Car Dealers: The Hispanic Market Is Still Waiting to Be Engaged

I was a guest on Paul Meyer’s Sunday Night Live last month. It was a lively talk covering a lot of facts on Hispanic marketing and the immense opportunities for car dealers.

The data continues to get better year after year… but the response of most dealers is seriously off the mark.

So let’s look at the data and then ask some questions about why most dealers aren’t doing Spanish language advertising.

US Hispanic Marketing Statistics

I can write a whole book about the stats, but here are just a few to get the point across:

• The U.S. The Hispanic population is not only the fastest-growing demographic in the country, but also a driving force in the American economy.
• According to Nielsen, the U.S. Hispanics population has quadrupled in size over the last 40 years. The population growth is now driven by new births rather than immigration, a trend that started in 2000.
• This growth has led to significant demographic shifts, such as Hispanics becoming the largest ethnic group in California in 2014, and in Texas in 2021.
• The economic impact of U.S. Hispanics is equally impressive. According to a late 2023 Yahoo Finance! article, the US Hispanic economy is valued at $3.2 Trillion, has a 14% YOY growth rate, and is 2.5x the non-Hispanic equivalents.
• US Hispanic spending power would make US Hispanics the 5th largest economy in the world… well ahead of Canada
• Between 2019 and 2020, there was a 13% increase in Hispanic home buying, according to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. This marked the sixth consecutive year that Hispanics led homeownership growth in the U.S. Freddie Mac even projected in 2021 that the future of homeownership in America will largely be Hispanic.
• In 2021, the Urban Institute said that by 2040, 70% of new homeowners are expected to be Hispanic. They didn’t arrive at this data on their own… FreddieMac is saying roughly the same thing.
• And, to hammer home the point, Bloomberg Línea, a joint initiative by Bloomberg Media and Falic Media, stated in a 2021 article that US Hispanics “are considered the secret of the future of the US and ‘their purchasing power has increased 69% (compared to 41% among non-Hispanics’”.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Look at those stats! If the data is correct that US Hispanic spending power was around $700-$750 billion in 2004, and is around $3.2 trillion today, then we are looking at the burgeoning growth of an Hispanic middle class.

Despite this massively compelling data, U.S. Hispanics remain heavily under-targeted in advertising. According to a May 2024 AdWeek article, only 4% of ad budgets are allocated to Hispanic marketing, a marginal increase from the 3% spent 20 years ago.

Let’s look at data we collected via our market analytics solution called SurgeRecon. Our tool crawled 27,997 websites looking for Spanish content on the website. Of all the websites crawled, only 2,269 had easily identifiable content. That’s just 8% of all car dealer websites we reviewed!

When we limit the results to dealers with 50,000 or more Hispanics living in a 50 mile radius, we find similar numbers. 89% show no obvious Spanish language content vs 11% otherwise.

If the Hispanic spending power increase was around 300% over the last 20 years, why has there been such a paltry increase in ad budgets or in at least having Spanish content on websites with high Hispanic populations in their area? What gives?

Human Behavior is Resistant to Change

What do you think is blocking car dealers and other companies from shifting a larger percentage of their marketing budget to include Hispanic marketing? It’s not like it’s a complicated question; they just have to give their advertising a cultural bent that includes US Hispanics.

Think of cultural marketing like this: If you lived in Boston, near where I grew up, you would be crazy not to have a St. Paddy’s day promotion given the volume of people who are of Irish descent. If you lived in Providence, closer to where I grew up, you would also be crazy not to flavor some of your advertising towards people of Italian descent since the population volume is so high.

I would like to know what holds dealers back from doing Hispanic advertising. From my perspective and experience, I think that too many dealers have a preconceived notion of the community that is based on images they see in the media, as opposed to the real facts listed above. We are witnessing the growth of an Hispanic middle class that is outpacing the rate of growth for the general public.

Facts are powerful, but they are not as potent as emotionally laden images and cultural myths that bombard us on a daily basis through various forms of media. This creates perceptual habits that govern our behavior and make us resistant to change.

Let’s Learn Why Dealers Aren’t Adopting Hispanic Advertising in Wider Numbers

That said, Dealer Marketing Magazine and all of us at SurgeMetrix would like a better understanding of why the adoption of Spanish language advertising is so low in the dealer community. Consequently, if you are a dealer, please take a moment to complete this survey.

Our plan is to capture data here as well as via mass email to dealers from around the country. If you have a dealer group, or are with an agency that would like to help with the survey, please contact us here.

Let’s get some data and learn what dealers really think!