State Farm Mixes National and Local Efforts to Reach Hispanic Market

AN INTERVIEW WITH:
Ed Gold
Advertising Director
State Farm Insurance

State Farm ranks as the 10th largest advertiser in Hispanic media spending in the US, according to Kantar Media and Advertising Age’s Hispanic Fact Pack 2011. Ed Gold oversees State Farm’s media and sponsorship strategy, planning and execution across all the company’s product lines and customer segments. He spoke with eMarketer’s Tobi Elkin about State Farm’s strategy for targeting Hispanic consumers.

eMarketer: When targeting Hispanics, are you focused more on traditional segmentation models or on psychographic/behavioral segmentations?

Ed Gold: We’re looking at both demographic and psychographic behaviors. We definitely look at age, ethnicity and gender, but we are also looking at psychographic modeling.

eMarketer: What are some of the psychographic segments you’re focused on?

Gold: They are proprietary, so I can’t tell you the specific segments we’re looking at. What I will say is that we’re looking at things in multiple ways when it comes to the Hispanic market. There is the non-acculturated segment, which is primarily a Spanish-speaking audience. And then there’s the more acculturated audience, which follows what the general market is doing.
From a demographic and psychographic point of view, we look at young adults ages 18 to 29 and think about them more from the standpoint of unmarried, on their own for the first time and figuring out their lives.

eMarketer: Are young Hispanic adults marketed to differently than young adults in the general market?

Gold: Outside of using MTV, Tr3s and a few other Hispanic networks, they are not marketed to all that differently, because we’re not dealing with a language barrier. Certainly there may be some cultural cues that we want to put into our messaging, but Hispanic young adults are very much part of the overall young adult audience.

eMarketer: You mentioned looking at acculturated vs. non-acculturated Hispanic consumers. How important is that in your targeting and messaging?

Gold: We want to do business with both populations. Messaging is going to be done specifically in Spanish to the non-acculturated group and bilinguals. We also look at it from the standpoint of having over 18,000 State Farm agents across the US and Canada. Over 4,000 of our offices are Spanish-speaking offices where either the agent or their personnel speak Spanish. So we are able to do business with people the way they want to do business, in their language. It’s part of our overall business philosophy.
eMarketer: Do you have any specific examples of campaigns that successfully targeted Hispanic consumers?

Gold: This past April marked the fourth year of our sponsorship of the Latin Billboard Awards. Obviously, music is a huge passion for the young adult Hispanic market. We also sponsored concerts by Latin Billboard artists in a number of key Hispanic markets and did a music-teacher-for-a-day program in high schools. In conjunction with that, we also launched our State Farm Latino Facebook page. Those local market efforts are another way that we are trying to make State Farm a very relevant brand to the Hispanic market.

eMarketer: What has State Farm done with Facebook where Hispanic consumers are concerned?

Gold: Our Facebook page is facebook.com/StateFarmLatino. If you click on the Juega e Ilumina tab, you get more information about our CONCACAF Gold Cup Sponsorship, for the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football. Essentially, people could play a soccer game either online, on an iPhone app or at the Gold Cup events where we were present. For every 15 minutes of play, a soccer ball was sent to a CONCACAF country in need and consumers had the opportunity to vote for which country they were sent to.

Knowing that the Hispanic community does a lot to help support their families in their home countries, we thought this would be a great way to give them another opportunity to help while reaching the demographic through soccer—one of their passion points.

eMarketer: What made you decide to create a specifically Hispanic Facebook page?

Gold: Our idea was to be one of the first out there with an in-language Hispanic Facebook page catering to that audience. We thought if we build it, they will come—and they are coming.

eMarketer: What kind of offers do Hispanic consumers respond to?

Gold: We do very well with the Hispanic market because we have local agents. The Hispanic market wants to do business in their community and with somebody that they know and can trust. You may or may not pay a little bit more for State Farm than for some of the other competitors but we’ve seen Hispanic consumers understanding the value of having a State Farm agent right down the street.

The complete interview is available to eMarketer Total Access clients. Learn more.