2 ADVERTISING TO LATINOS

BOX 4.2 ADVERTISING TO LATINOS

The largest ethnic minority group in the United States as of 2002 were Latinos, with 32 million in 2003 and a projected 56 million by 2020. The $800 billion they spend annually on goods and services has started to attract major advertising attention recently and helped to integrate Hispanic tastes and culture into the national mainstream.

In 2002, NBC bought the second-largest Spanish-language network, Telemundo, for $2.7 billion. Some magazines publish Spanish-language versions (e.g., People en Español) and Spanish-language TV and radio are widely available in all major U.S. markets. However, the Latino audience also watches much English-language programming and a large percentage are bilingual and bicultural.

Procter and Gamble aired a Crest Toothpaste commercial in Spanish during the 2003 Grammy Awards Ceremony. Many companies, including Pepsi and Nike, have used some Spanish in their mainstream TV ads. Kraft Foods now sells a milk-based Jell-O (O Gelatina Para Leche), a Kool-Aid flavor “Aguas Frescas,” and a lime-flavored mayonnaise. Pepsi and Nestlé sell fruit drinks with flavors like mango and tamarind, and Nabisco began selling three Latin American cookie brands in the United States in 2003 (Weaver, 2003a).

Fear Appeals

These involve some kind of threat of what may happen if one does not buy the product (e.g., a scenario of a child trying unsuccessfully to phone parents when in danger because the parents don’t have call waiting). Selling home computers by asking parents “You don’t want your child to be left behind in math because you wouldn’t buy him a computer, do you?” is a subtle but

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appeals involving the safety of one’s children, such as when one car manufacturer showed an apparent sonogram of a fetus in utero as the most important reason to buy its car. Such appeals to parents, playing on their love for and responsibility toward their children, are common and probably highly effective, Psychological research on persuasion shows that fear appeals have varying effects. The conventional wisdom in both social psychology and advertising for many years has been that there is an optimal level of fear at which persuasion is the strongest. A weaker appeal will be less effective, but if the fear induced becomes too strong, the ad may turn people off and make them defensive, in which case they tune out the message. As Rotfeld (1988) pointed out in a careful review paper on fear appeals and persuasion, however, there is no consistency in the research on this point (see also King & Reid, 1990, regarding fear appeals in PSAs). It is hard to draw firm conclusions because what each researcher has defined as a strong, moderate, and low fear appeals has varied widely, and there has typically been little assurance that the participants in the studies have viewed the appeals similarly to the researchers. Indeed, sometimes ads are viewed hugely differently by different segments of the audience, some of whom may

be highly offended; see Box 4.3 for a particularly controversial example. Fear appeals in ads can be effective, but exactly which ones are most effective is not yet entirely clear.