing to Hispanics than any other population. Organizations who simply translate their content — without any attention to cultural diversity —are actually providing more of a disservice to their Hispanic consumers than any true value.  

One way advertisers have worked to authentically engage with U.S. Hispanics is through using a mixture of English and Spanish in messaging (aka “Spanglish) to reflect the biculturalism that many Hispanics have grown to identify with. Having only a translated version of an English page on a website, for example, does not allow for individualized messaging to this majority audience.

Now substitute “Spanglish” with another culturally-specific dialect and you have a universal problem that can’t be solved through translations alone.

Your content should instead pay homage to culturally diverse audiences (e.g., Cuban/Mexican/Puerto Rican versus “Hispanic”) and ‘acculturated’ audiences (site visitors who may speak English at work, perhaps another language at home, and consume digital media in both).  So, not only do you need translation, you need regionalization in a single region.  How you accomplish that is through personalization, not translations alone.

Using a combination of existing customer profile data, demographic information, geolocation and behavioral data, specific audience personas can be created using marketing technologies designed to allow for content personalization. Then, targeted messaging, imagery and video content can be created and displayed to those audiences automatically when the attributes of the user match the criteria for the selected audience. This allows for the individualized messaging that these cultural groups expect.

If you target on a cultural level, you will concentrate your messaging to an audience that may actually be listening.

Brad Meehan

Brad Meehan

Brad Meehan is an experienced Adobe multi-solution architect specializing in best practices for designing Adobe Marketing Cloud projects the right way the first time. Since 2008, he has implemented numerous large-scale Adobe AEM installations for a variety of clients and industries, such as FedEx, Ford, SAP, Kellogg, Eloqua/Oracle, MasterCard, Barclay’s Premier League, Honeywell, and Carlson Hotels.

He currently manages the Adobe/Intouch partnership and has long standing personal relationships with members of the Adobe organization including the training and enablement teams, delivery assurance, solution consultants, and marketing and sales teams.

Brad shares AEM industry best practices for usability, personalization, development, and planning on his blog “Adobe AEM the Right Way”. He has also been published by Ad Age and The Washington Post for his thought leadership in digital marketing using marketing cloud technologies.

An 8-year veteran of the Air Force, Brad traveled the globe on assignment with the 48th Intelligence Squadron, working in places like Italy, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and others. After two successful tours, Brad was Honorably Discharged to pursue his education.

Brad graduated Cum Laude from California State University, Sacramento with a B.S. in Computer Science and was the recipient of the Academic Achievement Award for Computer Science.

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