According to José Vélez-Silva, Multicultural Communications VP at Comcast, Total Market is not one-size-fits-all, and he highlighted that if it is seen that way, “we are going to have to go back to the 90s when we had to justify the existence of the Hispanic market”.
Vélez-Silva took part in a roundtable on the latest marketing trends the first day of the annual CMC conference. It was chaired by Isaac Mizrahi, co-president, and CEO of Alma, and with the participation of Marissa Solis, VP/General Manager for the Hispanic Market at PepsiCo, and Alex Tokatlian, Program Leader, Hispanic Marketing and Advertising at Domino’s Pizza.
“I think the industry’s mistake has been that we have substituted the word ‘general’ for ‘total’, and we are at a moment in which we need to show culture’s breath in our advertising,” said Vélez-Silva. He highlighted that the premise of Total Market “is lovely”, in the sense that a network of different cultures working jointly to raise the brand and communicate a unified brand message is created.
For Solis, Total Market can be seen as something the organization is doing for efficiency, “but now it is about incremental growth”. She said that what is important is not the language but the context, when it comes to marketing to the Hispanic market, how this is used and when it is used. “The power is there, in how we understand that and then bring it to the forefront and the center for the entire company. What I am most excited about is that when you see Hispanic from PepsiCo, it is going to be at the front and the center. It is not going to be a Hispanic campaign, it is not going to be a general market campaign,” she emphasized.