BrainTrust Query: Hola Loyalty - Meet Valoramás
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Hanifin Loyalty blog.
When I started my work studying Millennial marketing back in 2005, it seemed that nearly every conference I attended had a session on "Marketing to Hispanics" or "Serving the Underbanked." Topics like this were often perceived as gratuitous additions to the agenda as few market examples were available to share and fewer in the audience were tasked to find solutions to these narrowly defined "problems."
Living near Miami and having traveled Latin America for the previous 10 years, I knew better.
Over the past twenty years I've witnessed an insulated, mostly Cuban community in Miami become a diverse assembly of Latin American diaspora which has increasingly adopted American language and culture. At one point in the nineties, marketers might have agreed that simply translating traditional advertisements and offers into Spanish would be sufficient to get results. Now, it's truly difficult to discern which people prefer to speak first in English, first in Spanish, or those who comfortably blend the two into "Spanglish." If you can get the targeting right, the task remains to craft a message that will connect with each group.
At the same time, loyalty marketers have been trying to find the right formula to create a coalition loyalty model that works in the U.S.
Valoramás.com may an answer to both questions. Valoramás is the "first of its kind online bilingual rewards program." It's also effectively a coalition loyalty program that serves up a great solution for "marketing to Hispanics."
Members pay a $25 annual fee to become part of the community. By shopping online across almost 2,000 retailers, members can earn cash back rewards that average more than five percent of purchase amounts and can range as high as 57 percent. In the process, members support the Latino community by generating donations for a selected set of charities supported by Valoramás and its members.
OneBigTent, LLC, the parent company of Valoramás, has aligned itself with a group of business partners that includes República, Marketing Strategists, FreeCause, Inc, Reward Paths, TransNational, and Miller Cooper & Co. Pledging to give back more than half its annual gross revenues to members and to organizations making a difference in the Latino community, OneBigTent states on its website that "giving back is the highest form of citizenship." Funds will be allocated for schools, scholarships, job training, community centers, the arts, and health care.
Valoramás might be the most effective effort to date to bring Latinos together in support of their interests and communities. It's also a worthy example of social giving and, we hope, a boon to the Latino community in the U.S.
In the process, marketers will have a venue through which they can finally capitalize on a solution for "marketing to Hispanics."