Noticias

Two local firms – Witherspoon Marketing Communications and Concussion LLP – have recently launched efforts to capture and serve that market.

Longtime Fort Worth advertising and public relations firm Witherspoon recently collaborated with Open Channels Group LLC, lead by Tonya Veasey, on a joint venture to capitalize on a market the former largely has missed for decades.

“We’ve been here for 60-plus years and we really haven’t delved into that very much,” said Mike Wilie, CEO of Witherspoon. “I see some businesses that we’d be really good at handling, but without an alliance (it wouldn’t be possible). It just gives us another arrow in the quiver, so to speak.”

To break into the multicultural market, Wilie and company established a partnership with Veasey, who has been an instrumental part of Fort Worth commerce for more than a decade. Veasey has worked alongside then-State Sen. Mike Moncrief, acted as a lobbyist and fund-raiser, and served on boards for the Minority Leaders and Citizens Council, Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and the Fort Worth Metropolitan Black Chamber of Commerce. Her husband, Rep. Mark Veasey, has served east and southeast Fort Worth for four years in the Texas House of Representatives.

“I’m excited about the opportunity to go after additional business and know that I have the support of a firm like Witherspoon,” Veasey said. “I run a very small minority-owned business – I have five employees – so there are projects I would love to go after but I don’t have the manpower … This (partnership) allows me to gradually build the manpower I have here and the experience.”

Meanwhile, Concussion launched its own partnership with Matador Marketing Group to take advantage of the large and still growing North Texas Hispanic population.

The two companies worked together in the past, said Matador President Luis Caballero, but “less than three months ago we decided to pull the trigger on Matador and say this is an avenue we need to invest in together and move forward.”

The possibilities aren’t coming, however – they’re here. Multicultural consumers spent about $5.2 billion at area supermarkets, including Wal-Mart, Fiesta Mart, and Saigon Taipei Supermarket, according to a September study conducted by Dallas-based research firm Rincón & Associates. The research firm interviewed about 1,400 residents in five languages – English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese – to build the Dallas/Ft. Worth Multicultural Trendline Study 2008.

“Of the 1 million residents added to the [Dallas-Fort Worth area] since 2000, seven in 10 were multicultural persons,” according to a Sept. 9 statement. “By the year 2040, three in four of all Dallas-Fort Worth residents will be a multicultural person – representing 13 million of the projected 17 million total residents.”

That massive population influx has many areas businesses large and small closely eyeing the revenue possibilities, but Wilie said it requires more than applying what works for white consumers to a black consumer or an Asian consumer.

“You should always target the message to your audience, but me saying what makes sense is just my opinion,” he said.

In that way, Veasey’s contribution to the joint venture cannot be underestimated, he said.

“Times are tough in this market, and marketing is structured in such a way that it has to produce results or it gets cut,” he said, “so I didn’t want to align with someone that doesn’t have a good reputation or would be out of business within a year.

“[Veasey] has got some experience to back it up. That’s important for us because the tenure Witherspoon has, we tend to attract a certain type of client, let’s say – older clients and not some of the start-ups.”

Concussion CEO Andrew Yanez, a fourth-generation Hispanic and investor in Matador, said simply translating brands from English to Spanish isn’t good enough.

“I think what a lot of companies do is (focus on) soccer and family,” Yanez said. “There’s a lot more depth to the market than that … Just because there’s a ‘z’ on the end of your name doesn’t mean you’re a full-blown Hispanic. Hispanic isn’t about language anymore.”

Caballero, whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, said his own experience, and that of Yanez, proves the point.

“We both go home and speak Spanish to our grandparents but the language of commerce is English, and the language of brands should not necessarily be language-based but lifestyle-based,” he said. “If you look at the under-18 market, they’re functioning and working and living their lives in English.”

Multicultural consumers use both English and native-language media to meet their needs for news and entertainment, according to the Rincón & Associates study. Television is the most important source of shopping information for Hispanics and blacks, while Asian shoppers primarily use the Internet.

“For the brands that aren’t currently in the Hispanic market,” Caballero said, “it will take a sit-down on why it’s relevant and why allocating a segment of your budget to this market is important.”

And it’s not trial and error, they said, but research tried-and-true.

Ultimately, the times they are a-changin’, all parties agree, and the result of the election for the nation’s highest office illustrates that fact, Wilie said.

“Frankly I just think the time is right,” Wilie said. “The election signals a huge change the way America is going to think about a lot of things.”